upquark

83 ms·

91.
by upquark 14y ago
If someone is running our universe as a simulation they still don't necessarily know of our existence. I have a hard time figuring out how you'd detect intelligent life or its byproducts in your simulation. Even if you do detect something a
92.
by upquark 14y ago
I think we need more ridicule of this type of stuff, not less. Also, I'm all for public ridicule of western kooks and BS-ers in government, science, healthcare. I disagree this is why we don't get along, humor can be a powerful and positiv
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Iran’s New Fake Inventions: Time Machine, ‘Islamic Google Earth’(wired.com)
15 points by upquark 14y ago|8 comments
94.
by upquark 14y ago
As far as science is concerned, there's nothing beyond being able to objectively model a phenomenon and make useful predictions about it. If I can fully model the set of brain processes that humans typically call "love", and if I can make u
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by upquark 14y ago
A. Plenty of people are suggesting precisely that. B. I was responding to the parent comment about empirically verified dog's-sixth-sense phenomena, and what I think about those.
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by upquark 14y ago
When did I say I want to be explaining what love is? I said it's testable in theory, and you don't seem to be arguing against that.
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by upquark 14y ago
If I create a device that predicts with 99% accuracy whether a test subject loves their mother (by looking at the subject's brain), without ever answering any of your questions about consciousness, would you retract the above statement?
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by upquark 14y ago
My issue with this sort of unexplained phenomena is that people are willing to jump to ridiculous conclusions that invalidate or at least poke a hole through physics/chemistry/biology/all the other layers of scientific knowledge, vs trying
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by upquark 14y ago
>I could love my mother or I could not love my mother. Can you test that? In theory, yes. What happens inside your brain isn't untestable or sacred, we're just not there yet technologically (but we'll get there).
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by upquark 14y ago
> We've got it made. That's one way to look at it. Another way is to ask yourself whether we could've been much farther ahead, as a civilization and a species, in terms of quality of life, human rights, technology and science, and so on
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by upquark 14y ago
> But in what they do, they seem push humanity forward, to give a reason, a hope. I'd argue that the surviving religions are more like the strongest viruses of the mind, not really the most useful mutations for society. You could look a
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by upquark 14y ago
Actually math and stats applications are very common, developers could really benefit from knowing more math, recognizing known problems and applying known solutions. People just do things the dumb way more often than not, and then spend mo
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by upquark 14y ago
With the disclaimer that I've watched the documentary and haven't read the book, the reasoning seemed faulty and unsound to me. It was definitely too deterministic and did not really go into non-environmental factors. For example, it boiled
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by upquark 14y ago
I'm not sure it's gotten worse in every aspect, particularly in terms of acceptance of foreign ethnicities and races. People do have an unrealistic model of the real world, and that model is being currently skewed by mass media, etc, but pr
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by upquark 14y ago
I'm not a neuroscientist and may be missing something, but on the surface this seems like a pretty poor argument: citing feasibility as a justification for not going with the (overwhelmingly) simpler organisms first, and going after humans
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by upquark 14y ago
Excellent work, thank you for sharing.
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by upquark 14y ago
> And by the way if you work hard 'enough', your dreams will come true anywhere! Why do people keep repeating this? What is the empirical evidence for this statement outside of some anecdotes? I have seen so many counter-examples in my
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by upquark 14y ago
Out of curiosity, why would you take that as an axiom? Do human minds possess some qualities above physical reality? Are they unknowable in principle? If you answer yes, how did you arrive to that answer? Isn't there a physical experiment o
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by upquark 14y ago
This is factually incorrect.
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by upquark 14y ago
Fascinating discussion. A couple of thoughts: 1. I was wondering if we could apply an anthropic type of argument here? We are having this argument at this time and place because we predate the colonization by self-replicating bots / other e
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by upquark 14y ago
Not disagreeing with your second paragraph, but just wanted to point out that Machine Learning has matured way beyond the "unprincipled hacks" phase, and as was correctly pointed out above, can be seen as a direction in applied statistics.
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by upquark 14y ago
The rest of your personality traits that allow you to accomplish great things (diligence, perseverance, focus, empathy, etc), as well as external factors such as being born at the right place and the right time, are also arguably a genetic