Posts
Comments
"Agreed. I'll leave the original main comment, but after this, creationism (called ID or otherwise) is cause for comment removal."
I never argued for ID or creationism (the closest I have come is arguing for a more complete understanding of the topic before bashing it), I have been merely pointing out that Evolution has some serious holes. If you believe it so blindly that you can't see the holes then you haven't done your homework. If Darwin was alive today many speculate he would have never bothered to formulate evolution since the unfortunate discovery that cells are more the blobs of protoplasm. I am actually arguing for a re-working of the entire idea of a naturalistic explanation of the world.
But whatever, I give up... you guys win, your bonehead comments have won... I need not waste more time here...
En effet la règle ignorante ici (how's your french?)
...strams fo tol a nekat evah tsum taht hctac ruoy no stargnoC .ekatsim a edam I ,tniop dooG
...uoy htiw dehsinif ma I kniht I neht tog ev'uoy tseb eht si taht fi oS
Did you read what you wrote here?
"An interesting collection of molecules occupied a certain tide pool 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago, interesting because the molecule collection built copies of itself out of surrounding molecules, and the resulting molecule collections also replicated while accumulating beneficial mutations. Those molecule collections satisfied a high-level functional criterion called "genetic fitness", and it happened by pure chance."
So essentially ignoring the rest of your post because it just goes into more "detail" we have some molecules + lots of magic=the world as we know it. Then followed by a big please accept my straw-man argument therefore the Singularity Summit is necessary. Does that about sum it up?
Just an aside: Have you ever considered that naturalistic explanations cannot explain DNA, or the Cambrian explosion. Have you ever looked at chemistry, quantum mechanics,... and even tried to figure out how that could work? What about considering the early earth and the available chemicals which are essentially what comes out of a volcano? If you have then I challenge you to explain how through naturalistic processes you can form even the simplest bacteria (which by the way has ~160 kilobases).
"No. You are arrogant, ill informed and condescending. Basically, a troll."
Ok... fine, I am arrogant but thats because I am smarter then almost everyone here...(and I have the IQ, accomplishments... to prove it) I am condescending because most of you are just hobbiest trying to brown-nose your way into EY's good graces.
Ill informed?
Hmmmm..... coming from people who can't even identify a re-invention of the wheel when they see it or understand the opposition to make a cogent argument... fine... I take that as a compliment.
Trust me I am not a troll, just because I say things which you guys don't like doesn't make me a troll. If you want to find good examples of real trolls go to google groups...
Cheers
Humor me: I want to take an informal poll:
Questions (just yes or no) 1.) How many of you are in science fields? (by that I mean actually doing research, publishing papers etc.)
2.) How many of you have ever built an AI video game or other?
3.) How many of you have worked on or with or designed automated reasoning and or theorem proving software or algorithms?
4.) How many of you is this just a hobby?
I think those will do for now. (I am just curious from reading the post and comments which apparently someone didn't like my observation in my other comment which was valid)
I think you're re-inventing the wheel here.
"This towards the goal of creating "rationality augmentation" software. In the short term, my suspicion is that such software would look like a group of existing tools glued together with human practices."
Look at current work in AI, automated reasoning systems, and automated theorem proving.
"I guess you didn't read the wikipedia article I linked to"
If your knowledge of this comes from Wikipedia no wonder your clueless... read the links I posted: "Intelligent Design adherents believe only that the complexity of the natural world could not have occurred by chance. Some intelligent entity must have created the complexity, they reason, but that "designer" could in theory be anything or anyone."
As I said not necessarily the Christian God.
"Creationism is focused on defending a literal reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the Biblical God a few thousand years ago. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text. Instead, intelligent design theory is an effort to empirically detect whether the "apparent design" in nature observed by biologists is genuine design (the product of an organizing intelligence) or is simply the product of chance and mechanical natural laws. This effort to detect design in nature is being adopted by a growing number of biologists, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science at American colleges and universities. Scholars who adopt a design approach include biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University, microbiologist Scott Minnich at the University of Idaho, and mathematician William Dembski at Baylor University. (3)"
From the discovery institute... again as I said the two are different...
http://www.intelligentdesign.org/faq.php
Do your homework...
Any further commentary please direct to the email address I failed to provide...
Wow, you guys truly are useless...
Apparently there is to much information that is above you head since you guys follow EY who can't do the math for QM.
"Which is a serious mistake: there is too much gibberish in the world to learn it all before turning down."
So thats why you guys can't do technical work, and don't understand advanced math... I get it... its above you... cool...
Well whatever I am finished... I don't care what you do... If average people like ones here want to look foolish great what do I care...
So have fun winning your popularity contest to get a good boy from EY...
Cheers
Wrong....
http://www.discovery.org/a/1329
http://www.slate.com/id/2118388/
Again the profound ignorance you guys have of the ideas you disagree with comes out. Its a common mistake to say they are the same with different terms look at the actual view points and you find they are not.
Educate yourself...
Creationism: based on the Bible and the Christian God
Intelligent Design: does not necessitate the Christian God and centers around the idea of irreducible complexity
Seriously I don't agree with it but at least before I go off half-cocked I actually bother to educate myself.
"decision to have creationist Michael Behe interviewed"
Errr.... wrong...
Behe is not a creationist, he actually takes the view of intelligent design which is different (don't believe me look it up). The stereo type you are reacting to hasn't been true in "christian science" community for years.
Think whatever you want about Behe but at least do him the courtesy of not misrepresenting his views so you can go on an anti-religious rant, because and I am just being blunt (its a character flaw some would say) it just sounds foolish.
I just tried the one for AI and I think its not quite accurate. One of the biggest issues is that I think some of the terms need to be precisely defined and they are not. The other issue I found was that the analysis of my beliefs was not completely accurate because it did not take into account all the answers properly.
Its an interesting idea but needs work.
I look forward to it. (though I doubt I will ever see it considering how long you've been saying you were going to make an FAI and how little progress you have actually made) But maybe your pulling a Wolfram and going to work alone for 10 years and dazzle everyone with your theory.
"The Power of Intelligence"
Derivative drivel...
The post shows the exact same lack of familiarity with neuroscience as the comment I responded to. Examine closely how a single neuron functions and the operations that it can perform. Examine closely the ability of savants (things like memory, counting in primes, calender math...) and after a few years of reading the current neuroscience research comeback and we might have something to discuss.
Wow what hubris the "brain is inadequate spaghetti code". Tell me have you ever actually studied neuroscience? Where do you think modern science came from? This inadequate spaghetti code has given us the computer, modern physics and plenty of other things. For being inadequate spaghetti code (this is really a misnomer because we don't actually understand the brain well enough to make that judgement) it does pretty well.
If the brain is as bad as you make it out to be then I challenge you to make a better one. In fact I challenge you to make a computer capable of as many operations as the brain running on as little power as the brain does. If you can't do better then you are no better then the people who go around bashing General Relativity without being able to propose something better.
I have to say I think this post would be better if it were turned into an annotated bibliography for rationality and I guess considering the post focusing on decision theory.
This seems to me a bit maudlin at times in the overall tone of the work. I guess my question would be what is point of this? Are you trying to bash anti-reductionist arguments, or anti-science or some mix of the two, or am I missing the point all together?
Does this greater detail mean that we will see some math and some worked out problems? Are these results ever going to be published in a journal, or anywhere that is peer-reviewed?
The university would be Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Program (an esoteric area of CS)
As for the other parts I did some work in computer hardware specifically graphics hardware design, body armor design (bullet proof vests) etc. The body armor got to prototyping but was not marketable for a variety reasons to dull to go into. I am currently starting a video game company.
I am sorry I am going to take a shortcut here and respond to a couple posts along with yours. So fine I partially insert my foot in my mouth... but the issue I think here is that the papers we need to be talking about are math papers right? Anyone can publish non-technical ideas as long as they are well reasoned, but the art of science is the technical mastery.
As for Eliezer's comment concerning the irrelevance of Flare being a pre 2003 EY work I have to disagree. When you have no formal academic credentials and you are trying to make your mark in a technical field such as decision theory anything technical that you have done or attempted counts.
You essentially are building your credentials via work that you have done. I am speaking from experience since I didn't complete college I went the business route. But I can also say that I did a lot of technical work so I built my credentials in the field by doing novel technical things.
I am trying to help here coming from a similar position and wanting a PhD etc. having various technical achievements as my prior work made all the difference in getting in to a PhD program without a B.S. or M.S. It also makes all the difference in being taken seriously by the scientific community.
Which circles back to my original point which is an vague outline is not enough to show you really have a theory much less a revolutionary one. Sadly asking to be taken seriously is just not enough, you have to prove that you meet the bar of admission (decision theory is going to be math).
If someone can show me some technical math work EY has done that would be great, but as of now I have very little confidence that he has a real theory (if someone can I will drop the issue.) Yes I am aware of the Bayesian Theory paper but this lets face it is fairly basic and is far from showing that EY has the ability to revolutionize decision theory.
"Anyone who declines to talk about interesting material because it's in a blog post, or for that matter, a poem scrawled in blood on toilet paper, is not taking Science seriously. Why should I expect them to have anything important to say if I go to the further trouble of publishing a paper?"
What?
Vladimir is right not paying attention to blog entry with no published work is a great way to avoid crackpots. You have this all backwards you speak as if you have all these credentials so everyone should just take you seriously. In reality what credentials do you have? You built all this expectation for this grand theory and this vague outline is the best you can do? Where is the math? Where is the theory?
I think anyone in academia would be inclined to ask the same question of you why should they take some vague blog entry seriously when the writer controls the comments and can't be bothered to submit his work for peer-review? You talk about wanting to write a PhD thesis this won't help get you there. In fact this vague outline should do nothing but cast doubt in everyones mind as to whether you have a theory or not.
I have been following this TDT issue for a while and I for one would like to see some math and some worked out problems. Otherwise I would be inclined to call your bluff.
Eliezer have you ever published a paper in a peer-review journal? The way you talk about it says naive amateur. There is huge value especially for you since you don't have a PhD or any successful companies or any of the other typical things that people who go the non-academic route tend to have.
Let's face the music here, your one practical AI project that I am aware of Flare failed, and most of your writing has never been subjected to the rigor that all science should be subjected to. It seems to me if you want to do what you claim you need to start publishing.