On 25 December 2012 04:22, Jim Bromer <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: > As with all other major breakthroughs in > history, it will be broadly clear only in hindsight, which people had > the right intuitions in foresight, and which did not... >
Well, even that is not exactly true. The history of science and engineering shows that very often there are many contestants searching in the same general area, driven by similar hunches (some of which are wildly wrong, for utterly non-obvious reasons). And the outstanding problem that needs to be solved is rarely the obvious one. As a kid, I wondered why the adoption of the steam engine was not more rapid than it was. As a kid, I failed to understand that what held back the steam engine was not piston or cylinder design, or governors, or transmissions, but was in fact boiler design: the inability to convert heat into steam quickly enough. Once that problem was solved, the rest came quickly. The boiler issue becomes "obvious" once one thinks about the problem clearly; yet it's amazing how many contemporaries failed to do so. But then, the history of discovery is also filled with examples of serendipity and chance: deeply held convictions that were wildly wrong, but lead to a discovery. There is only one common thread in all of these: activity and attempts. If you don't actually try, you don't get a shot at winning. If you don't buy a lotto ticket, you can't win the lotto. Polio probably would have been cured by a woman ... if she hadn't halted her career to raise a family. A similar story for DNA: now, we seem to only remember Watson and Crick, and have forgotten one of their important colleagues.. Most recently, the Nobel prize for the discovery of luminescent chemical tags... Don't get hung up on arguments. Do get hung up on actually doing. > But does your faith include the possibility that your specific ideas might > be wrong? > I've seen Ben be wrong. He doesn't celebrate it, or barely even acknowledge it, he just moves on. Its not a matter of faith, but of pragmatism. > Does it include the possibility that many of us might have be looking in > the right direction but that it would only become apparent if someone > else presents us with a new technology that we could not invent ourselves? > Heh. I'm sure many are thinking and looking in the right direction. --linas ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
