4 ms·

Why do people think this guy is some sort of techno philosophical king? Yeah, he can code Python, but this is laughable ...

jamesrom 4y ago
What's with these "throwaway" accounts saying stuff is "laughable" without an opinion to back it up? Can you explain what is laughable here?
- mrks_hy 4y ago
  Not OP, but the premise is just too naive. He's coming from a compsci deep learning angle and thus arrives at a completely flawed model for how neurons interact and "compute". Not that we have a model that even explains this theoretically yet, but it makes no real sense to talk of Brain FLOPs in the way he does. It's borderline cringeworthy that this is upvoted so high.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    The dismissal is cringeworthy, the human cortex only consumes 0.17 watts https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.057927v1.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.057927v1.... Which put a very low upper limit to the number of simultaneous neurons that can be activated. Considering it as FLOPs or not is irrelevant to this fundamental limitation and that is the point you are all ridiculously missing
- d_tr 4y ago
  The amount of complexity casually thrown away. The premises and the conclusions. The fact that this is on the front page.
- throwaway4good 4y ago
  That we are discussing it; the only reason this blurp is here on top of hn is the author and his cult following.
stephc_int13 4y ago
There is this weird idea that human intelligence would be somewhat general enough that if someone exhibit exceptional talent in some fields, his insight about other, loosely connected fields, are valuable. Elon Musk is an other good example, the guy is super smart but also super dumb about a few things, and this is entirely normal and compatible. We should never look for a messiah.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  Anyone can become a polymath with training and hard work, leonardo da vincy being the best example.
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    Absolutely, with training and hard work. But there is this strange belief that if someone is extremely skilled in a field, his genius can be applied with little efforts and training elsewhere. You can be a Chess champion and an excellent Chef, but you this is completely unrelated, except maybe for the discipline. Same with Philosophy and Theoretical Physics, or almost anything. You can even be a World class Quake player and be mediocre or barely average at CS.
    - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
      I half-disagree. Yes there are skills that do not or poorly translate from one field to another. E.g. reaction time in a FPS video game might or might not help reaction time in playing tennis IRL and will probably not help you cook better meals. Although some kinds of brain stimulation (including video games) have a moderate positive effect on a wide range of things, but as said the effect is moderate. As for tennis reaction time, the effect might be strong but not necessarily. However there is one skill or set of skills that do translate over almost all cognitive tasks that involve reasoning/language/understanding/science. I am talking about training in rationality, critical thinking, epistemology and debiasing against brain bugs such as cognitive biases and logical fallacies. This training will help significantly to increase the logical validity (structure) of arguments and to better quantify or evaluate the validity and strength of premises. However this is only half of the equation since being able to evaluate or form logical structures do not allow to verify alone the truthfulness of premises because they are external knolwedge you can't infer from nothing so yeah erudition is the other half and sometimes logic alone with limited knowledge can yield some interesting results and a rationally trained mind can go much further than a person who just has erudition but yeah for a complex topic, you generally need both to have potent explanative power and tentatively exhaustive exloration of the mental search space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

jamesrom 4y ago

What's with these "throwaway" accounts saying stuff is "laughable" without an opinion to back it up? Can you explain what is laughable here?

mrks_hy 4y ago
Not OP, but the premise is just too naive. He's coming from a compsci deep learning angle and thus arrives at a completely flawed model for how neurons interact and "compute". Not that we have a model that even explains this theoretically yet, but it makes no real sense to talk of Brain FLOPs in the way he does. It's borderline cringeworthy that this is upvoted so high.
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago
  The dismissal is cringeworthy, the human cortex only consumes 0.17 watts https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.057927v1.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.057927v1.... Which put a very low upper limit to the number of simultaneous neurons that can be activated. Considering it as FLOPs or not is irrelevant to this fundamental limitation and that is the point you are all ridiculously missing
d_tr 4y ago
The amount of complexity casually thrown away. The premises and the conclusions. The fact that this is on the front page.
throwaway4good 4y ago
That we are discussing it; the only reason this blurp is here on top of hn is the author and his cult following.

stephc_int13 4y ago

There is this weird idea that human intelligence would be somewhat general enough that if someone exhibit exceptional talent in some fields, his insight about other, loosely connected fields, are valuable. Elon Musk is an other good example, the guy is super smart but also super dumb about a few things, and this is entirely normal and compatible. We should never look for a messiah.

SemanticStrengh 4y ago
Anyone can become a polymath with training and hard work, leonardo da vincy being the best example.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Absolutely, with training and hard work. But there is this strange belief that if someone is extremely skilled in a field, his genius can be applied with little efforts and training elsewhere. You can be a Chess champion and an excellent Chef, but you this is completely unrelated, except maybe for the discipline. Same with Philosophy and Theoretical Physics, or almost anything. You can even be a World class Quake player and be mediocre or barely average at CS.
  - SemanticStrengh 4y ago
    I half-disagree. Yes there are skills that do not or poorly translate from one field to another. E.g. reaction time in a FPS video game might or might not help reaction time in playing tennis IRL and will probably not help you cook better meals. Although some kinds of brain stimulation (including video games) have a moderate positive effect on a wide range of things, but as said the effect is moderate. As for tennis reaction time, the effect might be strong but not necessarily. However there is one skill or set of skills that do translate over almost all cognitive tasks that involve reasoning/language/understanding/science. I am talking about training in rationality, critical thinking, epistemology and debiasing against brain bugs such as cognitive biases and logical fallacies. This training will help significantly to increase the logical validity (structure) of arguments and to better quantify or evaluate the validity and strength of premises. However this is only half of the equation since being able to evaluate or form logical structures do not allow to verify alone the truthfulness of premises because they are external knolwedge you can't infer from nothing so yeah erudition is the other half and sometimes logic alone with limited knowledge can yield some interesting results and a rationally trained mind can go much further than a person who just has erudition but yeah for a complex topic, you generally need both to have potent explanative power and tentatively exhaustive exloration of the mental search space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases