gloriousduke

> The consequences of Zuckerberg’s inaction are now clear. On December 4, a North Carolina man brought a loaded weapon into Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong to investigate a conspiracy theory called #Pizzagate in which Comet is the hub of a child-trafficking ring organized by Democratic Party operatives. The story was popularized by fake news.

In the days after the election, I too believed in social media's major role the unexpected results. However, after more reflection, the problem seems far beyond facile dissemination of fake news: a large portion of the population are either post-truth thinkers, or, simply never learned how to fact check their news sources. If someone is going to be swayed to elect a different candidate because of a story that popped up in their news feed, there's not a whole lot we can do besides ensure that the next generation is better educated in healthy skepticism and critical thinking.

With something like flowtype.org.

Valid points, but they won't stop the average less self-analytical person from trusting Big Data, just as many are susceptible to altering their behavior because of some "study" they read about in the paper. Due to our (the masses) inability to follow the gnothi seauton aphorism, we are more likely to allow someone or something to make choices for us. See concluding paragraph of the essay.

It looks like the link to part 2 is broken, so:

http://www.salon.com/2001/03/26/wizards_part2/

I think this will be a growing trend for all social networks among the more thoughtful crowd (or at least a large curtailing of usage). What value does signing into these platforms many times per day really bring, especially considering the negative effects of distraction?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world...

A related issue is the coworker who knows you are working with technology X and provides links to tools to make your technology X toolchain better, particularly in a public forum like stand-ups. Such recommendations are fine when the intent is genuine, but often I feel it's just a case of trying to earn brownie points with management. /rant

A libel case resulting from a situation like this could be important in setting precedent for how responsible companies need to be with (for?) their AI.

> For quite a bit of software these days, the correct program and the description of the correct program are pretty similar artifacts.

My brain was going mental mobius strip when I was originally responding and thinking of something along these lines. Maybe what I was getting at is that the an idea like the Halting problem doesn't apply as viciously to hardware?

Would you say it's easier to spec out hardware than software? I don't work with hardware, but from a layman's perspective it seems like you can (and have to be) utterly exacting when it comes to product matching designs, with said designs themselves being very exacting, i.e. using physics equations.

With complex software, it's pretty dang hard to layout an entire program in specifications without going down the provably correct approach, which likely will run into limitations when the real world is involved. Waterfall dev for operating systems of the past come to mind.... Probably the best you can do is be very stringent with your coding standards, something space agencies are the masters of.

Hawaii island is dealing with a fungal pathogen that impacts the most abundant native tree similarly: http://www2.ctahr.hawaii.edu/forestry/disease/ohia_wilt.html.

> An entire human development up to the age of intelligence you are looking for

I've also found the lack of development time consideration a weakness in the AGI literature I've read. We can create intelligent humans now, but it takes not only reproduction, but immersion in our world and societies for something like 12-18 years for a fully intelligent agent to emerge. Maybe if some future DeepMind algorithms could inhabit a complex world like you find in Skyrim for a decade or two, you'd get something interesting.

> If the best and the brightest of you are drawn to building addictive apps rather than making great journalism, important films, or literature that survives the test of time, will we as a society be ultimately impoverished?

The opportunity to create art still exists. Distribution channels are more varied now; they're more inclusive and perhaps (ironically?) less conducive to middle class salaries. But since when has creating art ever been about financial reimbursement? You're either creating or you aren't. The incentive exists for those that feel one, for those that have to create or go insane. If you "were going to be a novelist" but decided to be a programmer or an economist because you wanted to make money, well...

In the words of Shia Labeouf: "just do it."

Using arrow functions also lexically binds the this value in the anonymous function, an important change for many.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

I feel as if this comment is an exemplar of Microsoft itself.

If existence is deterministic in a Laplaceanly demonic way, we should be able to unravel etiology more and more effectively as our technology improves. Perhaps this is a harbinger of the possibilities of the forensics of ontology.

Wheelerian thought should never be down-voted.

Just think, a member of the group is probably reading this thread right now...

> way too cold or way too hot

This isn't as big of a concern as it once might have been. See extremophiles.

> It's possible that we'll evidence of past life on Mars, but not current.

If life takes hold anywhere and has any amount of (geologic) time to spread, I'm guessing only an extremely powerful gamma ray burst or other high energy event could completely exterminate it. It might be impossible to sterilize the earth at this point without completely destroying it, and even then there'd probably be microbes in the resulting meteors, etc (until our sun dies at least).

Well they sort of already are if you take into account asm.js and the use of emscripten to compile native-language bytecode into it. But, I guess if you already have the native code for a desktop-only app...

>using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims

It takes some philosophy to decide how to do science. I prefer Popper's approach for the methodology.

>Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost?

I think we answer this question via the realization that every human is a subjective being and has a right to pursue happiness, a realization which comes from the humanities (a-hem) as much as it does from the theory of natural selection or quantum mechanics (and actually, we have no way of looking at a brain and saying it assuredly causes consciousness, so we can't even say who's a subjective being with science). Heck, the universe's "way of doing" might be a nearby gamma ray burst far harsher than any human war ;)

>You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

I wholeheartedly concur, but there are already concerns that if something like the multiverse is the "explanation" for the constant values in our universe, then there might be aspects of existence inaccessible to our experiments. I will need much consolation if such a thing is true.

You are right, but wouldn't the grand unification provide the framework to lead to the loftier conclusions/insights/ah-hahs? Or are you saying QM and relativity and thereby their presumed common denominator are currently entirely divorced from ontology?

The answer to the first question is related to an interpretation of David Hume known as Hume's Law, paraphrased as, "you can't derive an ought from an is". In other words, the results of science cannot tell us anything conclusive about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day. The submission contained the following quote regarding neuroscience from a well-regarded paper: "it 'can help us see that all behavior is mechanical, that all behavior is produced by chains of physical events that ultimately reach back to forces beyond the agent’s control.'" Some pretty drastic changes to the rule of law could result from equating such results with "there is no free will". How do we decide what ought to comprise such changes? Secondly, as exhilarating and awe inspiring as learning the results of science can be (for me at least), how do we take knowledge and do anything with it? We can use it for technology, sure. But what if tomorrow we conclusively determine there are extraterrestrial beings through the results of one of our scientific instruments? How does society respond in relation to what the discovery means to each person despite the fact the experiment says nothing about such meaning? You could also think of it all this way: what ought we to do once we know every possible provable (or Popperian falsifiable) statement about existence?

As for the second question, to me, it makes sense that there has to be a lowest level of ontology, unless the lowest level is some sort of recursive structure (which in a sense would still be a "lowest level thing"). I believe most of us expect that there is some sort of monadic entity that is equivalent to Democritus's atom. In the standard model the quark is that sort of thing (if I'm not mistaken), but the string theorists hypothesize that a lower level (think more complete, i.e. not assuming zero dimensional entities in reality) object is the basis for a quark. Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

No, I think only the masters of the ivory towers and those with an eye for the lucrative should decide what is printed.

> Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?

I can't say I didn't. But perhaps my subconscious finally prodded me to go beyond lurking and post my first comment so as to ensure I engage with the masses and thereby improve the clarity of my hermetically sealed self expression. So let me rephrase that: Stuff like great novels and the writings of Nietzsche can make you feel as alive as when you consider the findings from the LHC or read the "Selfish Gene". That being said, I think we should use the ideas of science, and philosophy of science, to improve our art and make it more meaningful and fecund for ideas. Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else. Obfuscation is one way to encourage the reader to really understand the context and layers of some piece of writing by making them dig deeper (there was an interesting link about this a few weeks back).

And yet, isn't one of the premiere goals of science, at least of the sort aiming at ontology, i.e. physics, to formulate a "Theory of Everything"? In other words, one idea to rule them all? Of course such an idea probably won't explain "higher level" structures in the Universe without some additional "subroutines"—just like understanding the periodic table does not result in instantaneous explanation of biochemistry, the brain, or human society (funny, maybe natural selection does something of the sort...). Though I do not fully agree with everything here, and I'm not sure that the author is wholly maligning the state of affairs in his thesis, we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail-ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at worst deleterious, obfuscation.