433 karma · joined March 22, 2012
It would be prudent to articulate the specifics in order to deliteate alternatives to capitalism. This would be "formulating policy", or "pedantry". You can't have it both ways. If you just want your argument to be heard and not discuss the specifics then say just that: "I don't care about the specifics, I know how i feel about it already."
Loops are (in the general case) hard to reason about and provide few run-time guarantees. Predicate transformers with recurrence-relations are mostly intractable and a giant PITA. Variable assignment (or register overwrites) are hard to reason about, and loops (well... single entry/exit in lieu of goto, but whatever) were introduced to make it easier on the minds eye to follow the evaluation of programs and still they fail regularily.
Looping is not a simple task, it has real externalities wrt. program correctness (however you define it) and programming languages are providing more and more tools to avoid them and provide more run-time guarantees.
How would _you_ describe an agressive attitude towards one's career?
"Oh so you believe this or that? Well you now embody those beliefs and are complicit in all crimes motivated by them. Your mere presence is oppressive to people who have been slighted by actions or words motivated by the same beliefs. May your career end and your friends abandon you."
>Seriously, would you make excuses like this for a pro-ISIS muslim? A white nationalist? A violent anarchist? An antisemitic holocaust denier?
I can only speak for myself but I would tolerate it vehemently. I have more respect for politeness through gritted teeth than indignation, exclusion and marginalization because the former implies real effort and a conscious fight against your innate prejudice. Of course, no prejudice is best but show me the man who doth not judgeth and i will show you a liar.
Tolerance and persecution together in harmony.
It's a series of fantasy f*#%ing novels, ofcourse it's role-play. Serious role play maybe, and definitively weird, but the author is _still alive_ and his name is not L. Ron Hubbard. Is he participating in political activism with mysogynistic undertones? Is he otherwise projecting gor-related gender views onto non-consenting parties? No. He just wants to do weird stuff together with other people who want to do weird stuff, socially and sexually. To assume that he holds these views to be morally absolute for everyone is a gross misrepresentation and unfortunately typical of persecution of weird people.
Academic pursuits are, monetarily speaking, money sinks. They might be worthwhile investments, but only so far as they deliver patents or attract grants. Academic professionals want to advance the state of the art, and only small parts of that work is applicable to the money-abstraction.
In order to prevent Science(TM) from grinding to a halt, we replace Money with some other measurable so we can apply our existing tools and make risk-assessment before granting money to academics who will (most certainly) spend every last cent of it to indulge their pursuits. We chose measurables in a trade-off between academic freedom + infinite spending and academic constraints + finite spending, because the supply of Science(TM) is practically unbounded.
I'm stating the obvious here in order to ask the question: What is the gosh-darned alternative?
When I said "make a big fuss" i didn't mean "herald it as the gold standard", but they do go on about it even though they might disagree about what it utlimately signifies.
From the other end, the merits of production AI will be measured against isolated properties pulled out of the intellgence black-box, and since intelligence remains undefined (in a strict ontological sense), debate ensues.
I consider myself open to other world-views (you may not, that's fine), but a criticism of my world view (me being a modern european and all) that starts the conversation in 18th century terms (from a european modernist perspective) is a non-starter. There is to much ground to cover between then and now, and if that ground is covered in the book, then that's certainly not reflected in the article.
Since you have already committed to disagreeing with me i'll make the deductive leap that the article is comensurable with your worldview and assume that you personally believe that morality can only come from the nurturing mother (as stated in my quotation). From this i'll take the liberty to conclude that your opinion on the matter is... freudean at best, and disregard it completely. What a fruitful discussion we're having.
>Women, he emphasizes, have retained the instinct to nurture because the human child is especially vulnerable compared to the young of many animal species. They have to create peaceful, nurturing conditions or the human race can’t survive.
>“There is no other fount of social morality itself,” says Kanth. He faults Eurocentric modernists for centering on male aggression and taking it to represent everybody, which is unfair.
No, nope, sorry. Take your armchair anthropology to the Rudolf Steiner Appreciation Society, but spare _me_. Maybe the piece picks up again after this, but I could not read on.
This is the point. There are multiple levels of interpretation layered on top of the physical process. There is no reason to believe that they are tidy or hierarchical either, abstractions and indirections can leak left and right (or top to bottom). We lack the language and tools to describe these structures laid bare, and words like "abstraction" and "indirection" are probably a bad fit. Even "interpretation" might prove to be conceptually misleading when cracking this nut, so to speak.
Or you could say, you know, that beliefs must hold some utility. There are a lot of utilities that we need from our beliefs. I believe that the front of the bus is a portal to hell that threatens to damn me to eternal suffering, so I'm quite terrified when it approaches to engulf me. This shares utility with realizing that an impact with a bus can result in awesome momentum transfer, causing a sudden acceleration preventing my soft body from containing my precious bodily fluids. The point is the utility, not the rationalization (this term is loaded pretty heavy at this point, sorry).
I do not agree that the view is particularly post-modern, but since you called it first i guess i must concede. The point was not "all is subjective and nothing is true", rather "whether or not i take on this belief (or fact or whatever) presented to me is a function of the degree to which i understand it combined with my intuition of the ramifications of me holding this belief". We don't have truth-seeking minds, we have "value-" or "utility"-maximizing habits.
We understand things and we underestimate things. We prefer things and we reject things. Not always knowingly and sometimes intentionally.
If we were to present a 19th century carpenter with a nail gun he would agree upon demonstration; "that is very nice and all, thanks but i'll stick to my hammer". He would have neither a compressor, gasoline and a long enough hose, nor a wall socket and extension chord. The nail gun has no place in his toolshed because he doesn't have the required infrastructure and context to put it to use, and therefore the utility of the nail gun to him is close to zero.
Beliefs are the same, and a relation to "facts" or "truth" is not a requrement for their utility. When presented with new facts and truths we always evaluate their utility before we ascribe to them. We might fool ourselves that this process is somehow "rational" but rationality is just a social preference with some second-order effects with regards to science and the developement of technology (which indeed has "utility" but is far from the only "utility" beliefs can achieve).
When the pupil is modeled as a "customer" something has to take the place of "revenue" when measuring the relative success of different management- and educational strategies and comparing them to cost. There are different quantifiable "revenues" in education like student-hours, grade averages, diplomas etc. But the focus is on diplomas, passing grades and standardized tests (as opposed to teaching hours or other measures of undefinable value to the "customer").
To cover cost, teaching institutions rely on funding, and funding is tied to "revenue" e.g. test-results and diplomas. This causes a misalignment of incentives that reveals the real customer of teaching institutions: The funding agencies (department of education, local state government etc.). Students, or more specifically diplomas, are the product. And demand is growing. The only rational response is to produce more diplomas and test results. The supply of students who will thrive in a given educational environment, now defined implicitly as "that which produces the desired diplomas and test results" is fixed. Lower standards or lose funding. The NPM-ethos is "run it like a business" so the choice is obvious.
The problem is not trees, they are readily available in many formats. The problem is schemas. If there are no rules on the branches everything becomes "Old_stuff" or "important_work" or whatever people do to their document folders as the tide turns.
You need trees layered over trees to provide some structure and get that sweet workflow QC. Graph-homomorphisms between trees that is, or slice categories over whatever structure you need to maintain. Trees (or graphs) in semantic/syntactic relationships stacked as high as you can muster. Usually this is presented as a two-layered structure-tree+data-tree system in end user applications, with a fixed semantic tree depending on the domain in application. The trick is finding the balance between end-user configurability of layers n+1 and the required knowledge to design useful structures. People who edit layer 2 should probably be domain experts, and layers 3 and above are best left to programmers and computer scientists. If this was a solved problem, nobody would buy CRUD-software, and a good half of us would be looking for work.
TDD is (among other things) a way to have developers write formal (as in "machine readable") specifications for particular features of a computer program, _ahead of time_. It does this without bothering the developer with intangible (abstract, not-part-of-the-syntax-of-programming-language) late-undergraduate CS concepts like "invariant", "pre-" and "postcondition" etc.
This makes the test not only an affirmation of feature compliance, but a _reasoning tool_ in and of itself. Since tests are specifications written in the target application language and even run in the same runtime, tests can serve the dual purpose of reasoning about the abstract logic of the application as well as the implementation details of the chosen toolchain.
Now, bugs in either tests or toolchain will affect the test results, so while you can kill two birds with one stone, you might break a window in the effort. You now have to make tests for the tests and turtles all the way down.