ewjordan

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by ewjordan 16y ago
I couldn't live without Tree Style Tabs, which is one of the main reasons I haven't switched to Chrome either. I'm in exactly the same situation - I literally cannot stand to use a browser without that extension anymore, especially on a w
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Abso-f@#$ing-lutely. If there's zero probability that someone's going to commit a crime again, then any sentence that they receive is purely punitive, and it's there for only two reasons, 1) to satisfy our emotional need to punish someone t
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by ewjordan 16y ago
I'll respond out of order: But a child rapist has no major impact on economic productivity, so... yeah, I'm starting to see the problem with this mercenary approach to sentencing. This is almost trivial to account for, though, as long as
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by ewjordan 16y ago
This is actually a bit more interesting than merely providing judges with the costs. FTFA: The concept is simple: fill in an offender’s conviction code, criminal history and other background, and the program spits out a range of recommend
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by ewjordan 16y ago
You're spot on - I have trouble believing that they're really going to put in all the effort to build an entire OS when they could achieve exactly the same end result by merely finishing their freaking Android app . Thus far, Facebook hasn
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Based on the limited set of reactions I've seen so far (for instance, http://www.autismweb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23104 )? No. This won't change a damn thing. When you're that committed to a cause, every scientific result that
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Sure, it's murder. But I suspect most people would, on occasion, find justification to murder in order to save lives (or even just to save "more important" lives - wars are fought all the time on the theory that the lives of a country's ci
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by ewjordan 16y ago
* If the shark eats the baby it will still be hungry(or get hungry again sooner) old crusty scientist guy is a much larger meal.* We'll assume for the purposes of this thought experiment that the shark just wants a nibble - he'll be satisfi
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by ewjordan 16y ago
The doctor has already used up a lot of his potential. But the baby has almost no potential. Well, that's not entirely clear... Let me be more specific: the baby has some potential, but since it's too young, we don't know where on the Be
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Here's one I've always liked, along the same lines, that tends to make even the most committed utilitarians pause: You need to build a driveway up to your new house, and there are two possible routes, each one with a single maple tree in th
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by ewjordan 16y ago
I've often thought that it would be interesting to offer customers an option to commit to their own price, where they may be called on (say) a month in the future to pay that price or less, with the understanding that every person that purc
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by ewjordan 16y ago
ewjordan's Law of Irony : in any Internet discussion of sufficient length where the word "irony" is used, someone will call out the poster for using it incorrectly. This is true whether or not the original usage was proper or not, and wit
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by ewjordan 16y ago
But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. Indeed - it would be a shame for them to start over from scratch and end up coming
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by ewjordan 16y ago
In my experience, at least (I'm not the grandparent poster), the projects that you get burned on the worst are always the flat-quote projects. Get stuck with one or two really bad ones, and you'll really wish you'd stuck to hourly, even if
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The Moral of the Kurzweil v. Myers Spat(ewjordan.blogspot.com)
8 points by ewjordan 16y ago|2 comments
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Whether or not there's any good reason to have this policy, the real problem is that it's utterly unclear when you're making an app free that you'll never be able to undo that without submitting an entirely new app. If that's the policy, th
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Ah, that's interesting, I never realized the rank was what determined the amount of "prediction" that a field does. That's something that should have been obvious on degrees-of-freedom considerations, but I never thought about it in that w
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by ewjordan 16y ago
The Sun, as it is right now, won't have its gravity affect Earth for another 8+ minutes, and the gravity that the Earth feels right now pulling it towards the Sun is actually pulling it towards where the Sun was 8+ minutes ago! (Weird, isn
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by ewjordan 16y ago
IMO the main reason this overcomplication tends to happen is that many of the Monads for Idiots guides are written by people just out of the period where they struggled with the concept, and they mistakenly think that the entire thought p
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by ewjordan 16y ago
You're absolutely right - looking at that quote (and looking through the original one that Myers responded to), he's overstated what we can conclude based on DNA length by a good amount (though Myers argument doesn't disprove the upper boun
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Rather than quibble over what "intelligence algorithms" mean I am going to pretend you said "human brains or things very similar to such". I think this pretty well illuminates the source of our "disagreement" (and resolves it), apart from
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by ewjordan 16y ago
So, I don't think protein folding adds much complexity to the result; it's more like a general purpose programming language than a set of specific library functions. This is dead on. The reason that library functions enable great code com
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Yes, "fold proteins" is a member of a distinguished class of algorithms that DNA is exceptionally well suited to handle. Similarly, "simulate shallow wave dynamics" is in the class of algorithms that a water tank is pretty near optimal fo
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Sigh...where's Eliezer when we need him? :) It is just there, in that last step, that Kurzweil invokes a fallacy. In general, if you have two different kinds of machines, and you want to program each to compute the same result -- upper bou
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Perhaps the disconnect here is that Kurzweil, operating from an information theory perspective, is neglecting the possibility that the biological environment in which a brain grows effectively adds a ton of "data" to the system Please rea
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by ewjordan 16y ago
That is not what Meyers meant. [We meander midstream into a heated discussion between Kurzweil and PZ Myers...] Kurzweil: ...able to live...FOREVER! Kurzweil: ... Kurzweil: ...? Myers: FFS, Kurzweil, you dimwit, we're the only two people
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by ewjordan 16y ago
Given the idea that consciousness is related to complex quantum interactions at the molecular level Yes, that's an idea; it just so happens to be (at least outside the world of philosophy, where it's still easy to find people that don't b
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by ewjordan 16y ago
The Emperor's New Mind was (IMO) abysmal, and I was really embarrassed to see someone with such indisputable genius as Penrose put out such drivel. You're very right, the strongest evidence for his theory there is that an eminent physici
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by ewjordan 16y ago
We're arguing different things. You're talking about the information content required to reproduce a particular brain, which I agree, has a massive Kolmogorov complexity (even if we decide, as we might want to, to factor out many equivalen
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by ewjordan 16y ago
The question on the table, I think, is whether a brain that's pretty darn similar to a working one will still work or not - does it just have to have similar statistical properties, or are the explicit details of the connections important,

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