Lacking an incentive to stay away from the hen house, foxes will naturally move to "guard" them.
Same thing with managers. Lacking an incentive to follow regulations, they will naturally focus on instinctual outcomes; working harder, producing more, building quicker, etc. You need to provide incentives to stop them from doing the obvious, instinctual thing. Just like Foxes!
> Why did we look for a solution in the first place?
They did. I do not believe that you were involved.
> How is it important that a number can be a sum of three cubes?
People like things for their own sake. How is it important to have sex or drink a beer? Same thing. Also math has this uncanny tendency to turn out to be useful where you least expect it. Consider the primes. For a long time people might have asked the same question you are asking here, and yet now they are central in encryption and thus the digital finance market. Could not find a more capitalistic and materialistic use if you tried.
Why are you so bitter? I asked this genuinely. I doubt PhD+ people do that type of research "just for fun", or do that like someone like me drinks a beer. Someone answered elaborately, and I'm glad they did. Thanks anyway.
The very idea of a "scientific theory" is a philosophical concept, and your implicit assertion that empiricism trumps abstract reasoning (which I am here neither agreeing with nor opposing) is in itself a philosophical position.
Pseudoscience refers to activities that superficially have the aesthetics of science but do not follow its constraints. For example, homeopathy is pseudoscience. They dress in white coats and use chemistry lab equipment, but they do not test their ideas with experiments that could falsify them. This has nothing to do with reasoning with the current scientific theories. What do you think theoretical physicists do?
I say this because more and more I notice people using "pseudoscience" in a sense similar to "heresy", and treating philosophy as some sort of inferior system of knowledge that is bound to be replaced by science. These people misunderstand both science and philosophy, and would benefit from a bit more of reading and thinking outside of their comfort zone.
> I say this because more and more I notice people using "pseudoscience" in a sense similar to "heresy"
I think that for some people science has replaced religion as a belief and social control system
For these people science defines what is possible within reality and how the world works in a fundamental way; but they don't really understand how these scientific theories work, they just accept them.
I am not saying that science is a religion (they do work under different constraints), I am just saying that science has started to serve a similar role within our civilization, like religion did back in the "dark ages"
I'm not sure that calling science "social control" in any context is fair. It's certainly replaced religion as a tool for explaining things, but that's what it's for.
Your wording makes it sound like there's only one "scientific" belief system, but It's in my view really only a component of one. I think constructing your worldview around at least theoretically verifiable claims is a definite improvement over religious dogma, but most important is the scientific mindset of accepting uncertainty and "I don't know" answers (until you figure them out).
I also think it's valid to trust experts, but extraordinary claims will still require extraordinary evidence.
Now, the social structures around science aren't perfect and bad science can definitely be used to mislead people. That's just another problem to solve.
> How can it be a state machine if you aren't mutating it?
You are confusing a state machine (which is an abstract model of computation) with the behavior of a program implementing it. The set of possible states and the conditions of transition from one state to the next never change.
These conditions can depend on mutable state, as is the case described by the author (in this case, mutable state is kept in the current and previous node pointers).
Nothing is perfect, but dictatorship is worse. I live close what remains of the Berlin wall. People risked their lives to jump it and escape to the democratic side. Nobody ever wanted to escape the democratic side and jump in the other direction. Why?
I love China and I have a lot of empathy for the Chinese people. You have an amazing and ancient culture and I hope that you can release yourselves from oppression, gain control of your own government as a people, prosper and be happy. We are all human beings, fuck the dictators.
Russia is a democracy. The US was a democracy when it genocided the native Americans. askmike is right. Democracy alone won't help Hong Kong. China will not stop. Pacifist Hong Kong will be crushed, regardless the form of government.
>Nobody ever wanted to escape the democratic side and jump in the other direction. Why?
The world is full of nutcases, and a lot seem to be from US (think flat earth etc.). I find it highly offensive that you use one crazy wackjob to disprove how people were treated in eastern Europe.
> Russia is a democracy. The US was a democracy when it genocided the native Americans. askmike is right. Democracy alone won't help Hong Kong. China will not stop. Pacifist Hong Kong will be crushed, regardless the form of government.
I am not claiming that democracy will save Hong Kong from China. What I am saying is that democracy is better than no democracy, and no amount of doublespeak or whatabbautism is going to change that reality. "Eat this poison, it's good for you", it's what the Chinese autocrats are saying. Well, people might indeed have to eat it, but they don't have to believe that it is good for them.
> You've never heard of James Dresnok. Why?
Yes I did, and I'm sure you can probably find a similar case that is actually related to my example. The simple point is that, when you have a wall between a democracy (not a "democracy", like contemporary Russia) and an autocratic regime, the ratio of people making the jump in the direction of the dictatorship against people making the jump in the direction of the democracy is < .00001. It is probably not zero because of people with psychiatric issues, people who are in love with someone on the other side, who left family there... But it is pretty damn close to zero, and this is something you have to explain if you want to insist that democracy or no democracy is the same for people.
> What I am saying is that democracy is better than no democracy, and no amount of doublespeak or whatabbautism is going to change that reality.
It's not reality, it's just your opinion (and those of most people living in democratic countries). Meanwhile the vast majority of Chinese people disagree with you.
Maybe they do disagree with me. It is impossible to know, because they are not free to say what they really think -- which is another fundamental problem with not-democracy.
> my answer to that is that the government should not be paying for people's health care. It enables bad behaviors and it forces people who make good choices to subsidize people who make bad choices. Which is legitimately bullshit.
Bullshit. The government is not "paying for people's health care". In most of the civilized world, you pay a percentage of your income to the national health care system, and then the national health care system takes care of you if you need something.
Why? Because you can be suddenly diagnosed with all sorts of diseases that could not be prevented by having "good behavior". That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc.
Also: people get old. The older you get, the more shit starts to happen.
Not having a national health care system leads to a nasty and cruel society.
> That is puritanical bullshit to blame those who need help and compassion the most. People have life-threatening diseases because of genetic factors, environmental factors that are out of their control, receiving a cosmic radiation at the wrong moment, etc etc.
I don't see where OP is implying that individuals suffering from unfortunate accidents outside of their control are driving up health care costs. This whole discussion seems to be centered on lifestyle choices, eating large quantities of sugar, that have a significant effect on the health care costs of the population as a whole. Those are the types of decisions that have the ability to drive up health care costs. Childhood cancer or other unfortunate illnesses are statistically too infrequent to be driving up health care costs alone.
As a parallel example: A family might have their house burn down due to no fault of their own, and yet the monthly premium that families pay for home insurance to cover such an event is within their means. Note: The US market actually forces this by default as no lender will underwrite your mortgage without casualty insurance.
> I don't see where OP is implying that individuals suffering from unfortunate accidents outside of their control are driving up health care costs
No, OP is just proposing that help is denied to everyone who needs it and can't afford it, because it is deemed more important to prevent free-riders than to be humane. It's a nasty ideology, that is only embraced by the US among all developed countries.
It means that your life is only valuable to society if you have (or had) some economic value. It doesn't matter, by the way, if this economic value comes from actually contributing, or by inheritance, or by winning big at a casino. The important thing is that you have money, otherwise go (literally) die in a corner.
> This whole discussion seems to be centered on lifestyle choices, eating large quantities of sugar, that have a significant effect on the health care costs of the population as a whole.
So why not tax the big corps that make all of this junk for the costs to society that they externalize? Sure, it would be great if people had the level of education necessary to make the right choices. It is pretty hard to get that level of education in the US if you are born into an unprivileged situation, because the education system for the poor is shit, because said companies avoid paying taxes as much as possible, and the more well-off are selfish and shortsighted, and vote for politicians that do not spend public money on what can improve society as a whole.
> Childhood cancer or other unfortunate illnesses are statistically too infrequent to be driving up health care costs alone.
You are very young, I imagine. Perhaps you haven't yet started to understand that things go to shit as you age, and it is not "infrequent", it is part of the human condition. A part that is hidden out of the public eye because it is inconvenient to talk about it. All Americans are immortal and about to be millionaires!
It is only confusing if one spends too much time paying attention to those who want to sell you something, or develop some sort of guru personal-brand (I vomit in my mouth a little bit when I write things like "personal brand").
Here's what most people need to know:
Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources.
This means no refined-anything (no added sugar, no white flour, no hydrogenated-fats, etc.)
The less ingredients the better. The more you recognize the ingredients as something you could grow in nature, the better.
I imagine I will be bombarded with paleo-something, keto-whatever, broscience, etc etc. You don't need any of that. Eat unprocessed food, mostly from vegetable sources and you will be way ahead of the vast majority of western people in terms of having a healthy nutrition.
Unprocessed != nutritionally balanced, although it often is. The “fewer ingredients == better” people often forget that you still need to balance your diet. The “mostly from vegetable sources” part might leave you in need of more fat and protein, but this is of course depends on the person.
non-scientific thoughts:
I believe eating unprocessed food is important due to how the body breaks it down.
Eating corn vs. corn flour I imagine has different effects on the body and on indicators of satiety
Ah, but eating unprocessed corn as a primary part of your diet will cause pellagra, unless you soak it in lime water. So unprocessed isn’t always best.
You are right, and it is also the case that totalitarian policy can be implemented in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. It can be a last resort measure to save a society (e.g., when the UK canceled elections to deal with the Nazi threat).
More importantly: it is perfectly possible to implement totalitarian policy while maintaining the aesthetics of freedom. There is a famous book about this, 1984 something... Sorry for the cliché, but here we are.
Let's say, for example, that you convince the population of the most powerful economy on earth that they are the most free, most amazing society ever, while the rest of the developed world actually enjoys affordable health care and vacation time. Meanwhile, most of your citizens not only spend the vast amount of their time in an endless rat race that only benefits economically the top .001%, send their sons and daughters to stupid wars, while aggressively demanding the continuation of this state of affairs.
Another important trick to maintaining this state of affairs is to create very violent political debate about a very narrow and irrelevant set of topics (e.g. bullshit topics such as "cultural marxism", "red pill", "cucks and soyboys", "cultural appropriation", the corrupt blue guy vs the corrupt red gal... you get the picture).
The idea of "embodied AI" has been around for some decades. It is reasonable that, from a practical engineering perspective, creating "human-like" intelligence becomes more feasible if this intelligence is embodied in the same physical possibilities and constraints as a typical human.
What I find somewhat ironic is this: the author mentions working with Stephen Hawking, an amazing man who produced incredible intellectual work and enriched our understanding of reality while being almost incapable of any physicality.
If we apply current scientific theories (physics, chemistry, biology, etc) to this cell network and physical machinery, we quickly find our way back to symbolic manipulation. What are cells if not computational nodes that exchange messages?
A much more reasonable hypothesis for what is missing is contained in the text:
"A human cell is a remarkable piece of networked machinery that has about the same number of components as a modern jumbo jet[...]"
Maybe we just haven't reached the level of complexity needed for human-level AI. A hint that this might be the case is that the current excitement with ML seems to be fueled by algorithms that were mostly known by the 80s (sure, with lots of recent incremental improvements, but no new big idea). What made a difference was the computational power and datasets that became available in the 2010s. I suspect the next leap will be of a similar nature. "More is different".
> Maybe we just haven't reached the level of complexity needed for human-level AI. A hint that this might be the case is that the current excitement with ML seems to be fueled by algorithms that were mostly known by the 80s (sure, with lots of recent incremental improvements, but no new big idea). What made a difference was the computational power and datasets that became available in the 2010s. I suspect the next leap will be of a similar nature. "More is different".
Regarding the nature of complexity and the notion that "More is different", I am reminded of the emergent behavior of vivisystems [1] as described in Kevin Kelley's book Out of Control [2] -- an insightful exploration of the emergent behavior expressed by complex self sustaining systems. If you have not read Out of Control then you might want to put it in your reading queue. I found it highly engaging and thought provoking.
>What I find somewhat ironic is this: the author mentions working with Stephen Hawking, an amazing man who produced incredible intellectual work and enriched our understanding of reality while being almost incapable of any physicality.
Not from birth though. I wouldn't dismiss the impact of being able to interact with the world during childhood so easily.
Helen Keller is a better example. It is also the case, however, that her brain, like anyone's, had been shaped, through evolution, by eons of interaction with the environment.
To me embodiment is important because it acts as the root in the hierarchy of reference frames from which you can model the real world. So whether or not the body has a particular set of physical capabilities isn't as important as the relationship it has with the rest of the world around it.
> What are cells if not computational nodes that exchange messages?
We evolved in a context where we survived by exchanging messages with other "computational nodes". So it's very tempting to see everything through that lens. But I think it's a mistake to see cells as "really" just like us. As Box said, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." We shouldn't forget that cells are really cells, and we see them as analogous to familiar things because the world is too big to represent directly in three pounds of meat.
Are you sure that the parent was comparong humans to cells? It strikes me more as this: "human intelligence is run by a network of nerve cells which are complex but could be modeled in all of their conplexity". So if you could model enough of these, you would get a functional replica of a human brain.
> What I find somewhat ironic is this: the author mentions working with Stephen Hawking, an amazing man who produced incredible intellectual work and enriched our understanding of reality while being almost incapable of any physicality.
From my point of view, what matters is not physical interaction but rather physical perception.
May it be visual, auditive, tactile etc. it all contributes to build the "model of the world" you carry in your whole body.
I suppose Hawking could still largely perceive his environment.
Only for the later (even if major) part of his life. One could argue that the physicality he was capable of in the earlier stage of his life helped him gain a solid understanding of physics on our level.
But there is a better argument to be made: Modern Physics is an entirely different beast. To understand the underlying reality you have to be, in one sense of the word, be detached from the reality. And being paralyzed can be said to be one of the many things that let him have experiences unlike that of any almost any other human being. His earlier life let him have a solid footing on the dynamics of our level, and his later life allowed him to depart from it, in a direction in which he was propelled by his intellect.
I would argue that if Stephen Hawking was a sports instructor (or even a programmer for a sport software), his lack of physicality would have worked against him. But if you showed me someone with a severe physical disability who writes great code for sport software, I would revert to my first argument.
If you mean the jet airplane is the simpler of the two, I would agree. The famous Roche Biochemical Pathways chart of just those mecahnisms that are understood illustrates this perfectly: http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl
No, this is what happens when one leaves the fox guarding the hen house.
If incentives were aligned with regulations, there would be no need for regulations to begin with.