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What people do is not well correlated with what they know. You can't reduce people to their behavior. You can reduce machines to their behavior. If you disagre

What people do is not well correlated with what they know. You can't reduce people to their behavior. You can reduce machines to their behavior. If you disagree, I would strongly suggest you review where else you might be making this incorrect assumption.

MichaelZuo 4mo ago
If you don’t assess people based on their actions… then how do you assess them? From my experience actions are easily worth thousands of times more than any other criteria.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  Attaboy you're on the right track! We're almost in agreement. I'm saying that you cannot accurately assess people at all! All you can do is guess. But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions.
  - MichaelZuo 4mo ago
    This comment doesnt make sense. How is it relevant to my question, whether you think someone else agrees with you… or not? I just don’t see a reason for anyone to give you higher credibility than other HN users.
  - Timwi 4mo ago
    > But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions. This is obviously false. Every developer has had hour-long debugging sessions to track down a mysterious behavior. Sometimes entire teams are stumped by a technical glitch. Until the bug is found, nobody knows everything about the machine.
    - sublinear 4mo ago
      Yet the bug has a chance of eventually being discovered. If someone is determined to find it, they certainly will. You are not thinking clearly here.
kakapo5672 4mo ago
You can't reduce people to their behavior ... As a first approximation, why not? Behavior is generally all we have in front of us, plus any other assorted social signals. Internal mental states are invisible, as is the personal history of the individual. We might note a man beating a kitten on the sidewalk, and believe this behavior sufficient grounds to reduce this person to the category "dick", even if we remained unaware of his high intelligence, his doctoral paper on gender-inequality, and the fact his mother hates him.

MichaelZuo 4mo ago

If you don’t assess people based on their actions… then how do you assess them? From my experience actions are easily worth thousands of times more than any other criteria.

sublinear 4mo ago
Attaboy you're on the right track! We're almost in agreement. I'm saying that you cannot accurately assess people at all! All you can do is guess. But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions.
- MichaelZuo 4mo ago
  This comment doesnt make sense. How is it relevant to my question, whether you think someone else agrees with you… or not? I just don’t see a reason for anyone to give you higher credibility than other HN users.
- Timwi 4mo ago
  > But when we assess a machine, we do know everything about it based on its actions. This is obviously false. Every developer has had hour-long debugging sessions to track down a mysterious behavior. Sometimes entire teams are stumped by a technical glitch. Until the bug is found, nobody knows everything about the machine.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    Yet the bug has a chance of eventually being discovered. If someone is determined to find it, they certainly will. You are not thinking clearly here.

kakapo5672 4mo ago

You can't reduce people to their behavior ... As a first approximation, why not? Behavior is generally all we have in front of us, plus any other assorted social signals. Internal mental states are invisible, as is the personal history of the individual. We might note a man beating a kitten on the sidewalk, and believe this behavior sufficient grounds to reduce this person to the category "dick", even if we remained unaware of his high intelligence, his doctoral paper on gender-inequality, and the fact his mother hates him.