Liesmith

there is no explanation of what exactly the Discovery Channel is doing wrong here. the video says "what is the movement about" but never actually follows up by telling you what the movement is about.

No one gives a shit about mensa. It will just make you look like a jerk. Definitely leave it off unless you want people who receive your resume to yell "hey check this guy out" and pass your resume around the office for laughs.

They're actually not that political, usually. They're immune to politics so that protects them a great deal from the pressures that can be brought to bear on other branches of government.

They also have historically had a completely different axis on which their decisions turn. Not left or right, but strict or flexible in their relationship to the constitution. It leads to some real surprises and people often interpret these in terms of political pressures but really the supreme court is the one set of people in government who care the least about pleasing some political masters.

Both of these quotes seem to come from a place of awe for computer science as if it is magic and only wizards can do it. "I might have been able to do it" is scoffed at because how could anyone say that! If you could do it you'd be a millionaire now! Only the guy saying it is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and that's a much bigger accomplishment than ebay. And all the justices are intellectual titans. Even the ones everyone hates.

Similarly the dismay of many in the industry thing. The author wants comp sci to be some kind of arcane lore that olds cant possibly understand because they're not hip enough. Tech stuff is also presented as kind of a black box that can't be compared to anything but itself, and if you aren't using silicon valley jargon 24/7 you just dont get it. The person who wrote the article in the OP is a tech cultist rather than a reasonable thinker.

Yeah, actually, he went to two. Charles Darwin went to Cambridge, and then to the University of Edinburgh. both of which are and were two of the foremost universities on the planet. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, The Winnower.

Also when Darwin was alive, science wasn't a hobby. It was a profession. He wasn't a tradesman or a guy pottering around with Napoleonic War reenactments, he was a professional scholar and doctor of medicine.

How is basic problem solving a test for rationality? Artists and serial killers and the mentally ill can learn to count.

You should probably see a psychiatrist and/or psychologist instead of asking hackernews how to solve this problem.

A much better question than "do rational people exist" would be "do people generally behave in a rational way?" Who cares if I'm not 100% rational all the time. As long as people in general tend towards rationality then it makes sense to talk about 'rational people.'

I dunno, dude. I was like you until recently, but smartphones are really personalized so my experience may not help you. What would you put on a laptop that fits in your pocket? I'm not much for social media apps and am actively hostile to Facebook's app because it has a history of spidering through your contact list and sucking up all your data. My phone has a couple of games (Ziggurat, King of Dragon Pass, and Lords of Midnight), an ebook reader, some useful map stuff, a couple apps that track the various public transport options in London so I know how long I have to wait for the bus. It's entirely possible that none of those are useful to you, if you don't play videogames or don't, you know, live in London. I also have google chrome. And skype. I find my phone (Samsung Galaxy s4) useless for writing longform, although email is more convenient when you can fire one off on the train.

Huh. I didn't know any of that. Sorry for my dismissive reply.

If you read the article it applies to all the schools that take government money.

We do live in a world where this policy isn't necessary. the UK doesn't really have a ton of people who take creationism seriously like the US does. As the article mentions, the state mandates the teaching of evolution in schools, and bans the teaching of pseudoscience. That latter is actually pretty funny since UK educations are crammed with pseudoscience, but aside from a few high-profile cases creationism isn't really a problem there.

"contrary to what you might expect, research has gotten less efficient over the last 60 years, despite innovations in clinical research: the number of drugs approved annually has remained relatively static, while the financial resources required for R&D have soared at a rate well beyond inflation." This right here is nonsense. The fact is that 60 years ago biochemistry was a new and exciting field where you could grow a weird mold and discover the cure for diseases that have plagued mankind since we came down from the trees. All of the obvious chemical reactions have been discovered and the age of new miracles every day coming from garage labs is long gone.

Just because this is the case doesn't mean that research has become 'less efficient.' Modern research methods are vastly more efficient than they were in the 50s, but unfortunately research is also much harder than it used to be.

Open source doesn't make things more efficient, it makes things more robust due to redundancy and transparency. This is something that can help science but don't expect miracles.

the quotes that seem to imply "room for improvement" actually do nothing of the kind. from the article: ---- The clinical side of it keeps getting longer. Well, not so much longer, but costlier and with poorer success rates. That is a big concern. (a senior academician)

R&D is very slow" and the" costs are ungodly. (a Vice President at a large pharma company)

It’s terrible because it is so costly and [pharma has] such poor success rates – the predictability of their models is so bad. (a senior regulator of the FDA) ----

These people are not complaining about the fact that pharmaceutical companies are keeping secrets and are inefficient, they're complaining about how inventing a new drug costs about as much as the GDP of a small country. And one of their major objections to open science is that it will bring together a bunch of companies that actually lower efficiency, and then their profits will go down because they reveal trade secrets. So you could end up with lower efficiency and lowered motivation to invest in research since the costs don't go down and the risks have gone up.

I'm not saying I'm against a less evil Big Pharma, but I'm not convinced that it's gonna lower costs or increase the rate of discovery.

Every time people talk about the "deep web" or "dark net" or whatever I roll my eyes so hard that I worry they will fall out of my head.

This is an extremely poorly thought out article. The core idea, that you can't be the best at something and still fail, is so naive that it ruins everything else that the guy says.

with a large transporter you don't need spaceships anymore.

Hatsune Miku is far from erotic except to a specific subset of fetishists, the robot restaurant is a gimmick, and study after study has demonstrated that people need actual human contact in the nursery and in times of stress or illness. People who are raised by machines fail to thrive. People who are visited and cared for by human beings recover better from all manner of illnesses. When I said that we could automate these jobs but they would fail, I was not speaking from ignorance.

Oh. You're one of those people. Look dude, slaves in ancient rome were not 'better off' than free people. They were slaves. They were beaten regularly, if they were attractive they were raped regularly. Sure you've got the occasional happy slave who gets manumitted at their master's death and continues to serve the family, but slavery is and always has been awful for the slaves.

Robots are not useless if they can't think. Robots can't think now and they get a lot of shit done anyhow.

As to the "they will be the same as humans" that's a nice fantasy but it will never, ever happen. Forget the 'robots will never feel true love' or whatever, the fact is that human beings don't have the same processing architecture as robots and so the machines will never react the same way to things as we do. They'll never have the natural human instinct to react to a confusing social situation with fear or aggression, will have no impulse to propagate the species, will not experience fear or pain or anything, because we don't want them to. They will be simulacra, no matter what Asimov hoped.

This is a fiction. Here's what actually happens to slavers:

The first slave rulers are vicious conquerors who enslaved people. Over time, their offspring grow more and more dependent on a larger and larger population of slaves (they don't get decadent or intellectual, it's just their economy is based on slaves and needs to expand), then suddenly there are enough slaves that the masters really can't handle them all or even keep them ground down enough to prevent rebellion. Then the slaves rebel and are murdered and the slaveholders become more concerned with security and warlike things, anything to keep the next crop of slaves under control. There's no transformation from 'benevolent slaveholders' to 'decadent slaveholders' it's just that the initially minor pressure of being beaten to death by your own slaves gradually increases as you get more and more slaves.

Eventually the society is destroyed by a more mercantile society with a higher standard of living.

None of this is going to happen with robots. The robots will not rise up to destroy us. The people who we cast aside in favor of robots (I say we because I'm an optimist and hope, naturally, to be a ruler rather than ruled) ultimately may rise up, especially if they have no social mobility or outlet for peaceful revolution and are saddled with generational 'base income' debt.

No, what gives them power is their very real ability to unilaterally use deadly force on a whim. What lets them maintain power is apathy on the part of the proletariat, their desire to be ruled, and individualized fear of authority. The illusion is actually that those in power can't hurt you, and it's something you only get when you unite with others and begin to equate the survival of the movement with your own survival. "I can't die, there's a thousand of us and only one of him."

Also you talk about the state's power evaporating, but a shitload of peasant rebellions have been put down by those in charge. Like, almost all of them ever. Even the USA would have been utterly demolished if the Brits hadn't said "you know what, these colonials don't actually have enough value to fight over this. And they'll come crawling back anyway once they figure out they can't trade because Britannia rules the waves."

This is silly. Yes, the worker holds the means of production and blah blah blah but if you're not united with all the other workers then the local lord can just murder you and now everyone is scared and climbing over one another to argue that he was right to do it.

You need to understand that this is nonsense.

First of all, there is lobbying and power politics in really, REALLY local politics. Also it costs a lot less to influence a low level guy. If all I have control over is a school district, you might be able to buy my support with a few tens of thousands of dollars put into a football team. If I am a state senator, I'm going to want considerably more, something that helps my whole district. Hundreds of thousands of dollars towards a major fund. If I'm a US Senator, then you're gonna have to get me more again, and it's probably not going to be money so much as other considerations. Maybe I want a bridge built. Maybe I want some naval destroyers built in my state's ironworks rather than the one up in Maine. Whatever it is it will be tricky as hell to outright buy my influence on anything. It may be cheaper and more effective to just buy up all the local town councils in the state by hosting a party for each of them than it is to get ahold of a US Senator.

Meanwhile the local guys also make major policy decisions, in aggregate. For example, if I can get every superintendent in Texas to buy a particular schoolbook for their schools, one that deals with Creationism as a legitimate 'alternative theory' to evolution, then I've actually just made it uneconomical to print other schoolbooks. So now everyone from California and New York and Delaware and Vermont also get a schoolbook pushing creationism, and a whole new generation of blue-state kids are being indoctrinated into my ideology. Boom.

China is not, technically, a superpower. Not in the way Russia and the US were during the cold war, or the way the US remains.

You know how p2p systems can be more effective? By not being p2p systems, and instead being centralized. It's not some kind of natural progression, it's an evolutionary process. Centralization gives you control, reactivity, and all kinds of good things. Decentralization makes you resilient during destructive upheavals that kill centralized competitors. We're gonna end up with a lot of both.

It is exciting to think that everything is collapsing and the world is changing and now is different than the past. And in a lot of ways it is. But there is no technological singularity that is going to make human beings irrelevant. We need to do something about the various crises of our time, but the guy you responded to is right. My first reaction on reading the article in the OP was "Wow, isn't it funny how bad things looked only a couple of years ago!" The whining 'democracy is a lie' part made me particularly nostalgic for a kinder, simpler time, a time when I could hate George Bush with all of my hate and could say stuff like "the system is totally broken, man" with a straight face.

While you can't trust governments and powerful individuals to reliably act in your interest (and never could), we need to take a step back here. There's a lot of nonsense and science fiction dystopia going around itt, a lot of people who think that 90% of humanity is worthless now that we don't need them for physical labor. That's ridiculous. Things are basically fine and while there are going to be some serious repercussions among tech people things will remain basically fine for the vast majority of westerners.

Actually literally everything in the universe guarantees that we will reach a stable solution. That's how things work. That stable solution may end up killing billions of people but eventually you get a status quo. Systems gravitate towards low energy states.

Also an Elysium like scenario? That movie was a joke and made no sense. If you're gonna believe in science fiction as the model for the future at least go for something that isn't terrible.

Again, intellectual capabilities are not what makes you immune to automation. We can make smart robots. We can't make those smart robots visit cancer patients in a hospital, or serve me food while playing a violin at a restaurant at my tenth wedding anniversary, or perform a moving and/or erotic song and dance at a concert. Well, we could, but none of those things would go over well or have the desired effect. We also can't make a robot to make startling leaps like "hey, I think the PHASES OF THE MOON are controlling the strength of the tides! Holy crap!"

only one of those three jobs is necessarily a product of intelligence.

There's no one who can't contribute to important problems. You assume that they are all related to intelligence but you are wrong. Wal-Mart Greeters and nursery caregivers and hospital candystripers are all solving important, impossible to automate problems in our society. All they need is the ability to care about other people and perform fairly simple tasks and provide a warm, human presence when that is called for.

It's slavery. Well, indentured servitude, but that's just a slightly technical way to say slavery, like those pedophiles who call themselves ephebophiles like it makes a difference. It's still messed up and vile.

Why in God's name would you say that there is a case for basic income and tie it to debt slavery? Especially in circumstances where people have no income but the basic income, because allt he work they're qualified to do is done by robots? This is insane. Here we've got all these people that you're basically writing off as worthless, and you're also enslaving them to a debt system that makes it impossible for them to ever earn anything for themselves?

Actually no I think you're right, if people like you run the system then this is the best thing we can hope for. I wish all bad social thinkers were as hell bent on creating a massive and violent revolution against themselves as you seem to be.