dmreedy

24 ms·

211.
by dmreedy 8y ago
It's been out of favor since Derrida, but I think Structuralism is due for another pass in the limelight. An extreme subjectivism about reality, shaped by the stimuli you are exposed to. These external stimuli are what define your axio
212.
by dmreedy 8y ago
What is a belief but an axiom? A prior that must be assumed, as it cannot be proven within the system. I will definitely concede that the logic people use on a day-to-day basis is much fuzzier than an analytic might prefer, and that there&#
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by dmreedy 8y ago
Agreed; it seems likely that the axiom system of the typical pro-life defender[0] is closer to "It's always wrong to end an innocent life"; this requires the inclusion of a set of axioms defining innocence (and thus probably
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I want to second this one, if for nothing else than the fact that in addition to being a wealth of information about the philosophies themselves, it's also a fascinating (granted, biased) perspective about how philosophical development
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Indeed so. I'm always reminded of Charles Babbage's self-reported interactions on the subject of his Difference Engine: 'On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I agree that it's solvable. However, the process your describing, of collecting human-level performance data, requires the ability to gather all of the data relevant to the act of driving in a manner consumable by the algorithm in ques
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by dmreedy 9y ago
You missed a rather important point 0: If self-driving cars are, at their best, roughly as capable as a human driver. This is a big 'if'. The solution to not killing people is a kind of rocket science. In fact, it's probabl
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by dmreedy 9y ago
That can depend heavily on the context. There are things that are things for which 'mysterious' is basically a mathematical description: chaos, for example. Anything more complex than a few variables with simple relationships rapi
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by dmreedy 9y ago
In a world without objectivity, perception of objectivity and objectivity are indistinguishable. I was using the word as short hand for those very pillars you're referring to; hence 'religion and jingoism'.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I've been talking with my brother a lot about this recently, especially as a function of the overall decrease of 'meaning' in the world. I think it goes back even further, to the advent of postmodernism in the throes of World
221.
by dmreedy 9y ago
The loss of a source of meaning in life is a dangerous thing, especially if it isn't replaced by something else. That way lies nihilism, and, if the thesis of the article is to be believed, opiod addiction.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Even then, it still reduces to a brute-forceable game with finite, explorable states; 'just' with an extra layer of (granted, quite interesting and technically impressive) parsing. We don't know what the case is for reality.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I was prodding at what I perceived as dualism above; was curious how deep it ran. However, to your point, I'm willing to bet that our need to use heuristics and approximations has more to do with the mathematical inability to reverse-e
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Why doesn't the universe doesn't follow something that might be described as an algorithm? Why don't humans? Why are 'trends' are not cut and dry, and algorithms are? Why will grafting biological machinery to artifi
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Precisely so. You can, given enough time, brute force your way to victory in any game of perfect information. This is not the case with reality, as far as we understand it so far. Thus, from a theoretical perspective, the class of problems
226.
by dmreedy 9y ago
Unfortunately, room for growth does not guarantee ability for growth. The revolutions we see now have sprung largely from a handful of work that came to fruition ten or so years ago: a new set of tools to approximate solutions to previously
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by dmreedy 9y ago
In fact, I'd go so far to say that data is source code in the case of Machine Learning; it just goes through a kind of compilation step.
228.
by dmreedy 9y ago
I've always been a fan of Haldane's treatment of the matter: http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html
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by dmreedy 9y ago
There's an idea that passes in and out of vogue[0] that metaphor is the foundation of semantics in general. It's not been popular lately, but I get the feeling it will come back the more we bump up against the hard limits of tabul
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I'm always reminded of a quote from 1776 "It doesn't matter. I won't be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground a
231.
by dmreedy 9y ago
This is neat. Sarcasm is hard because it's a violation of the cooperative principle. I think describing it as simply incongruity is understating the difficulty of the problem (that said, good enough for 80% accuracy on the task is noth
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by dmreedy 9y ago
The trick with Maslow's Hierarchy is that it's not a serial process. Problems can happen in parallel, and different combinations of problems can happen to different kinds of people. All of society is not carried up and down the py
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Simply, no. Most of big advances in the past five years have been around Natural Language 'Parsing' of unstructured information into structured information (this is what Deep Learning is very good at, so far at least); classifyi
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by dmreedy 9y ago
It's easy to look at the raw numbers analysis and admire the invisible hand of the market guiding the economy down the middle line through an endless trail of pendulum swings. This abstraction ignores the raw human cost. These shifts
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by dmreedy 9y ago
Of course it's not solved. We don't even know how to define the problem. Speech is[1] a fundamental component of Language, which is a fundamental component of Intelligence[2]. This is addressed somewhat in the conversation around
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by dmreedy 9y ago
> Recently, I became fixated on the idea of someone using a Zune in 2017, which I found absolutely hilarious for reasons even I don't fully understand. What must it be like? Does the modern-day Zune owner feel like a gadget-toting J
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by dmreedy 9y ago
The article discusses this extensively, and is perhaps more even-handed than its title might suggest. The balance seems to be that Instagram may be a net positive for restaurants, but not for food; those things are not the same, and the aut
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by dmreedy 9y ago
I'd cast it in a less malicious light. It's not so much that we do the goal post moving to keep ourselves in the job of knowing things other people don't know, I think. The goal posts keep moving themselves. We know why a s
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by dmreedy 9y ago
While I agree the general thrust of what you're saying, I do think there is something subtly different about the AI hype cycle. It's so accessible . The core concepts are the fundamental, inextricable frame of daily experience.
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by dmreedy 9y ago
There are a number of books, throughout history, on either side of the conversation. I would not call the issue settled by any measure. It's hard to settle any issue when it comes to tricky, sneaky, intangible things like qualia, and s

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