Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

Well, I did get a chance to listen to CArne Ross' TED talk after Marcus pointed him out. (Nothing further, yet.) And he made one comment in that talk that I like, yet completely disagree with ... something like "it's up to each and every person to implement policy" ... or diplomacy or someth

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

Hm. But enlightenment (IMO) only happens in a personal sense. And "personal" implies tight couplings. Eg Dick Cheney being OK with gay people because his daughter is gay, despite him being evil in every other non-personal aspect of his decades in power. Or Milo _finally_ realizing how bad a

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

On 05/05/2017 09:24 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I intended to make a different point than what I think you may have concluded. Heh, yes, I know. That was partly the point of referring to it in this context. >8^D Nonetheless, the point I inferred is still there. > To certain technologists, ther

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

But that's not what you said. You said they distribute abstractions, which they clearly do not ... cannot because that's nonsense. One cannot distribute an abstraction. The reason one can _experience_ discovering an unintended _use_ for an artifact is because these things that get distribute

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

FWIW, I would try not to over-parse "rhetoric" any more than I over-parse "abstract". All informational language is persuasive and all persuasive language is informative. The distinction is false, I think. We see this most egregiously in the saying: If you want to learn something, read about

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

Heh, just in case you think my comments about my gratefulness or admission of my stupidity are somehow intended as ironic, I'll confirm they are NOT. All y'all are way smarter than me. And I am very grateful for your presence, interaction, tolerance, and the very existence of the forum. I su

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

Fantastic pattern recognition, Roger. We can combine anti-emminence-based concept of white privilege with Kazynski's (negative) interpretation of the more tightly integrated social fabric ("will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more like cells

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

What if faster firing tightened a brain's coupling to its environment, rather than loosening it? That would suggest that brains with fast neurons would be _less_ tolerant of ambiguity, not more. One couldn't think deeply about anything because the environment would keep you locked in a kind o

Re: [FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

At some point, wouldn't we enter David Deutsch (or Neal Stephenson) territory? ... where the idea is that the computation in our nervous system is mappable to the computation going on around us. If consciousness isn't compressible because it's an artifact of that mapping, then faster neurons

Re: [FRIAM] An interesting article

Thanks, Carter! I really want to like that article. And my apophenia suggests it's addressing the prevalence of childish attitudes like Randian Objectivism in tech circles. But my one complaint about the article is the naive conception of submission. Like every other attribute of a complex p

Re: [FRIAM] Follow up re: Windows Update

That annoyed me immensely when I first acquired Win10. I did manage to turn it off, though I don't remember how. But your rant is timely given the WannaCry outbreak and, especially the proposition that pirate versions and/or people who don't update regularly didn't get MS' fix back in March.

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

There's still time for early registration here: https://2017.pqcrypto.org/conference/ If I had even the slightest professional duties in the space, I'd take advantage of the opportunity to visit Utrecht! On 05/18/2017 09:13 AM, Gillian Densmore wrote: > Josh or someone else can explain it bet

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Very cool. Thanks for the idea! I've never profiled either GPG or any blockchain transactions. Ever since the 2nd round of StorJ testing, I began using my Coinbase wallet exclusively ... My penchant for wiping and reinstalling the OS kept interfering with my (lack of) wallet management. On

Re: [FRIAM] truth is sillier than fiction

Winner: the best venn diagram of 2017 via @LorcanRK https://twitter.com/CBinsights/status/864141940496912384 On 05/17/2017 12:27 PM, gepr wrote: > Rejection Letter > http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/05/rejection-letter.html > >> And a mild-mannered British computer security exper

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

And "get ready" has more than one dimension: It Isn’t Ransomware, But It Will Take Over Your Server Anyway http://www.pandasecurity.com/mediacenter/pandalabs/ransomware-remote-desktop-protocol/ On 05/17/2017 12:36 PM, Tom Johnson wrote: > Techno evolution? > > https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

On 05/23/2017 12:05 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > CPU based mining is incredibly inefficient. Right. But the point is about the unintended social side effects of any given tech. E.g. script kiddies trying to hijack your computer for mining because they don't understand as much about mining as th

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Ah, yes, here it is. I should have bookmarked it. Trump, Clinton, and the Electoral Politics of Bitcoin http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=1826 On 05/23/2017 12:41 PM, glen ☣ wrote: > The decentralization rhetoric surrounding blockchain tech has been described > as a ripe platform for

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Well sure, TANSTAAFL. But, especially given Owen's (and apparently Stephen's) loaded question "What is complexity?", to write it all off as "tools don't imply political motives" is, itself, a loaded answer. We have overwhelming evidence that complexity is bound up with robustness through mech

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Ha! The obligatory pointing out of the least resistive path. Or perhaps as Gillian might point out, those who state the obvious exhibit more power (∀V≠0|R→0,P→±∞). On 05/24/2017 09:30 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Back in the Usenet days, people would prefix remarks like that as "Ob > complexit

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

UTF-8 /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose On 05/24/2017 10:50 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > But V doesn't occur within the scope of the universal quantifier. Where do > you find the logic symbols? -- ☣ glen FRIAM Applied Comple

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Oh, and Special characters across all X apps http://blog.agent-based-modeling.com/index.php/gepr/scaaxa The tricky ones are the "Combining" characters like the ̶s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶o̶u̶t. On 05/24/2017 10:47 AM, glen ☣ wrote: > UTF-8 /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose > &g

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Maturana and Varela, Robert Rosen, Mark Bedeau, Stuart Kauffman [†] (as well as a huge ecology of others) have written about this to no avail, apparently. We _insist_ on having our ambiguity and eating it, too. In the end, it's rhetorical trickery (of which I'm no less culpable than anyone el

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I agree completely. But if we look carefully at Russ' question: On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: > Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a > biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system? And we consider the previous comments a

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Excellent! Thanks for the clarification. This seems (to me) to follow along with Kauffman's "agents", at least up to the working paper version of Investigations I have. There, he suggests that a galaxy might be a collection of agents. I prefer what (I think) Smolin suggests in The Life of t

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I agree for the most part. But what M&V and Rosen (and to some extent Shrödinger, Turing, von Neumann, etc.) were trying to do is suss out the difference between living and inanimate systems. And that's worthy. You don't really need the "agent" concept for that work, though. I tend to prefer

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Yeah, but you're relying on the ambiguity of the concept. A system that is only complex for very short spans of time, or under very special conditions wouldn't fit with _most_ people's concept of "complex". To boot, unadulterated oscillation wouldn't satisfy it either. And, as has been said e

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Heh, you're not going to make an empathetic attempt to listen to Russ' intent? 8^) My answer is either or both "yes" and/or "no", because your words are too ambiguous. Both "complex" and "system" are left to the audience's imagination. I would say that each of those _can_ exhibit complex phen

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

On 05/26/2017 04:54 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote: > I am listening to Russ. I do think he's defining a sub-class of complex > systems (eg living systems). I would like to keep the definition of > "complex systems" broader than that though. OK. But I don't think he's necessarily _asserting_ that only

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

On 05/29/2017 09:02 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > I appreciate your stating it this way. I did hear Nick ask if a system could > (somehow?) choose it's own boundaries and dismissed it as (yet another) > distraction but would now like to hear more. It felt like an > anthropomorphism to suggest a

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Ugh. Sorry. I often forget to use "other people's words" when I talk. Sophistry is not a bad thing in my own private lexicon. We are surrounded by sophismata (is that the right word?). The disambiguation of the meanings of "model" is one such sophisma. It is not resolvable, at least in th

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

On 05/29/2017 12:01 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > There is surely more to it than just one directional layering, though. And there's more to it than the omnidirectional layering (like an onion), too. I'm happy that y'all are using the word "layer" rather than "level" (despite that the unfortunate

Re: [FRIAM] Arrow's theorem or this mailing list?

Dude, you're not allowed to agree with it! >8^) On 05/31/2017 09:20 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: > So, so, right! > > On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote: > >> https://xkcd.com/1844/ -- ☣ glen FRIAM Applied Complexi

Re: [FRIAM] Arrow's theorem or this mailing list?

Ha! I would never say such a thing, because I agree with von Neumann: https://pionic.org/understanding-vs-knowing "In mathematics you don’t understand things. You simply get used to them." Note, however, that I vehemently disagree with the gist of that article, though. On 05/31/2017 03:57

Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

On 06/05/2017 09:58 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Most probably don't even know what a computer lab is anymore, that was our > generation(s)'s thing! Much less use email. If you want to subvert the youth, use Instagram or somesuch. -- ☣ glen

Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

I have no idea. Stuff like this helps, though: https://www.instagram.com/inconvergent/ On 06/05/2017 10:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > How does moral necessity of The Midnight Computer Wiring > Society

Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

I share your worry. But when I hear myself say it, it sounds like "Get off my lawn!" Perhaps evolution is (will be) faster with more stumbling around in public? The mind is dead. Long live the hive. On 06/05/2017 10:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Sure, like the link on that page over the gi

[FRIAM] semiotics, again?

EricS' categorization of a cumulative hierarchy for reflective complexity reminded me of this: A Linguist Responds to Cormac McCarthy http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/a-linguist-responds-to-cormac-mccarthy particularly the difference between a "hard-coded" referent (e.g. a hypothetical neuro

Re: [FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

This is what a web page should look like: http://bactra.org/ On 06/05/2017 02:03 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Well, I for one hate Confluence (and similar things).Before I could > construct a page with some constructed HTML and generated linked files. Now > it is some dorky plug-in protocol

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Ugh. So, now that only pretty people can make music, you're arguing that only pretty people can run the government? I like the idea of the masks many of the antifa people wear. Along with the bias that we think pretty people are more intelligent, competent, whatever, we have: The Code for

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Heh, yeah, I agree. I'm just poking. But this goes back to the other thread re: individual intellect vs. the hive mind. Perhaps these kids _know_ that they are sacrificable, largely homogenous, cells in a large organism? I know my own tolerance to risk was lowered with my cancer diagnosis.

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Or, better yet, donate with a traceable transaction chain. We're not anonymous because we're literally anonymous. We're anonymous because we are legion. Or, as my biker buddies say: safety in numbers. On 06/05/2017 03:51 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I noticed some but not all of those organiza

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

There's no maybe about that. While my friends were counterprotesting on Sunday, I was mowing the lawn and quaffing lager like a good provincial. Just don't go tracing contributions to sci-hub ... That would worry me. On 06/05/2017 04:17 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Maybe I traced out some of t

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

ht qualify as complex. > > On 05/26/2017 12:40 PM, glen ☣ wrote: > >> [gepr] Yeah, but you're relying on the ambiguity of the concept. A system >> that is only complex for very short spans of time, or under very special >> conditions wouldn't fit with _mos

Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

+1 Having been called a "troll" for most of my adult life, I'd love to hear why Owen lobs the insult. On 06/07/2017 01:54 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Owen, > > > > I don’t understand this comment. Who’s a troll? Are you trolling, here? Is > this irony? I don’t follow. > > [...] > >

[FRIAM] And now for something completely different.

While engaged in a literature search for something entirely different, I landed on this fun paper: Consequences of removing cheap, super-strength beer and cider: a qualitative study of a UK local alcohol availability intervention https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5051338/ > Incr

Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

You seem to be asking for people other than me to respond. But I doubt anyone will try to explain a troll like me. >8^) I don't have any idea what you mean by "a kind of hen". So, I'll let that go. Stratum is a good word, but like level, it implies a direction, namely up-down ("something la

Re: [FRIAM] Peculiar pattern found in ‘random’ prime numbers : Nature News & Comment

Smells a little like Benford's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law On 06/08/2017 09:55 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: > Kinda fascinating new paper on prime numbers: > > Prime numbers near to each other tend to avoid repeating their last digits, > the mathematicians say: that is, a prime t

[FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

We quickly polluted that thread, too. But it drives home the point that an email list is _not_ a (good) collaborative production tool. Aha! I haven't heard from Cliff since my work for the PSL. He supposedly works up at PNNL. Thanks for that article. Yes, I took O

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

I think you and I on the same page. My first thought (before the concept-mapping tools) was to collaboratively develop an ontology so that we could all talk about the same things. But my guess is that would just cause even more hemming and hawing over terms. Regardless of tools, someone need

Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

On 06/09/2017 09:41 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > It seems like onions develop from the inside out, right? Heh, I don't know. Nor do I care because my analogy is not intended to be anything more than an analogy. >8^D >The outside layer is just the first inside layer grown large. I think if one

Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

Ha! I don't know if this is fun or not. But you are making me giggle. So that's good. 8^) On 06/09/2017 11:54 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > But wait a minute! Holding a side the mathematical meaning of model for a > minute, what is the difference between a model and a metaphor? I recently ma

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

And as I tried to imply in my note about "lamina" being a biased term, DLA is a schematic analog, meaning using the term "DLA" unadorned with context, leaves many variables unbound, one of which is whether it's a parallel or serial implementation. On 06/12/2017 08:36 AM, ┣glen┫ wrote: > So, the

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

Just to clarify, no, that's not at all what I did. I did not propose onion as a source and layer as a target. That completely misses my point. An onion is a thing that can be sliced up, thought about, analyzed, by various different methods. No metaphor involved. This tendency to see metapho

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

It is nice to see another person admit to their premature registration! Thanks. I brought up an onion as an example of a thing that, when analyzed with levels produces a different result than when analyzed with layers. You have to admit that slicing an onion produces different results than pr

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/12/2017 10:24 AM, Steven A Smith wrote: > I took it as a simple 'mis-registration'. I'll think about "premature" a > little more... Cf Brian Cantwell Smith in: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-mental-representation-9780198250524?cc=us&lang=en&; > I think I get your p

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

Hm. I guess I'll say it at least one more time. I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity. You're using Goebbles on me, aren't you? Here: I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity. I did NOT offer an onion as a model of complexity. I did NOT offer an onion as a model of compl

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

Yes, an onion _does_ submit to a partial order if you use polar coordinates. On 06/12/2017 10:52 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > At the risk of being dumb, I would say that when we peal an onion we get > layers; when we slice an onion, we get cross-sections; is there any way we > can get a "level" o

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

Sorry. I didn't mean anything nefarious with the "repeat a lie often enough" thing. I introduced an onion as an example of a thing, in the real world, that you can look at in terms of levels or layers. And looking at it in terms of layers produces something different (and presumably more "na

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

Right. My only point was to distinguish the two procedures for examining a thing, because one's choice of procedure can bias one's results. (obviously) With EricS' very detailed throwdown in favor of hierarchical accumulation AND Russ' chosen _target_ of urban systems, I think it's critical th

Re: [FRIAM] tools, trollers, and language

On 06/12/2017 02:03 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > What you are calling "levels" I am calling "cross sections"? Yes, a cross section would be 1 level. > And it is the partial arbitrariness of what one sees in a cross section that > makes it less valuable than a layer. Not quite. What you see i

Re: [FRIAM] IS:New Math Untangles the Mysterious Nature of Causality | WIRED WAS: Layers, not broilers

And, just in case y'all missed it in all the noise, here's ScottA's response I posted in the Graph/Network discursion: On 06/09/2017 03:14 PM, gepr ⛧ wrote: > > Higher-level causation exists (but I wish it didn’t) > http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3294 And in there is an update linkin

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

; like to do that to others. On 06/12/2017 10:39 AM, glen ☣ wrote: > Cf Brian Cantwell Smith in: > https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-mental-representation-9780198250524?cc=us&lang=en&; It's not clear to me how common the usage is. In B.C. Smith's

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

ote: >> The meaning is clear, but is this a term that is used in particular >> communities? The reason I ask is that I deal with people all that time >> that do this, and I'd like to be able to whack a book over their head, since >> they like to do that to oth

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/14/2017 03:46 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Others behaviors come to mind, like the agent that requires or expects fully > contextualized unambiguous linear arguments. This could be due to long term > memory limitations, due to a desire to teach (supervisory learning), or an > agent that

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/15/2017 06:38 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > It is a writer's job to control the reference of his signs, in so far as s/he > can. I disagree completely with the ultimate consequences of what you're saying. There is a philosophy in many branches of engineering to do exactly that: to engineer

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/15/2017 08:27 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > " It's the writer's job to balance and judge the amount of control ... ." > > So I, as a writer, have to be very slow to be aggrieved when I am not > understood. > > It's like the salesman blaming the customers for his not making the sale. I do

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

ciety–and > thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek > understanding. Note the emphasis on _listening_ rather than on speaking. >8^D On 06/15/2017 08:57 AM, glen ☣ wrote: > On 06/15/2017 08:27 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: >> " It's the writer

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/15/2017 10:19 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Tech companies usually distinguish between marketing and R&D. Marketing is > about connecting with the customer. R&D is about creating the magical device > that doesn't even need to be explained at a technical level. So what if it > apparently

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/15/2017 11:23 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > But as for consumers of some product like Shazam, I can't imagine that most > have any interest at all in how or why it works. Excellent! I keep finding nits to pick. 8^) Again, I'm not so sure. I had a difficult conversation today with Renee'.

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/15/2017 11:57 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > Shall we assume Renee' is Mrs. Glen? Yes, sorry ... another instance of me inscribing myself on the world. However, our partnership is neither condoned nor authorized by any religion or government. -- ☣ glen

Re: [FRIAM] sometimes an onion is just an onion...

On 06/15/2017 12:52 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > From my point of view, Glen Zigged, while I remained on course. Of course, > from Glen's frame of reference, *he* was on a straight course and * Zagged. > That is why iterative discussion is required for conversation? If you agree that iterat

Re: [FRIAM] Waterboarding a dead Horse in a Desert with no name.

On 06/15/2017 02:36 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > > sure... we can call it premature registration by that measure but that > undermines the utility of even having the concept of a *mis*registration as a > possibility. By your logic, any mis-registration I might make along the way > is a pre-reg

Re: [FRIAM] now it all makes sense

fAIth: The most avid believers in AI are aggressively secular – yet their language is eerily religious. Why? https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar To go along with the article back in 2013: Belief in the Singularity is Fideistic http://redfish.

Re: [FRIAM] All Your Them Are One Model To Us Learn

On 06/20/2017 11:15 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > The last thing you want is your personal assistant robot putting your > Labradoodle in the refrigerator. But what if you want to eat the other half later? -- ☣ glen FRIAM Applied Comple

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

Y'all say: In http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20170619/f46244d3/attachment-0001.pdf: > > > If our analysis is correct, then the distinction between explanation and > description takes > on an entirely new importance in science. > ... > The young man thinks, "This is

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

Just in case it needs to be stated, explicitly, I'm also interested in your deliberations. At a minimum, it would be very cool to see a reading list, things your collective feel are important to being able to hold a conversation in the domain. On 06/18/2017 09:46 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > I

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

Given your extraordinary spam handling methods, I thought I'd notify you here, Nick, that I sent the rest of my notes on the rest of your introduction off-list. For what it's worth, I think you've got a GREAT gist if you could find a way to free yourself from the obsession with circularity ...

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

What would you call people like me, who were reared Catholic, including confirmation and duties as an "altar boy", but who never believed a single word uttered in Mass, by parents, or in the official books? In fact, the only concepts I took, believed in, from Catholicism are 1) catholicism (lit

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

On 06/23/2017 12:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Many "interpretations" just put off getting to the bottom of things. Keep > the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a better > interpretation, then press Delete. How about, instead of interpretations, we think of applications, e

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

OK. I mostly agree. But at some point, there might be an unresolveable ambiguity in the kernel, at which point I would be forced to allow pluralism. That's why I allow pluaralism from the start... to avoid having to change my mind later. 8^) I think it's easier to go from many to one than i

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

On 06/23/2017 12:08 PM, Steven A Smith wrote: > Works for me, I was thinking "crypto athiest"... Naa. I don't qualify as any sort of atheist. I have gods, they're just unique gods. > Interesting that you didn't believe "a word uttered in Mass" while I, as a > young adult came to believe (or a

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

These are nice videos. Your requirement that we respond with video is difficult for me because I don't normally produce video... I could provide, say, an "in silico liver visualization". But the extra content would obscure any message, I think. But this video by other people is relevant to

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

If the forum expresses irritation, then we can take it offline. Otherwise, I will treat them like I like to be treated ... voyeurism can be a good thing. 8^) Rather than (or in addition to) using pseudo-random number generators, do something like: 1) https://api.random.org/guidelines, 2) use

Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

Regarding the toolchain: I can't help but wonder how difficult it would be to switch from Maple to Sage? If it's anything like how it used to be to use Matlab code in Octave, then it's non-trivial. But if it *were* relatively straightforward, then it might be easier to "distribute" participa

Re: [FRIAM] Trump Support

I'm inclined to call that articlet "fake news". 8^) YouGov has a good rating with 538 (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/). But I can't help but wonder about the one-sidedness of the articlet. Why only include those 2 (or 7 ... or 8, or whatever it was) questions? Where'

Re: [FRIAM] Trump Support

On 08/03/2017 01:07 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote: > Nice to have you back, Glen. Thanks! On 08/03/2017 01:19 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > People talk about `playing by the rules' like it is a good thing. But is > fulfillment of an old or obsolete social contract (get married, get a > soul-destroyin

[FRIAM] the self

So, I read this the other day: The Promise of LSD Microdoses and Other Psychedelic "Medicines" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-promise-of-lsd-microdoses-and-other-psychedelic-medicines/ and was reminded of Frank's dare to read: The Analysis of the Self http://press.uchicago.

Re: [FRIAM] the self

All you've done is pass the buck from "self" to "me". And given the hijinks Roger pulled with Swarm, self might respond to "jump" one day, but throw an error the next ... just like, say, today I can throw a baseball with my right arm. But if I break that arm, tomorrow I might not be able to th

Re: [FRIAM] the self

FWIW, B.C.Smith, that fount of wisdom, references "flex and slop" and cites Hume as inspiration for the idea. It's a tangle of reasoning that boils down (I think - this is my own nonsense, not Smith's) to the idea that there *must* be misunderstanding for communication to exist. (This is an e

Re: [FRIAM] Future of humans and artificial intelligence

I'm not sure how Asimov intended them. But the three laws is a trope that clearly shows the inadequacy of deontological ethics. Rules are fine as far as they go. But they don't go very far. We can see this even in the foundations of mathematics, the unification of physics, and polyphenism/r

Re: [FRIAM] the self

OK. This is better. But you seem to have defined "unit" or "coherence", rather than "self" ... I'm reminded of Simon's "near decomposability" in The Sciences of the Artificial. To promote a unit to a self, you're going to have to include some sort of loop, like propri- or inter-oception. And

Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

Maybe you're looking for the term "Markovian"? http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MarkovProcess.html On 08/09/2017 07:47 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > First. I had always supposed that a stochastic process was one whose value > was determined by two factors, a random factor AND it's last value. So the

Re: [FRIAM] random v stochastic v indeterminate

I think Wagner and Monod agree, actually. If I extrapolate what Jenny said Wagner said, *mutation's* randomness is a statement of ignorance, presumably about where innovation comes from in biological evolution. So, both Monod and Wagner would say innovation comes from mutation. On 08/09/2017

Re: [FRIAM] schadenfreude - a political rant

On 08/09/2017 08:58 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > It helps a little, though, I think that comedians and commentators keep > pounding on the moron theme. It clearly worked with the White House because > they started doing off-camera interviews. I actually laughed out loud at this segment: https

Re: [FRIAM] Fascinating article on how AI is driving change in SEO, categories of AI and the Law of Accelerating Returns

Well, my interpretation of Pamela's concern would have more to do with [bio]diversity than it does some form of naive extinction threat. In previous posts, I've outlined my skepticism that (complicated) open source is any less opaque to understanding than proprietary sources because the skills

Re: [FRIAM] Fascinating article on how AI is driving change in SEO, categories of AI and the Law of Accelerating Returns

On that note, I found this article interesting: A Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Tool to Fight Poverty http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/business/economy/universal-basic-income-poverty.html?_r=0 One of the interesting dynamics I've noticed is when I argue about the basic income with people wh

Re: [FRIAM] I hope this is ok...

Fantastic! I love how they (he's the icon for an entire team) actually _do_ things to exhibit absurdity, rather than merely talking about it. I was particularly fond of http://www.ourladyofperpetualexemption.com/ It's like an extension of physical comedy ... organizational comedy? Loopy se

Re: [FRIAM] Fascinating article on how AI is driving change in SEO, categories of AI and the Law of Accelerating Returns

On 06/06/2016 02:22 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote: > https://medium.com/utopia-for-realists/why-do-the-poor-make-such-poor-decisions-f05d84c44f1a > was interesting, vis a vis what happens when you just give poor people > money. Excerpt: > So in concrete terms, just how much dumber does poverty make yo

Re: [FRIAM] Fascinating article on how AI is driving change in SEO, categories of AI and the Law of Accelerating Returns

On 06/05/2016 02:22 PM, Robert Wall wrote: > This one, titled "Where do minds belong? > > (Mar > 2016)" discusses the technological roadblocks in an insightful, highly > speculative, but entertaining manner. "Those

Re: [FRIAM] Fascinating article on how AI is driving change in SEO, categories of AI and the Law of Accelerating Returns

If you meant to say that our conception of programming (as opposed to understanding of programming). Along the same lines, I just ran across this: http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/ode/overview.html "Just as the digital logic gate abstraction allows digital circuit designers to create l

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