Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true.

That's just an accidental property of the english language.

We can imagine a language where "runner" and "thing that moves from A to B fast" used the same term T, and if people referred to T with the english notion of "runner" (e.g. a person running in a marathon") it was just deduced from the context. There are many cases like that.

In any case, the point is moot, as "thinking" doesn't have the same constraints. We might not call what a car does as running/runner (though we do use the former term) but we absolutely have considered AI as "thinking" and called AIs "thinking machines", even before AI (never mind AGI) even existed.

>You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true.

This depends on the level of abstraction of the discussion. At some level of abstraction it's irrelevant if the move happened via running or via horse buggy or via a car. Sometimes we just care about the act of moving from A to B, and different methods to do so are only differentiated by their speed or other effectiveness.

In that case, we can compare man and machine though, and just care for the speed (machine can answer in 0.1. secs, a man needs to think over 1-2 minutes to answer such questions) or effectiveness (e.g. machine is better at juggling many things at the same time when thinking, or man is better at subtle semantical nuance).

Are car parts car parts? Not according to an auto-mechanics, but according to the laymen. A radiator is not a battery or an engine. Are games games? Not according to a game theorist, but according to the the laymen. A game is not a play or a history.

This isn't an accident of language. An example of an actual accident of language would be giving tanks instead of giving thanks.

Are runners runners? Yes, according to you. A walker is a runner is a missile is a bowling ball rolling between places is light moving through a medium. No, according to a fitness coach, because a runner is not a tank is not a plane. When they say that a person should take up running they don't mean the person should melt down their body in a furnace and sprinkle their atoms into metal which is then pressed into iron plates that are attached to a tank which will then go running.

Sometimes we need to be careful in language. For example, we probably don't want to confuse the process of being incinerated and pressed into iron plates with the process of a human exercising their muscles. The choice to be careful in this way is not an accident of language. It is a very deliberate thing when, for example, John Von Nuemann carefully explains why he thinks the laymen use of the word game has perilous impact on our ability to think about the field of game theory which he starts in his book about the same.

I think you should make your point so as to disprove Nuemann, not pick on the straw man of running. Or you should argue against the use of the term radiator instead of car parts. It will better highlight your fallacy, because with running I have to make your position seem much more farcial then it is. We do gain something from thinking imprecisely. We gain speed. That can really get our thoughts running, so long as we don't trip up, but it calls to attention that when someone chooses to stop running due to the claim that the terrain isn't runnable, the correct response is not to tell them that running is accidental property. It is to be careful as you move over the more complicated terrain. Otherwise you might be incinerating yourself without noticing your error.

>This isn't an accident of language. An example of an actual accident of language would be giving tanks instead of giving thanks.

By "Accident of language" I don't mean "slip of the tongue" or "mistake when speaking".

I mean that kind words we use to describe someome who runs as "runner" is an accidental, not essential, property of English, and can be different in other languages. It doesn't represent some deeper truth, other than being a reflection of the historical development of the English vocabulary. I mean it's contigent in the sense it's used in philosophy as: "not logically necessary"

Not just in its sounds (which are obviously accidental, different languages can have different sounds for a word of the same meaning), but also in its semantics and use, e.g. how we don't call a car a "runner".

That we don't call it that doesn't express some fundamental truth, it's just how English ended up. Other languages can very well call both a car and a running man the same thing, and even if they don't for this particular case, they do have such differences between them for all kinds of terms.

>* I think you should make your point so as to disprove Nuemann, not pick on the straw man of running.*

I'm not here to disprove Neumann. I'm here to point that Lanier's argument based on the use of "runner" doesn't contribute anything.

> I'm not here to disprove Neumann.

You are arguing on the basis of possibility of imprecision in language that the choice to be more precise does not contribute anything. That structure - whether you want it to or not - as a direct consequence of logic applies to every thinker who ever argued for precision due to the possibility of ambiguity. It is an argument against formal systems, programming languages, measurement, and more. Some of the time it will turn out that your conclusion was true. Other times it will not. So the argument structure itself is invalid. Your conclusions do not follow from your premises.

Try your blade - your argument structure - against steel rather than straw. I saw you slice through straw with it. So I picked up the blade after you set it down and tried to slice it through steel. The blade failed to do so. The blade is cheap, prone to shattering, and unsuited for use in a serious contest between ideas.

For what it is worth - I do happen to agree with you that Lanier is making a mistake here. I think it is in the logical equivalence mismatch. He wants intelligence to be comparable to running, not to motion more generally, but since intelligence is actually more comparable to compression we can talk of different implementations of the process using terms like artificial or natural intelligence without being fallacious for much the same reason we can talk about different compression algorithms and still be talking about compression. So instead of trying to argue from his distinction between motion in general and motion in humans, I would think the place to point to for contradiction is the existence of cheetah runners versus human runners. Directly contradicting his insinuation is that we actually do say that cheetah are faster runners than humans.

I already covered this in my post.

Cars are an easier method to move people and stuff when there are suitable routes, where easier means "the journey will take less time, will require almost no human exertion by those moved, and will likely include weather protection".

Nobody is going to disagree with this (they may raise the objections I did that cars are energetically, materially and environmentally less efficient than other means, but that doesn't invalidate "cars are easier for moving people+stuff").

But that's not running. I will concede that even in English, there are idioms like "Can you run me to town?" meaning "Can you drive me to town?", or "I'm just going to run to the store" meaning "I'm going take a short journey to the store". But this doesn't mean that cars are better at running than humans, it means that the english word run can be used in different ways. And you know exactly which way Lanier meant it.

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