"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology." Some of them are rather interesting, actually.
I tend to view all platforms negatively because I am afraid that all are a virtual substitute to actual encounters and debates. They soothe a real need and desire with a sort of hallucinatory satisfaction (human beings are very good at that). Which does tend to create a cycle of addiction or dependency. So by making life more bearable, they also validate and consolidate life as it is. So yeah...
I trust my brain to do the work and if I am not able to produce a relevant summary on demand, so be it. What I read is being processed and I do not know how, when, or why, or to what end it will be useful, but it likely will. In other words, all the books I have read and digested, even partially, are metabolized.
Research now more or less always proceeds bottom-up so that it's never possible to determine causality from results. Everyone looks for causality, researchers look for positive results and the wheel keeps on turning.
When top-down thinking disappears, science enters a cognitive decline of its own. This one is contagious.
These are indeed "arguments". There is an actual reason though. Mars cannot be terraformed because it has no magnetosphere. Which is also probably why it is like it is now in the first place. Creating a magnetosphere is not impossible theoretically but vastly unrealistic at this time.
I do not believe what we read is "forgotten" as in deleted. I believe, it remains as a distinct series of patterns that may or may not be elicited again, depending on circumstances. Proust's "madeleine" is a perceptual example of this and we all have many such. Often, entire passages of books I read come back up to my awareness without me even knowing what the book was. I could possibly investigate but I prefer to rely on this human ability to retrieve percepts or meaning in an apparent random fashion, as I trust my brain entirely.
There are amply enough potential connections or patterns of connections in anyone's brain to store, in a way or another, pretty much anything we are exposed to, from the trivial to the essential.
As far as I am concerned, a book read is a book stored. Maybe not wilfully remembered, but mine.
And, as usual, a central aspect is absent. The social/historical environment. Any individual's performance, in whatever aspect of human activity being considered, is closely dependent on, some would even say produced by, its context. Closed contexts foster waste, open contexts foster creativity. Essentializing intelligence, or problem-solving, is way of perpetuating closed contexts.
Let's just note that giving the guy a 1st class ticket or even a private jet to his destination would have been less expensive. And could even have enhanced UA's image and business.
It appears that we might have jumped on the transistor metaphor too quick and to intensely. I believe not everything is binary in the brain, even if the resulting executive action is. Patterns, for example, might not be.
Second that. The whole learning process is about substituting cognitive action to behavioral action. Kids can handle it and do it very well. It is important, and I would say essential, to push their limits as much as possible. When I was a kid myself, the end of the school day (in a European country) could be heard block away: hordes of kids running out screaming!
I also found that knowing something pretty much equals to being able to explain it to someone. I thought I knew many things until I tried to explain them.
Or, in other words, there is a sort of "internal" knowledge that seems to heuristically cut corners and generates or fosters the illusion of knowing. True knowledge does not cut corners. Which is what some of the posters have expressed as well.
I like the reference to a metric, which I always felt could be a useful approach to many problems, including in AI.
Re spell-checking, I wonder whether there is an algorithm that uses topography (i.e. vicinity of keys) to assist with the correction...
It think this linguistic approach remains very superficial in that it only targets vocabulary and ways to represent it and to translate it. It does not tackle the "deep structure" the grammar that underlies and, in my belief, determines everything that sits above. Yes, I know, I'm a chomskian... I also understand that this would have propelled the narrative in a wildly weird area where most spectators would have probably gone to do some other thing than to watch. And "Arrival" is not a bad movie.
I just wonder what would a truly alien language, with a truly alien underlying structure, would look like. Much more than vocabulary keys could be needed to even begin to communicate.
This is also where the SW hypothesis would begin to really become hugely significant.
And that is also incorrect in assuming a strict hunter-gatherer mode of production. Husbandry and some agriculture were part of the late hunter-gatherer people's life, as seen in Scandinavia for example, and this does not necessarily mean that this was a mere transition to full-fledged farming either. The debate is still wide open.