What is your point? Pointing out a curated list of photos online does not point to any inconsistency with critizing Facebook. If it does, that is merely coincidental and does not speak to the intent behind my post.
304 karma · joined July 31, 2014
As a joke. Same goes for the tape on his mic.
If promiscuity were to increase over a number of generations, that would be more on account of increased safety practices and/or improved immunological methods.
A → B |- ~(A & ~B)
1) A → B [by assumption] 1
2) A & ~B [by assumption] 2
3) A [conj. elim. 2] 2
4) B [imp by 1,2] 1,2
5) ~B [conj. elim 2] 2
6) B & ~B [conj 4,5] 1,2
7) ~(A & ~B) [reductio ad absurdum 2,6] 1
{Thus by assuming only A → B we prove that we can derive ~(A & ~B).}
From there you can also trivially prove that ~(A & ~B) |- A → B; thus, they are tautologous and so given the primitives ~ and &, implication is not quite as "special" for a Universal Turing machine. This is merely to show, independent of any construction using only IMP, one can trivially reduce it to more primitive components, thus undermining any claim to a "special" status in the context of universal computation.
In sum, he's a total scumbag. I thought he was a cool guy, but now I think otherwise.
Who here supposes anyone is a tabula rasa? Who here supposes anyone emerges in this life fully formed and actualized? This is a spurious dichotomy that is erected time to time based on cultural norms and stipulations - much of it propagandising to suit others desires and ends.
The personality is a constellation of aspects that we all show to varying degrees, many of which are in fact out of our control, but some of which nevertheless are capable of being adjusted in accordance with various forms of conditioning. It is in that constellation that we find what the personality is. Emphasizing minute aspects and exaggerating them doesn't constitute the whole personality. This is remarkably uninformative as an article.
The supposition that the personality is completely fixed or completely mutable is simply false. There are fundamental constraints to how the personality can be manifested. Histrionic personalities are perhaps those most inclined to believe that their personality is truly self-determined, but they'd also be mistaken.
Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.
But they won't, because they're doubling down.
The timing of this is peculiar, but if it has nothing to do with HRC, we'll simply have to wait and see if that is the case.
That aside, these tests are far too old (ca. 1995) nowadays to be the real deal. Look nearby and you're sure to find more up-to-date stuff, though.
A Pied Piper of Hamelin in Modern Dress
For me there is nothing new about Wolfram's primary ideas. I have toyed with such notions for a quarter of a century, and so have a great many other people. Such ideas have power, but it is a very different question whether they have physical plausibility at the most fundamental level, and a necessity that goes beyond redundancy in offering more than do scores of other competing 'explanations' of the physical world, at the tiniest, intermediate, and largest scales.
A passage in Montaigne's Essays (book One, Chapter 50: "On Democritus and Heraclitus") is pertinent: "Things in themselves perhaps have their own weights, measures, and states; but inwardly, when they enter into us, the mind cuts them to its own conceptions."
I think the mind of Wolfram cuts them short! Moreover, I feel that, for the moment at least, the attractions of cellular automata - like a carnival that snags eye, ear, and leg through its tricks, bustle, and strangeness - are meretricious.
But my greatest objection to cellular automata lies in my belief that little of what is thought essential to them is, and what is is not peculiar to them. In short, they are merely little mirrors of a much greater idea, or a deeper and more comprehensive truth; one which, to begin with, is neither cellular nor automatic, and which is discrete (or 'binary') only as a process of transformation, when it is discrete at all.
As a neuroscientist, I have seen, over 30 years, not dissimilar errors - errors, for example, of misplaced emphasis, extrinsic formalization, and naively truncated research into physical detail and parallel mechanisms - plague abortive theories of the brain.
..................
I am anxious that this excessively clever fellow not be allowed to become, through an initial absence of penetrating criticism of his ideas, and his megalomanical and almost autistic obsessions, another Pied Piper of Hamelin, in an age which is already blurring the distinction between the real (and natural) and the artificial (and fanciful), to a degree that could soon become pathological.
Incidentally, in Browning's homonymous poem, which he wrote in 1824, the Pied Piper of Hamelin "is a musician who, according to an old German legend, came, in 1284, fantastically dressed, to Hamelin in Prussia, and offered for a sum of money to rid Hamelin of its rats. He charmed the rats by his piping into the river Weser, where they drowned." So at first the Piper was a heroic figure.
Later, however, "as the reward was withheld, he in revenge by his magic piping drew the one hundred and thirty children of the town to a cavern in a hill, which closed after them forever."
In real life, most heroes ARE piebald figures. At bottom, I find Wolfram's youthful but embarrassingly perseverative love affair with cellular automata deeply amusing:
Two decades ago, to caution the ardor of a friend of mine, Prof. Edward Fredkin - whose pioneering work upon, and advocacy of, cellular automata, in fact later led to Wolfram's own bewitchment - I constructed an instructive list of "250 Single Things People Have Tried To Reduce All of Nature To".
Some of the more conventional rival candidates have been matter, mass, energy, time, space, number or mathematics, points, lines, spirit, mind, ideas, God, machines, motion, vortices, nothing, and life (biology), apart from the 233 OTHER 'sole fundamental entities' I was able to recall on the spur of a moment - while confronting a Plenum of ulterior possibilities.
The monoideistic advocates of these '1-substance' metaphysics (or cosmologies) were often just as bright, confident, and fanatical as their latest fashionable successor, or avatar, S. Wolfram.
The latter's faith in his own uniqueness, at least, is anything BUT unique!