are we how we behave?
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I found this article interesting.
Michael Cohen’s verbal somersault, ‘I lied, but I’m not a liar,’ translated by a rhetoric expert https://theconversation.com/michael-cohens-verbal-somersault-i-lied-but-im-not-a-liar-translated-by-a-rhetoric-expert-112670 On the one hand, it's common sense (if it quacks like a duck...). But having spent a fair amount of time simulating complex things (like cells), the patterns one might induce from past behaviors don't often (completely) capture the mechanisms generating those behaviors. If this is true of, say, hepatocytes, then it's likely also true of whole animals. But this seems like a slippery slope into essentialism. At the end of the day, we have to fish or cut bait despite large swaths of uncertainty. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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I predict with great confidence that the stimulus "are we how we behave?"
will quickly evoke a response from Nick. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by gepr
Glen, Goaded by Lee, I feel some sort of response is now necessary. But only because I was goaded by Lee. (};-)]. Glen, please forgive me. You have been driven wild in the past by the presumptuousness with which I use the word “you”. Honest. I don’t mean YOU you. Well, except in the first sentence below. The point you raise is at the very core of what I have been thinking about for the last two months -- not very productively, I might add. Perhaps your intervention will unstick me. I am grateful for the provocation. First off, let me just say that I agree with the subject line. We ARE what we do. Ok, what about Cohen. Cohen's problem relates to the problem of induction. If certainty is what you crave, induction does not provide it. "I have been a liar all my life but now I am telling the truth" is a possibility. “Everybody lies,” Dr. House used to say; and everybody tells the truth, depending on the immediate pressures of the situation. And there are many (fallible) rules that we apply when trying to decide whether a particular person we are dealing with is under heavy pressure to lie or to tell the truth. Similarly, the more history we have with a particular individual in all these contexts, the better is our intuition about whether that individual is telling the truth at any one time. So I would argue that the behavioral rule that dictates Cohen's lying is of a higher order than "is he a liar or is he not". So our inference as to whether he is lying now is a subtle judgement about whether a man who has lied repeatedly in the past when it profits him is now carrying on with that pattern or is now NOT lying because it no longer profits him. And THAT would relate to what kind of incentives the SDNY is offering him. My guess is that his first stance with SDNY was "I will tell you anything." and that didn't fly with the SDNY. In fact, the first time he tried in on for them, they threatened to add another charge to the complaint on the spot. So with that dope slap, he suddenly realizes that he's in a situation in which even a habitual liar will tell the truth, because the prosecutor he might lie to really cares about the truth and knows the truth of most matters that the liar might lie about. So he goes for redemption. You do get the feeling from watching him that truth-telling under duress is a new kind of lie for him and that he finds it quite exhilarating. So much for Cohen. Now we get to the really thorny issue, which you raise, the ghoul of essentialism. Once you have described the behavior, is there anything else to be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to say less! Repeating all of the above every time you want to say what Cohen is would be at least cumbersome. Wouldn't be much easier to say, "Cohens a liar!", meaning that, more than most people, what he says has more to do with what saying will get him than with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be? But can you say this much less without saying a lot more. To apply the word LIAR to that complex pattern above is to imply that liar has a MEANING, that [a person whose utterances have more to do with what saying will get him than with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be] is what a liar IS. Why else say it? When you put a dollar across the counter at the candy’s store it is because you believe a dollar is worth a dollar’s worth of candy. If you thought the person across the counter didn’t share that belief, you would not let go of your dollar. What if he only took credit cards because he thought dollars were scraps of paper to be thrown in the trash. The same is with words. When you speak a word, it is with the expectation that the other person, will to some degree, at least, understand it as you understand it. This, in turn, implies that there is something behind the word, beyond the word, beneath the word, that exists whether or not you, or I, speak it. We should remain mute otherwise. I am guessing that this is the notion that you regard as dangerously close to “essentialism.” Now I am no philosopher. Philosophy is just as much a geekery as ethology, or software engineering, or mathematics, or physics, or chemistry, or … or….. or. If you have not slogged through all those texts for years, and bickered with those fellow students about their meaning, all under the watchful eye of pros, you are not a philosopher. I am a philosophical tourist. I like to visit but I sure wouldn’t like to live there. And my suspicion is that no FRIAM member is actually a proper philosopher, either. (Please contradict me if I am wrong; we REALLY need you.) So, I assume that none of us actually knows what essentialism IS. But I will take it to mean, a belief that behind every word use and every particular to which a word points, despite all the variety in usages and pointings, is a real something that infuses all the objects to which a term correctly points. Now here is where Peirce comes in. Peirce has great faith in cognitive systems, systems that are trying to discern the truth of any matter. He believes that experience is mostly random, but if there are any patterns in experience, cognitive systems will seek them out. Why, because knowing patterns helps a cognitive system (such as an organism) avoid ugly surprises. [You can feel Darwin lurking in the background, but Peirce does not explicitly trot him out in the way I just did.] Peirce’s favorite “cognitive system” is the community of scientific inquiry. Sciences collect evidence of “generals”—of laws, of entities, of processes, categories, of beings, etc. that have existence beyond the individual case. How do we know that? Because each bit of evidence is taken to be evidence relating to the same thing. If they were not, we would have to suppose them as a miscellaneous accidental pile of experiences. But we don’t do that; even in their individuality we suppose them to stand for something other than what they are. So, scientific research necessarily postulates the reality of some things, those postulations are true if they are the postulations upon which we will agree in the very long run. I have talked before here about Peirce’s strange notion of truth – that upon which the community of inquiry will agree on the very long run – and the Real – that which is taken for granted by the truth. At first blush, those notions seem hardly more tangible than asserting that the truth is what God thinks and the Real is what he thinks about. But Peirce was, among many other things, a statistician, and he had, in the end, a statistical model of the truth. If there is some pattern in the world, if , say, a coin is biased toward heads, we will of course never know for sure because any random process can conceivably a string of heads for as long as you care to flip. But the longer a string of heads we obtain, the less likely it is that it is drawn from a population of flips of a fair coin. Similarly, while the local and temporal convergences of living communities of inquiry can never give absolute assurance that something is true, the make it increasingly likely that a Real Pattern exists. That’s the best I can do with essence. Don’t blame me. This was all Lee’s fault. All thousand words of it. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- I found this article interesting. Michael Cohen’s verbal somersault, ‘I lied, but I’m not a liar,’ translated by a rhetoric expert On the one hand, it's common sense (if it quacks like a duck...). But having spent a fair amount of time simulating complex things (like cells), the patterns one might induce from past behaviors don't often (completely) capture the mechanisms generating those behaviors. If this is true of, say, hepatocytes, then it's likely also true of whole animals. But this seems like a slippery slope into essentialism. At the end of the day, we have to fish or cut bait despite large swaths of uncertainty. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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It seems reasonable that, in any person's lifetime behavior, we might identify not only an ephemeris, but variation around that ephemeris, like a world-tube, rather than a world-line. As Marcus pointed out by "not getting" mid-life crises, if such ephimerides are tubes, not lines, then it's less likely there exist fundamental discontinuities in any given ephemeris. (I.e. the tube is a steady stream of discontinuities jumping back and forth circumscribed by the fuzzy walls of the tube.) The tube can bend sharply or gracefully, but given the width of the tube, discontinuities in the tube are impossible.
But what is there to say that the width of the tube *must* decrease over time? Why can't a person's behavioral tube go from thin to fat as they age? So, that as the person gets older, their moment-to-moment behavior grows more and more erratic, widening the tube? As usual, I have little stories from my own life that lend some credence to that. But most people I meet tend to think the opposite. Old people have narrow tubes and young people have fat tubes. Even if those little stories I have are exceptions (high sigma outliers), their existence argues that the composite tube for groups of people present an indeterminate tonicity through time. Does the composite tube for, say, Westerners thicken or thin over time? How about some demographic in the East? Or over the whole of humanity? And to what extent is the thickening or thinning of the composite tube guided/controlled by our semi-closed geosphere, limited resources, inflection points like the industrial revolution, etc? All this is to hint that, if we are how we behave, then one might adopt a moral imperative to work hard at behaving erratically, to make every effort to increase the variance in one's behavior so that we are, simply, *more* than we were yesterday. On 2/28/19 8:57 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Glen, > > > > Goaded by Lee, I feel some sort of response is now necessary. But only because I was goaded by Lee. (};-)]. Glen, please forgive me. You have been driven wild in the past by the presumptuousness with which I use the word “you”. Honest. I don’t mean YOU you. Well, except in the first sentence below. > > > > The point you raise is at the very core of what I have been thinking about for the last two months -- not very productively, I might add. Perhaps your intervention will unstick me. I am grateful for the provocation. > > > > First off, let me just say that I agree with the subject line. We ARE what we do. > > > > Ok, what about Cohen. Cohen's problem relates to the problem of induction. If certainty is what you crave, induction does not provide it. "I have been a liar all my life but now I am telling the truth" is a possibility. “Everybody lies,” Dr. House used to say; and everybody tells the truth, depending on the immediate pressures of the situation. And there are many (fallible) rules that we apply when trying to decide whether a particular person we are dealing with is under heavy pressure to lie or to tell the truth. Similarly, the more history we have with a particular individual in all these contexts, the better is our intuition about whether that individual is telling the truth at any one time. So I would argue that the behavioral rule that dictates Cohen's lying is of a higher order than "is he a liar or is he not". So our inference as to whether he is lying now is a subtle judgement about whether a man who has lied repeatedly in the past when it profits him is now > carrying on with that pattern or is now NOT lying because it no longer profits him. And THAT would relate to what kind of incentives the SDNY is offering him. My guess is that his first stance with SDNY was "I will tell you anything." and that didn't fly with the SDNY. In fact, the first time he tried in on for them, they threatened to add another charge to the complaint on the spot. So with that dope slap, he suddenly realizes that he's in a situation in which even a habitual liar will tell the truth, because the prosecutor he might lie to really cares about the truth and knows the truth of most matters that the liar might lie about. So he goes for redemption. You do get the feeling from watching him that truth-telling under duress is a new kind of lie for him and that he finds it quite exhilarating. So much for Cohen. > > > > Now we get to the really thorny issue, which you raise, the ghoul of essentialism. Once you have described the behavior, is there anything else to be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to say less! Repeating all of the above every time you want to say what Cohen is would be at least cumbersome. Wouldn't be much easier to say, "Cohens a liar!", meaning that, more than most people, what he says has more to do with what saying will get him than with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be? > > > > But can you say this much less without saying a lot more. To apply the word LIAR to that complex pattern above is to imply that liar has a MEANING, that [a person whose utterances have more to do with what saying will get him than with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be] is what a liar IS. Why else say it? When you put a dollar across the counter at the candy’s store it is because you believe a dollar is worth a dollar’s worth of candy. If you thought the person across the counter didn’t share that belief, you would not let go of your dollar. What if he only took credit cards because he thought dollars were scraps of paper to be thrown in the trash. The same is with words. When you speak a word, it is with the expectation that the other person, will to some degree, at least, /understand it as you understand it. /This, in turn, implies that there is something behind the > word, beyond the word, beneath the word, that exists whether or not you, or I, speak it. We should remain mute otherwise. > > > > I am guessing that this is the notion that you regard as dangerously close to “essentialism.” Now I am no philosopher. Philosophy is just as much a geekery as ethology, or software engineering, or mathematics, or physics, or chemistry, or … or….. or. If you have not slogged through all those texts for years, and bickered with those fellow students about their meaning, all under the watchful eye of pros, you are not a philosopher. I am a philosophical tourist. I like to visit but I sure wouldn’t like to live there. And my suspicion is that no FRIAM member is actually a proper philosopher, either. (Please contradict me if I am wrong; we REALLY need you.) So, I assume that none of us actually knows what essentialism IS. But I will take it to mean, a belief that behind every word use and every particular to which a word points, despite all the variety in usages and pointings, is a real something that infuses all the objects to which a term correctly points. > > > > Now here is where Peirce comes in. Peirce has great faith in cognitive systems, systems that are trying to discern the truth of any matter. He believes that experience is mostly random, but if there are any patterns in experience, cognitive systems will seek them out. Why, because knowing patterns helps a cognitive system (such as an organism) avoid ugly surprises. [You can feel Darwin lurking in the background, but Peirce does not explicitly trot him out in the way I just did.] Peirce’s favorite “cognitive system” is the community of scientific inquiry. Sciences collect evidence of “generals”—of laws, of entities, of processes, categories, of beings, etc. that have existence beyond the individual case. How do we know that? Because each bit of evidence is taken to be evidence relating to the same thing. If they were not, we would have to suppose them as a miscellaneous accidental pile of experiences. But we don’t do that; even in their individuality we suppose them > to stand for something other than what they are. So, scientific research necessarily postulates the reality of some things, those postulations are true if they are the postulations upon which we will agree in the very long run. > > > > I have talked before here about Peirce’s strange notion of truth – that upon which the community of inquiry will agree on the very long run – and the Real – that which is taken for granted by the truth. At first blush, those notions seem hardly more tangible than asserting that the truth is what God thinks and the Real is what he thinks about. But Peirce was, among many other things, a statistician, and he had, in the end, a statistical model of the truth. If there is some pattern in the world, if , say, a coin is biased toward heads, we will of course never know for sure because any random process can conceivably a string of heads for as long as you care to flip. But the longer a string of heads we obtain, the less likely it is that it is drawn from a population of flips of a fair coin. Similarly, while the local and temporal convergences of living communities of inquiry can never give absolute assurance that something is true, the make it increasingly likely that a > Real Pattern exists. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
Nick, May I offend you by proposing a dualism to challenge your behavioral monism? Using Cohen as illustration. If we state the problem other than it has been so far: Given a Context X, the probability of Cohen's Behavior (verbal utterances) being inconsistent with the "Truth" of that context is Q. "Truth" is as Pierce would have it — including the statistics. The dualism is Behavior and Context. Context is not reducible to behavior even though it may be grounded in behavior, because the "patterns" and the "Truth"are emergent. [BTW, I have "slogged through all those texts for years, and bickered with those fellow students about their meaning, all under the watchful eye of pros" but only with regard non-Western philosophies. Does that count?] dave west On Thu, Feb 28, 2019, at 9:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by gepr
Glen,
An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I get more like myself." Keep fattening that tube, baby! Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen Sent: Friday, March 01, 2019 9:01 AM To: [hidden email] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] are we how we behave? It seems reasonable that, in any person's lifetime behavior, we might identify not only an ephemeris, but variation around that ephemeris, like a world-tube, rather than a world-line. As Marcus pointed out by "not getting" mid-life crises, if such ephimerides are tubes, not lines, then it's less likely there exist fundamental discontinuities in any given ephemeris. (I.e. the tube is a steady stream of discontinuities jumping back and forth circumscribed by the fuzzy walls of the tube.) The tube can bend sharply or gracefully, but given the width of the tube, discontinuities in the tube are impossible. But what is there to say that the width of the tube *must* decrease over time? Why can't a person's behavioral tube go from thin to fat as they age? So, that as the person gets older, their moment-to-moment behavior grows more and more erratic, widening the tube? As usual, I have little stories from my own life that lend some credence to that. But most people I meet tend to think the opposite. Old people have narrow tubes and young people have fat tubes. Even if those little stories I have are exceptions (high sigma outliers), their existence argues that the composite tube for groups of people present an indeterminate tonicity through time. Does the composite tube for, say, Westerners thicken or thin over time? How about some demographic in the East? Or over the whole of humanity? And to what extent is the thickening or thinning of the composite tube guided/controlled by our semi-closed geosphere, limited resources, inflection points like the industrial revolution, etc? All this is to hint that, if we are how we behave, then one might adopt a moral imperative to work hard at behaving erratically, to make every effort to increase the variance in one's behavior so that we are, simply, *more* than we were yesterday. On 2/28/19 8:57 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Glen, > > > > Goaded by Lee, I feel some sort of response is now necessary. But > only because I was goaded by Lee. (};-)]. Glen, please forgive me. You have been driven wild in the past by the presumptuousness with which I use the word “you”. Honest. I don’t mean YOU you. Well, except in the first sentence below. > > > > The point you raise is at the very core of what I have been thinking about for the last two months -- not very productively, I might add. Perhaps your intervention will unstick me. I am grateful for the provocation. > > > > First off, let me just say that I agree with the subject line. We ARE > what we do. > > > > Ok, what about Cohen. Cohen's problem relates to the problem of > induction. If certainty is what you crave, induction does not provide it. "I have been a liar all my life but now I am telling the truth" is a possibility. “Everybody lies,” Dr. House used to say; and everybody tells the truth, depending on the immediate pressures of the situation. And there are many (fallible) rules that we apply when trying to decide whether a particular person we are dealing with is under heavy pressure to lie or to tell the truth. Similarly, the more history we have with a particular individual in all these contexts, the better is our intuition about whether that individual is telling the truth at any one time. So I would argue that the behavioral rule that dictates Cohen's lying is of a higher order than "is he a liar or is he not". So our inference as to whether he is lying now is a subtle judgement about whether a man who has lied repeatedly in the past when it profits him is now carrying on with that pattern or is now NOT lying because it no longer profits him. And THAT would relate to what kind of incentives the SDNY is offering him. My guess is that his first stance with SDNY was "I will tell you anything." and that didn't fly with the SDNY. In fact, the first time he tried in on for them, they threatened to add another charge to the complaint on the spot. So with that dope slap, he suddenly realizes that he's in a situation in which even a habitual liar will tell the truth, because the prosecutor he might lie to really cares about the truth and knows the truth of most matters that the liar might lie about. So he goes for redemption. You do get the feeling from watching him that truth-telling under duress is a new kind of lie for him and that he finds it quite exhilarating. So much for Cohen. > > > > Now we get to the really thorny issue, which you raise, the ghoul of essentialism. Once you have described the behavior, is there anything else to be said? Well, actually, it would be nice to say less! Repeating all of the above every time you want to say what Cohen is would be at least cumbersome. Wouldn't be much easier to say, "Cohens a liar!", meaning that, more than most people, what he says has more to do with what saying will get him than with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be? > > > > But can you say this much less without saying a lot more. To apply > the word LIAR to that complex pattern above is to imply that liar has a MEANING, that [a person whose utterances have more to do with what saying will get him than with any deep habit of scrupulously lining up what he is about to say with what he, on sober reflection, thinks the state of affairs to be] is what a liar IS. Why else say it? When you put a dollar across the counter at the candy’s store it is because you believe a dollar is worth a dollar’s worth of candy. If you thought the person across the counter didn’t share that belief, you would not let go of your dollar. What if he only took credit cards because he thought dollars were scraps of paper to be thrown in the trash. The same is with words. When you speak a word, it is with the expectation that the other person, will to some degree, at least, /understand it as you understand it. /This, in turn, implies that there is something behind the word, beyond the word, beneath the word, that exists whether or not you, or I, speak it. We should remain mute otherwise. > > > > I am guessing that this is the notion that you regard as dangerously close to “essentialism.” Now I am no philosopher. Philosophy is just as much a geekery as ethology, or software engineering, or mathematics, or physics, or chemistry, or … or….. or. If you have not slogged through all those texts for years, and bickered with those fellow students about their meaning, all under the watchful eye of pros, you are not a philosopher. I am a philosophical tourist. I like to visit but I sure wouldn’t like to live there. And my suspicion is that no FRIAM member is actually a proper philosopher, either. (Please contradict me if I am wrong; we REALLY need you.) So, I assume that none of us actually knows what essentialism IS. But I will take it to mean, a belief that behind every word use and every particular to which a word points, despite all the variety in usages and pointings, is a real something that infuses all the objects to which a term correctly points. > > > > Now here is where Peirce comes in. Peirce has great faith in > cognitive systems, systems that are trying to discern the truth of any matter. He believes that experience is mostly random, but if there are any patterns in experience, cognitive systems will seek them out. Why, because knowing patterns helps a cognitive system (such as an organism) avoid ugly surprises. [You can feel Darwin lurking in the background, but Peirce does not explicitly trot him out in the way I just did.] Peirce’s favorite “cognitive system” is the community of scientific inquiry. Sciences collect evidence of “generals”—of laws, of entities, of processes, categories, of beings, etc. that have existence beyond the individual case. How do we know that? Because each bit of evidence is taken to be evidence relating to the same thing. If they were not, we would have to suppose them as a miscellaneous accidental pile of experiences. But we don’t do that; even in their individuality we suppose them to stand for something other than what they are. So, scientific research necessarily postulates the reality of some things, those postulations are true if they are the postulations upon which we will agree in the very long run. > > > > I have talked before here about Peirce’s strange notion of truth – > that upon which the community of inquiry will agree on the very long run – and the Real – that which is taken for granted by the truth. At first blush, those notions seem hardly more tangible than asserting that the truth is what God thinks and the Real is what he thinks about. But Peirce was, among many other things, a statistician, and he had, in the end, a statistical model of the truth. If there is some pattern in the world, if , say, a coin is biased toward heads, we will of course never know for sure because any random process can conceivably a string of heads for as long as you care to flip. But the longer a string of heads we obtain, the less likely it is that it is drawn from a population of flips of a fair coin. Similarly, while the local and temporal convergences of living communities of inquiry can never give absolute assurance that something is true, the make it increasingly likely that a Real Pattern exists. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that may contradict my opinion of myself."
On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I get more like myself." > > Keep fattening that tube, baby! -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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All this evokes my memory of a favorite "truism":
Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that may contradict my opinion of myself." On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I get more like myself." Keep fattening that tube, baby! ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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Exactly. The problem is that nobody's honest in their feedback. Friends are too forgiving. Enemies are too harsh. Frenemies make a nice balance. But their feedback is too tightly intertwined with their own opinion of themselves.
I wish God were a robot ... with a feedback channel impervious to DDOS. On March 1, 2019 4:43:50 PM PST, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote: >All this evokes my memory of a favorite "truism": > > /I am who you think I think I am!/ > > > >> Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that >may contradict my opinion of myself." >> >> On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: >>> An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every >year I get more like myself." >>> >>> Keep fattening that tube, baby! -- glen ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 6:13 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote: Exactly. The problem is that nobody's honest in their feedback. Friends are too forgiving. Enemies are too harsh. Frenemies make a nice balance. But their feedback is too tightly intertwined with their own opinion of themselves. ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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Ha! I love it.
Bender: "Do you thing what I did was wrong?" God: "Right and wrong are just words. What matters is what you do." Bender: "Yeah, I know. That's why I asked if what I did ... Ah, forget it." On March 1, 2019 7:27:51 PM PST, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote: >OK, Glen, you walked into ta Futurama quote.... >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL7e05pClKM > >Carl > > >On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 6:13 PM glen <[hidden email]> wrote: > >> Exactly. The problem is that nobody's honest in their feedback. >Friends >> are too forgiving. Enemies are too harsh. Frenemies make a nice >balance. >> But their feedback is too tightly intertwined with their own opinion >of >> themselves. >> >> I wish God were a robot ... with a feedback channel impervious to >DDOS. >> >> On March 1, 2019 4:43:50 PM PST, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> >wrote: >> >All this evokes my memory of a favorite "truism": >> > >> > /I am who you think I think I am!/ >> > >> > >> > >> >> Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details >that >> >may contradict my opinion of myself." >> >> >> >> On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: >> >>> An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every >> >year I get more like myself." >> >>> >> >>> Keep fattening that tube, baby! >> >> -- >> glen >> >> ============================================================ >> 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 >> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove >> -- glen ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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In reply to this post by gepr
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html
On 3/1/19, 4:00 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email] on behalf of [hidden email]> wrote: Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that may contradict my opinion of myself." On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I get more like myself." > > Keep fattening that tube, baby! -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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Salt-air yoga and access to a shaman! Sign me up.
On 3/5/19 9:40 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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And cellulite. I would suggest they go to Starbucks and snap out of it before their bosses find out how they are pissing away company money.
On 3/5/19, 11:37 AM, "uǝlƃ ☣" <[hidden email]> wrote: Salt-air yoga and access to a shaman! Sign me up. On 3/5/19 9:40 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
Marcus/Glen/Nick -
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/modern-elder-resort-silicon-valley-ageism.html > Ha! It's more likely that, "Every year, I edit out more details that may contradict my opinion of myself." > > On 3/1/19 2:49 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > > An elderly friend of ours used to say, somewhat ruefully, "every year I get more like myself." > > > > Keep fattening that tube, baby! > Interesting to see the "new bar" set so low as age 30. Reminds me of my own youth when the "Hippie generation" was saying "don't trust anyone over 30!". Later I got to know a lot of folks from the "Beat" generation who were probably in their 30's by that time and rather put out that they couldn't keep their "hip" going amongst the new youth culture. Well into my 40's I still felt relevant in virtually every work-context I found myself in. This was partly because I had managed to (moslty) keep up with the broad strokes of the technology and culture of science/computing/internet. I was regularly outshined by the occasional genius/polymath/young-turk, but not entirely eclipsed. I remember acutely when at about 45, one of my (slightly) older colleagues referred to me as one of the "as yet disproven" employees in the group I was working in. I had moved from a Big-Iron (HPC) computing division to a more nimble and scrappy "Decision Support Sciences" division a couple of years earlier. My "elder" colleague was making a good point in that new context where there was always a lot of "hype" flying around (program managers selling it to sponsors and tech folks selling it to program managers) and it appeared that every "new face" was given a grace period, but after a few years if they hadn't *consistently* kept their snake-oil fresh, they could be treated as *stale* snake-oil salesmen. I never quite hit that place in that division but saw it coming. I missed (or ducked) opportunities to move up into program or line management positions, which was the best (only?) way of avoiding becoming deprecated in place. A few of the "old fogies" managed to keep a tech niche open by supporting some obscure program or technology that nobody else really wanted, and no (fresh) snake oil was needed for. Others just hunkered down and depended on institutional inertia to carry them into (and beyond) early retirement. At 52 I "took my show on the road", accepting Bechtel's (LANL) buyout offer they put out to avoid having to do a forced layoff (they got 500 volunteers for the 800 staff they wanted to shed). This was also just as the SFComplex was forming so I spent a good 4 years working "double-time" to try to help make Sfx viable while pursuing my own professional work. I didn't feel (entirely) out of touch/date technically then, but I *was* aware that I couldn't keep up with both breadth and depth. To make it all a bit more painful, many of the technologies I had helped "pioneer" (in a minor way) over the preceding 3 decades had hit a point of resurgent popularity and ease-of-entry. Computer Graphics, Scientific Visualization, Discrete Simulation, Visual Analytics, Virtual Reality, Distributed Systems development, etc. were all *finally* becoming mainstream and *everybody* was on the bandwagon. But few had to hand-jam HTML, write socket-level communications, write raw OpenGL, do careful memory/pointer management, worry overmuch about vertex/texel budgets, avoid *all* use of >= N^2 complexity algorithms, etc. and those were the hard-won skills I had developed. Still useful but rarely critical. A few years ago, I gave up trying to maintain either "breadth" or "depth" for the most part. I still find "niches" I can contribute to and I find that a very small (diminishing) number of potential clients really understand and appreciate my unique offerings, but I feel surrounded/overwhelmed by the plethora of much more energetic/agile/up-to-date workers offering (at least superficially) similar wares. It is (not) satisfying for me to see my "younger" colleagues (many of you here in your 40's/50's) starting to feel that same pressure... but inevitable? This all leads me to wonder how much of the "automation economy" is going to invade the high-tech job market, and how that will be relieved. I don't know if it will be shortened workweeks, (much) earlier retirement, serial multiple careers, guaranteed minimum incomes, or some combination that relieves the combination of an accelerated change of pace and increased leverage/automation through technology. The holy grails of my early career such as hardware improvements to obviate the need for extreme memory/CPU/Network conservation, and code-reuse, have come to fruit and in many ways are the source of my own (and others?) deprecation. It feels not unlike the end of the 19th century farmer whose skills with animal husbandry may not have prepared him so much for the industrial-age overtaking agriculture. My grandfathers both endured/survived the end of that era. The elder still spoke nostalgically and fondly of the various mules he depended on up until he had to quit the farm in his late 60's. My mules are named Fortran/Prolog/APL/C/PERL and VMS/BSD/Solaris/NeXT and IBM/CDC/CRAY/DEC and GL/OpenGL/VRPN/VRML. I barely know the names of the new tractors/combines/cropdusters/satellite-imaging/laser-leveling/??? technology. Always to be counted on for nostalgic maunderings, - Steve ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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< My "elder" colleague was making a
good point in that new context where there was always a lot of "hype" flying around (program managers selling it to sponsors and tech folks selling it to program managers) and it appeared that every "new face" was given a grace period, but after a few years if they hadn't *consistently* kept their snake-oil fresh, they could be treated as *stale* snake-oil salesmen. > That's a wonderful description of what is now called A division. I stop my commentary there. ( Marcus ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
I can't help but tie these maunderings to the modern epithets of "snowflake" and "privilege" (shared by opposite but similar ideologues). I have to wonder what it means to "learn" something. The question of whether a robot will take one's job cuts nicely to the chase, I think. How much of what any of us do/know is uniquely (or best) doable by a general intelligence (if such exists) versus specific intelligence? While I'm slightly fluent in a handful of programming languages, I cannot (anymore) just sit down and write a program in any one of them. I was pretty embarrassed at a recent interview where they asked me to code my solution to their interview question on the whiteboard. After I was done I noticed sugar from 3 different languages in the code I "wrote" ... all mixed together for convenience. They said they didn't mind. But who knows? Which is better? Being able to coherently code in one language, with nearly compilable code off the bat? Or the [dis]ability of changing languages on a regular basis in order to express a relatively portable algorithm? Which one would be easier for a robot? I honestly have no idea.
But the idea that the arbitrary persnickety sugar I learned yesterday *should* be useful today seems like a bit of a snowflake/privileged way to think (even ignoring the "problem of induction" we often talk about on this list). Is what it means to "learn" something fundamentally different from one era to the next? Do the practical elements of "learning" evolve over time? Does it really ... really? ... help to know how a motor works in order to drive a car? ... to reliably drive a car so that one's future is more predictable? ... to reduce the total cost of ownership of one's car? Or is there a logical layer of abstraction below which the Eloi really don't need to go? On 3/5/19 11:04 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Interesting to see the "new bar" set so low as age 30. Reminds me of my > own youth when the "Hippie generation" was saying "don't trust anyone > over 30!". Later I got to know a lot of folks from the "Beat" > generation who were probably in their 30's by that time and rather put > out that they couldn't keep their "hip" going amongst the new youth culture. > > ... > My mules are named Fortran/Prolog/APL/C/PERL and VMS/BSD/Solaris/NeXT > and IBM/CDC/CRAY/DEC and GL/OpenGL/VRPN/VRML. I barely know the names > of the new > tractors/combines/cropdusters/satellite-imaging/laser-leveling/??? > technology. > > Always to be counted on for nostalgic maunderings, -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Did I really REALLY have to learn Latin to be an Educated Man. Read in two languages to get a PHD? Do you really have to get an A in organic chemistry to be a good doctor? In Calculus to be a dentist?
How do we tell the difference between hazing and education? n Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of u?l? ? Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2019 2:40 PM To: FriAM <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] are we how we behave? I can't help but tie these maunderings to the modern epithets of "snowflake" and "privilege" (shared by opposite but similar ideologues). I have to wonder what it means to "learn" something. The question of whether a robot will take one's job cuts nicely to the chase, I think. How much of what any of us do/know is uniquely (or best) doable by a general intelligence (if such exists) versus specific intelligence? While I'm slightly fluent in a handful of programming languages, I cannot (anymore) just sit down and write a program in any one of them. I was pretty embarrassed at a recent interview where they asked me to code my solution to their interview question on the whiteboard. After I was done I noticed sugar from 3 different languages in the code I "wrote" ... all mixed together for convenience. They said they didn't mind. But who knows? Which is better? Being able to coherently code in one language, with nearly compilable code off the bat? Or the [dis]ability of changing languages on a regular basis in order to express a relatively portable algorithm? Which one would be easier for a robot? I honestly have no idea. But the idea that the arbitrary persnickety sugar I learned yesterday *should* be useful today seems like a bit of a snowflake/privileged way to think (even ignoring the "problem of induction" we often talk about on this list). Is what it means to "learn" something fundamentally different from one era to the next? Do the practical elements of "learning" evolve over time? Does it really ... really? ... help to know how a motor works in order to drive a car? ... to reliably drive a car so that one's future is more predictable? ... to reduce the total cost of ownership of one's car? Or is there a logical layer of abstraction below which the Eloi really don't need to go? On 3/5/19 11:04 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Interesting to see the "new bar" set so low as age 30. Reminds me of > my own youth when the "Hippie generation" was saying "don't trust > anyone over 30!". Later I got to know a lot of folks from the "Beat" > generation who were probably in their 30's by that time and rather put > out that they couldn't keep their "hip" going amongst the new youth culture. > > ... > My mules are named Fortran/Prolog/APL/C/PERL and VMS/BSD/Solaris/NeXT > and IBM/CDC/CRAY/DEC and GL/OpenGL/VRPN/VRML. I barely know the > names of the new > tractors/combines/cropdusters/satellite-imaging/laser-leveling/??? > technology. > > Always to be counted on for nostalgic maunderings, -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels
Marcus - I believe that is the very same division. It was D when I was
there, recently TSA before that which was a merger of A and TS before that I think! To be fair it wasn't *all* *always* like that, but there was a strong over/undertone. I fled HPC (formerly CIC, formerly C) to evade the "over-funded" "big iron" mentality (after most of 20 years), thinking that a scrappier place would be more satisfying. It was "merely different". The Snake Oil came in *much* larger containers and I got in (mildly) hot water any number of times for calling "emperor's new clothes!" while in C/CIC/HPC. I started (1981) in AT (accelerator technology) and kept in touch with some of those folks for the 27 years I was there and saw the paradoxes that came with production/experimental environments vs the uber-computing/production world. I got to play with some interesting folks in the TLA domain along the way but I had a creepy feeling the whole time I was going to discover (with an SCI) something that would put me in the dilemma Ed Snowden ended up in.... I ducked a few projects because they looked like they might lead me to things I didn't want to know. I was in DC 1 week before 9/11 gazing at the planes flying into Reagan, making a sharp turn over Georgetown at low altitude, thinking "what if one of those failed to make that turn?" Reminiscences aRE Us! - Steve On 3/5/19 2:20 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > < My "elder" colleague was making a > good point in that new context where there was always a lot of "hype" > flying around (program managers selling it to sponsors and tech folks > selling it to program managers) and it appeared that every "new face" > was given a grace period, but after a few years if they hadn't > *consistently* kept their snake-oil fresh, they could be treated as > *stale* snake-oil salesmen. > > > That's a wonderful description of what is now called A division. > I stop my commentary there. ( > > Marcus > > ============================================================ > 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 > archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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In reply to this post by gepr
Glen -
What a great (continued) riff on the (general) topic, in spite of the thread wandering more than a little (no kinks but far from straight and smooth). I would like to contrast "learning" with "problem solving" as I think the latter is the key point of what might allow "general intelligence" (if such exists, as you say) to distinguish itself. Many may disagree, but i find the essence of "problem solving" at it's best to be the art and science of "asking the right question". Once that has been achieved, the "answer" becomes self-evident and as Feynman liked to say "QED!" Contemporary machine learning seems to confront the definition of "self-evident" and "quite easily" The 1970's computer-proof of the 4-color problem is a good (on that boundary) example. Perhaps we could say that the program written to do the search of the axiom/logic space is a prime (if obscure) example of "asking the right question" and (though it is a bit of a stretch) the halting/solution of the program represents the "self-evident" answer (nQED?). At the very least, this is how I take the idea of "elegant" solutions to be (though the complexity of the 4-color problem-solution would seem to be a far stretch for what one would call "elegant"). Contemporary machine (deep?) learning techniques (even those emerging in the late 80s such as evolutionary algorithms) seem to demonstrate that a suitably "framed" question is as good as a well "stated" question with the right amount/type of computation. EA, GA, Nueral Nets, etc. are all "meta-heuristics" . I am not sure I can call applications of these techniques, even in their best form, "general intelligence" but I think I would be tempted to call them "more general" intelligence. I would *also* characterize a LOT of human problem-solving as NO MORE general, and the problem of "the expert" seems to frame that even more strongly... it often appears that an "expert" is distinguished from others with familiarity with a topic by *at least* the very same kind of "supervised learning" that advanced algorithms are capable of. Some experts seem to be very narrow, and ultimately not more than a very well populated/trained associative memory, whole others seem very general and are *also* capable of reframing complex and/or poorly formed questions into an appropriate and well-formed enough question for the answer to emerge (with or without significant computation in between) as "self-evident". There are plenty of folks with more practical and theoretical knowledge of these techniques than I have here, but I felt it was worth trying to characterize the question this way. Another important way of looking at the question of what can be automated might be an extension/parallel to the point of "if you have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail". It seems that our socio-political-economic milieu is evolving to "meet the problem of being human" halfway, by providing a sufficiently complex set (spectrum?) of choices of "how to live" to satisfy (most) everyone. This does not mean that our system entirely meets the needs of humanity, but rather that it does at a granularity/structure that it many (if not most) people can fit themselves into one of it's many compartments/slots in a matrix of solutions. Social Justice and Welfare systems exist to try to help people fit into these slots as well as presumably influencing the cultural and legal norms that establish and maintain those slots. The emergence of ideas such as Neurodiversity and this-n-that-spectrum diagnoses seem to help deal with the outliers and those falling between the cracks but this is once again, an example (I think) of force-fitting the real phenomenon (individuals in their arbitrary complexity) to the model (socio-political-economic-??? models). Mumble, - Steve On 3/5/19 2:40 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote: > I can't help but tie these maunderings to the modern epithets of "snowflake" and "privilege" (shared by opposite but similar ideologues). I have to wonder what it means to "learn" something. The question of whether a robot will take one's job cuts nicely to the chase, I think. How much of what any of us do/know is uniquely (or best) doable by a general intelligence (if such exists) versus specific intelligence? While I'm slightly fluent in a handful of programming languages, I cannot (anymore) just sit down and write a program in any one of them. I was pretty embarrassed at a recent interview where they asked me to code my solution to their interview question on the whiteboard. After I was done I noticed sugar from 3 different languages in the code I "wrote" ... all mixed together for convenience. They said they didn't mind. But who knows? Which is better? Being able to coherently code in one language, with nearly compilable code off the bat? Or the [dis]ability of changing languages on a regular basis in order to express a relatively portable algorithm? Which one would be easier for a robot? I honestly have no idea. > > But the idea that the arbitrary persnickety sugar I learned yesterday *should* be useful today seems like a bit of a snowflake/privileged way to think (even ignoring the "problem of induction" we often talk about on this list). Is what it means to "learn" something fundamentally different from one era to the next? Do the practical elements of "learning" evolve over time? Does it really ... really? ... help to know how a motor works in order to drive a car? ... to reliably drive a car so that one's future is more predictable? ... to reduce the total cost of ownership of one's car? Or is there a logical layer of abstraction below which the Eloi really don't need to go? > > On 3/5/19 11:04 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: >> Interesting to see the "new bar" set so low as age 30. Reminds me of my >> own youth when the "Hippie generation" was saying "don't trust anyone >> over 30!". Later I got to know a lot of folks from the "Beat" >> generation who were probably in their 30's by that time and rather put >> out that they couldn't keep their "hip" going amongst the new youth culture. >> >> ... >> My mules are named Fortran/Prolog/APL/C/PERL and VMS/BSD/Solaris/NeXT >> and IBM/CDC/CRAY/DEC and GL/OpenGL/VRPN/VRML. I barely know the names >> of the new >> tractors/combines/cropdusters/satellite-imaging/laser-leveling/??? >> technology. >> >> Always to be counted on for nostalgic maunderings, ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove |
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