jnicholasp

12 ms·

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by jnicholasp 10y ago
We could quibble about the meaning of "irrational", but I do agree that markets can be mistaken for longer than most people can financially back their conviction that it's mistaken. In the case of Tesla vs Ford, there is prob
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
The sentiment in general is reasonable to me: that humans are generally more effective and more productive when they have something to do and work on, even when they're not getting anywhere with their main project(s). It's not at
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
> Note that having a job seems necessary though. I'm not sure that's true. It would be interesting to see some numbers. My naive impression is that there are at least two things needed to make intellectual history: genius, and
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
> The market could be wrong , Tesla could fail to achieve their vision, Ford and other existing big companies could somehow turn themselves into organizations that aggressively pursue ambitious new visions.. but the market is bettin
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I don't know what this is meant to mean.
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Ford doesn't have much room to grow because they are a mature company in a mature field. Tesla is creating new fields. Ford doesn't know how to create new fields, therefore they're stuck making small improvements to existing
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Being innovative at small details of existing concepts isn't likely to produce huge gains in stock value, as opposed to being innovative at entire categories of new industry- and infrastructure-disrupting products. Ford does the former
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
The language is a little ambiguous. It seems it's meant to suggest that having a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3 inches is allowed, but that is not actually said, only implied by contrast to the explicit statement that fo
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
> same with a knife Any knife? You can't carry a pocket knife in the UK? That's ridiculous. Knives were nearly the first tool proto-man ever made, and they're still the most useful general purpose tool you can have.
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
My fault: I read your comment in the context of the two comments directly above it visually, which were talking about differences of culture , rather than in the context of the comment you were directly replying to, which was talking about
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I'm interested in and sympathetic to the vision I believe you're trying to express - that we have powerful new opportunities with computers/software to develop and express ideas in more powerful, more intuitive ways, and that
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Justify your second claim, please. I am no expert, but that seems very unlikely.
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
It's much more about giving up the attempt to hack people. The last three sentences of the article sum it up well: Stop trying to impress people or "win" the conversation. It's really much simpler than that. Just listen
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
> I would argue, however, that very few of the issues we are facing at the moment stem from lack of understanding. My 11 year old nephew sprained his ankle a few weeks ago playing basketball, badly enough that he started walking in an od
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I'm not saying that cooperative behavior requires intelligence. I'm saying that cooperative behavior is a reasonable and effective choice for creatures intellectually capable of choosing between behavioral strategies, no matter wh
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Bridges require foundations, pier columns, truss cables, and roadways in order to function. Each is necessary to the function of the whole; none has priority, and it doesn't make sense to single out any one of them as the thing that al
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I'm not conflating IQ with values, I'm arguing that as average IQ goes up, the percentage of the population who will recognize that certain problems of non-immediate import will inevitably become immediate, personal problems, will
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I'm not arguing here that we are. I'm arguing that it is conceivable that intelligent creatures could exist that were.
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation ev
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I don't recall that being in the books, though maybe it was in the movie or radio show or something. But "How many roads must a man walk down?" is the 'Question' that the pan-dimensional mice who commissioned the Ea
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Competition is not the only response to being one entity among many, and it is not even necessarily the most reasonable response. Cooperation is also possible, and it is one of the necessary elements in every human organization, from the fa
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
We already know that thermodynamics and evolutionary pressures can allow for intelligent beings with a population average IQ of 100 (on the arbitrary scale we've devised for ourselves) to exist, since we humans do exist. I'm sugge
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I feel like your imaginative capacity could stand to be exercised more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways in which intelligent entities could meaningfully differ from us, and which would lead to different political circumstances
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
I agree with your point, too, although I'm skeptical we can do much more than, maybe, polish the brass while the ship founders. Still, shiny brass (slightly nicer surroundings) is better than not. I do think we need radical reforms if
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Our voting system is itself flawed, and leads to the entrenchment of power in two parties, which are private organizations built for the purpose of consolidating political power. As long as we have First Past the Post voting [0], we will be
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Have you considered, "How many roads must a man walk down?"? Seriously, though, it's not unthinkable to me that the simulation argument is right, and that one of the reasons why simulations might be created is to explore ques
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Your point is valid. It's not clear to me that my claim is true, either. I made it in part because I wondered whether it were true, and I subscribe to the idea that the best way to find out if something is true is not to ask whether it
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
The seller does not pay for the buyer to receive their agent's service, except in accounting terms. The commission to the agents is (should be; if you as the seller aren't thinking of it that way, you're misconceiving the sit
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by jnicholasp 10y ago
Tangential quibble: For anything that could be called "human-style" learning, which presumably requires abstract intelligence and cultural transmission, we're probably looking at something that has existed only during the per

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