An End to Pornography, Sophistry, and Panty Raids: on Epstein's Edge.org (2019)
wired.com
wired.com
What's not fine is that you editorialized the title. The phrase "Epstein's Edge.org" appears nowhere in OP's title or even the article body. That's against the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. In this case you edited it to certainly make it more linkbaity, and arguably more misleading as well. We take submission privileges away from accounts that do that.
We also, and especially, take submission privileges away from accounts that are using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's also against the HN guidelines, because it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. You've been doing that a lot lately. If you'd please stop, we'd appreciate it.
Since class divides are off the table, this leads writers who work for the system with nothing to talk about but 1960s-era civil rights issues related to gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. To do this they have to avoid discussing the many successes of the civil rights movements, and especially the fact that many 'members of oppressed communities' work hand in glove with corrupt greedy elites to further their agendas. Case in point: this article makes no mention of Epstein collaborator and facilitator Ghislane Maxwell.
Another defining feature of US corporate media these days is a deep reluctance to discuss foreign policy and imperial agendas - after all, why was Epstein so eager to make contacts with the upper tiers of business and government power, and introduce them to trafficked young women that he controlled? There's a lot of evidence that he (and Maxwell) were part of an Israeli-affiliated spy operation that was perhaps collecting blackmail material on, or just getting inside information from, the people that Epstein brought into his circle.
Writing about those subjects, though - that would result in excommunication and the end of one's corporate media career.
In fact, we saw that alignment starting to happen during Occupy Wall Street in 2011, with progressives in the same camp as libertarians and the pro-labor right. If the country enters another economic downturn, it'd create the conditions for that to happen again. It'd be interesting to see how that would play out. There's a huge potential for change if people can tune out the outrage machine.
And corporate media neutralized that movement, by selectively amplifying the loopiest weirdos to discredit the whole. Media coverage of Occupy Wall Street was the first time I ever heard of the "progressive stack", which the media explained, meant the illiberal ranking of speaker order by race and gender. This was surely poison to the American middle class who might have otherwise resonated with the discontent behind Occupy Wallstreet.
I expect that if another Occupy-like movement happens again, the media will run the same playbook: Amplify the fringe to alienate the whole.
> In hindsight, to reprise this theory in 2016 was laughable, especially given some, let’s call them, changes in computing in the past four decades. The internet long ago turned a computer from a four-walled “room” to an infinite set of portals which lead to billions of biological and language-using minds, with which our computers work in continuous and limitless collaboration.
Searle's Chinese Room argument has never made any sense to me, but this makes even less sense. How did the internet change anything regarding that argument?
The Chinese room argument has no merit whatsoever, and should be forgotten. Millions of better things have been said on the subject. But Searle, being famous, gets the mindshare.
I have a different take on the argument. I believe it was widely misunderstood to be an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence, when it was actually merely an argument that there is a logical difference between symbol manipulation and sentient understanding. Searle contributed to the misunderstanding by terming the position he was arguing against "Strong AI". He then argued that "Strong AI" was not possible on the basis of his argument. However, "Strong AI" has a different meaning to many people so that the "Strong AI" which Searle was trying to refute was not the same as the "Strong AI" that most people have in mind when they hear the term.
For example, most people would probably say that a computer which could converse, write poems, compose novels, author novel scientific papers, etc. in perfect Mandarin, indistinguishable from a highly educated, human, fluent speaker of Mandarin, would be by definition a Strong AI. But Searle never refuted, or tried to refute, the idea that a computer could accomplish all of that, so he was not arguing against the position that most people would take to be "Strong AI". His point was to argue that having the qualia of conscious understanding is logically different than being able to accomplish the symbol manipulation required to achieve the tasks above.
ARGUMENT
1. Symbol manipulation is not the same as conscious understanding.
2. The brain can perform the equivalent of symbol manipulation via neuronal interactions.
3. ?
Conclusion: The brain does not have conscious understanding.
Depending on how you fill in (3), you can get two possible conclusions:
3a. The brain does nothing other than the equivalent of symbol manipulation described in (2).
With (3a), the conclusion above does follow. But, as an alternative:
3b. In addition to being able to perform the equivalent of symbol manipulation via neuronal interactions as described in (2), the brain has the ability to instantiate conscious understanding (perhaps this is done by some special kind of neuronal interactions or perhaps some other way).
With (3b), the conclusion above does not follow.
And since we know that the conclusion is false, we should therefore also consider (3a) to be false.
It is true that the mysterious "ability" that the brain has is not explained by (3b). Searle's view is thus more palatable for people who are okay with the position that we do not currently have a satisfactory explanation for qualia. However, it should be noted that (3b) is not necessarily an endorsement of the existence of an immaterial "soul substance" or anything of the sort as it is compatible with physicalist theories such as integrated information theory (in which what neurons are doing is more than just symbol manipulation).
I don't know that it is, but Searle doesn't know that it isn't. I would think it was the question we were trying to prove.
The question of whether the brain does symbol manipulation or not seems irrelevant. We know it doesn't have the same mechanism as either expert systems or neural networks. That seems trivial and not worth thinking about.
This is what the Chinese Room argument is trying to answer. In the room, there is a human, and the human is performing symbol manipulation according to the rules listed in various books. However, (1) the human has conscious understanding of various topics, but Chinese is not one of them, and yet (2) the outsider is able to send and receive messages in / out of the room in Chinese, indistinguishable from communicating with someone who does understand Chinese. This shows that an entity performing symbol manipulation which results in a Chinese conversation is not the same as that entity understanding a Chinese conversation. To say otherwise would require that the conjunction of 1 and 2 is not possible, but it is clearly possible (or at least this is clear to most people).
There are various replies which address the argument coherently.
The illusionism theory of consciousness denies that the conjunction of 1 and 2 is possible because 1 on its own is not possible. That is, the human in room does not have conscious understanding because no one has conscious understanding of anything (since consciousness does not exist). This theory has not widely caught on because most people think it is just too obvious that conscious experience does exist.
Another reply is that the conjunction of 1 and 2 is not possible because as soon as the human executes enough of the symbolic manipulation rules, they do in fact come to understand Chinese. The trouble with this reply is that it runs up against the strong concrete experience that we have which shows this is not remotely how gaining an understanding of something works.
A few other remarks:
(1) The argument does not show, and is not intended to show, that building a conscious machine is impossible. Searle explicitly thought, and wrote in his original paper, that it was possible to build such machines.
(2) The argument does not show, and is not intended to show, that conscious machines require biological substrates. Searle wrote in his original paper that it was an open question what substrates could be used to build conscious machines, and that it might well be possible to build conscious machines without any biological components.
(3) A reply which says, "alright, the human in the room does not understand Chinese, but maybe the 'room itself' does have a conscious understanding of Chinese" is perhaps interesting. Some people, including Searle, have debated how likely this is. However, it is beside the point of the original argument, which is just about showing a difference between the concept of syntax and the concept of semantics. (And, again, the argument shows that there is a difference by exhibiting a counterexample where an entity is able to follow arbitrarily complex syntactic rules and yet that entity does not have a corresponding understanding of the natural language which the rules implement.)
(4) For some, e.g. people in software development who work with formal languages on a regular basis, the fact that there is a difference between syntax and semantics is incredibly obvious. If you think it is simply obvious that there is a difference, then congratulations, you understand the concepts involved. In that case, Searle's argument is superfluous, and it's not intended for you. His argument is directed at those working in philosophy of mind or related fields who were not familiar enough with the difference between syntax and semantics to understand that there is a clear difference.
edited to add a reply about Point 1 begging the question: just to clarify, the ARGUMENT I posted above is not Searle's argument. It was an arguing I was giving to the previous poster to illustrate the fact that Searle's argument was not equivalent to claiming that consciousness does not exist in humans because individual neurons have no understanding of what the entire brain is doing. My starting point was taking Searle's conclusion as a given, in order to work out consequences from it.
That doesn't seem like a very useful argument to me, and I can't imagine why anybody would spend a moment on it were it not coming out of the mouth of a (deservedly) famous philosopher. But since it is, they try to make it talk about something not-pointless, i.e. the nature of a General Artificial Intelligence.
To use his terminology to summarize the point of his argument: there is a logical difference between syntax and semantics.
Importantly, contrary to popular view, he was not trying to argue that building a "thinking machine" was not possible or that an instantiation of a computer program could not think; au contraire, he explicitly said it was possible to build a "thinking machine" and that some instantiations of computer programs could think.
Was that really a thing? Maybe a pre-internet porn outlet for unhindered men?
Wikipedia has an article about their history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panty_raid
> How was he seemingly indifferent to Brexit—and Trump’s rise?
Am I missing some nuance here, or are these two claims contradictory? I understand 'dilate' to mean enlarge. To 'dilate on Trump' would mean to make Trump greater and larger, or to speak about Trump at great length. That seems to directly contradict the subsequent claim that Searle was indifferent to Trump. If Searle was talking up Trump at length the author would accuse him of being a Trump supporter, not indifferent.
Also, the part about Warner comparing the Braun/Apple industrial aesthetic to the lack of pubic hair in porn (lmao okay...) Then Searle asks if there are studies about the effect of this on people. Author characterizes this question as 'bad faith, plain and simple.' Am I missing something here?
This whole article seems like a disorganized rant, trying to make sense of it is hurting my head.
perhaps opining on Trump the person is different from implications of Trump's rise, but no idea; to me article mostly reads as if organized around poking in the eye
Only critique would be on the focus on the Chinese Room near the end. Moore’s law making the room 10,000 larger than when it started probably had no bearing on the premise.
That was suggested 11 hours ago by robot_head, which drew a response from dang which I find ... grotesquely insensitive, at the very least. The term "enabling" comes to mind. That's not the dang I generally encounter here.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32979901>
I've made three replies so far to that thread myself.
Dang's response is that "On HN, we generally go by article quality, not site quality: , and generally try to avoid guilt by association". That links a search on the terms "article quality" "site quality".
The problem I have here is that the situation departs sharply from "guilt by association" to "willing and knowing partner in crime", where those crimes include rape, child trafficking, and worse.
HN has seen at least 30 submissions from The Edge since 19 October 2020, based on its own "from site" feature:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/from%3Fsite%3Dedge.org>
The state I'm referring to is archive here: <https://archive.ph/8adBm>
I also noted to dang that The Edge nowhere carries any prominent mention, nor apology for, its associations with Epstein:
<https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=...>
In this case, if the question is "should HN subject the Edge to Damnatio memoriae?", the defence would have an extraordinarily challenging case to make.
I don't pretend to know what Edge has been up to, but this article doesn't actually pin anything like that on Edge. The case presented against Edge seems to boil down to these points:
1. Funded by Epstein.
2. Brockman once made a 'slightly lechy' remark about the authors body, is full of himself, and hangs out with billionaires.
3. A 'subset' of Edge members are right-wing.
4. Searle is a creepy sex pest, and not as smart as people say.
> The Edge nowhere carries any prominent mention, nor apology for, its associations with Epstein
This does seem like a red flag to me as well, but I can't rule out the mundane explanation that they're too embarrassed to apologize about it, thinking that would make them look guilty or give them bad SEO or something. I think they should put a denouncement of Epstein on their website, but I can't take their failure to do so as strong evidence of complicity. It could simply be misguided ass-covering. You're talking about Edge being a knowing and willing partner in rape and child trafficking, but strong allegations like that should be backed with stronger evidence than what has been given.
Joi Ito of M.I.T.'s Media Lab did apologise in 2019, three years ago:
<https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/my-apology-regarding-jeffrey...>
I'm not fully aware of timelines and awareness, though it's safe to say that HN is now fully aware of Epstein's activities and crimes, and his role in the tech world as a so-called philanthropist.
Another question of which I'm not clear is the extent to which Epstein's crimes were facilitated by or occurred through such organisations. I've recollections of mentions of parties and such, and of Epstein's reputation for having attractive women present (I've no links at the moment).
Epstein was sentenced to prison in 2008, served until 2011, for "procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18". This should have been well known by the early 2010s. And stands in distinct contrast with the earlier non-prosecution agreement (2006-8). Sexual assault allegations date to the 1970s (Jane Does v. Epstein). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Legal_proceedi...> <https://www.businessinsider.com/9-accusers-bring-new-lawsuit...>