This podcast by Sam Harris is worth contemplating.
"Sam Harris - President Trump and the Failure of the Left" [1]
755 karma · joined November 3, 2015
The west has successfully defeated the vicious communism [1] to a large extent. The west has successfully defeated the vice regime of Christianity and Church [2]. But we must understand that currently the biggest threat to the western freedom loving society is from the vicious ideology of Islam which is at crossroads with the modern liberal western civilized world and from the pseudo-liberals who are practicing double standards when it comes to the issue of critical study of Islam. These pseudo-liberal Islam apologists (whether bought and paid for or not) are hunting down any thoughtful and legitimate criticism of Islam, its prophet Muhammad and its scriptures. They are using various types of pressure tactics for this. For example, they are labeling any criticism of Islam as racist attacks on Muslims or as Islamophobia or as right wing acts. The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam. These views by Bill Maher and Sam Harris may help understand this point in a better way. [3], [4], [5]
Am I against Muslims? No, I do have many Muslim friends and many of them understand the viciousness of Islam.
In fact, it should be noted that the fight must be with Islam and not with general Muslim population and that the fight must be on the ideological front.
[1] http://victimsofcommunism.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_and_state_in_medieval_Europe
[3] https://www.samharris.org/islam
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8rZTuGfZo
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46nh8_BK7ok
"Sam Harris - President Trump and the Failure of the Left" [1]
I have deep and very high regard for the people who are able to apply ML to fields like DNA analysis or NLP which can take the dreaded "Turing test".
I stand nowhere in the ML arena, but I had tried once and got a good shock of my life: how hellishly difficult the ML can get and how quickly. I really feel humbled. If anything, I learnt to appreciate the width and depth of human brain capabilities. It seems entirely magical now to me how on earth does my brain process/understand such complex things like this very paragraph. Prior to some exposure to ML, I couldn't have appreciated this thing.
>>Just because you find something extremely challenging, doesn't mean it is inherently challenging.
Agreed. I never claimed it anyway. But the kind of problems, for which ML is being applied, the state of the art existing "analyzable algorithms" (like, finding approximate near-optimal solutions for TSP) are far from trivial. In addition to this, we must realize that the ML solution must "beat" these algorithms hands-down in "non-trivial" cases. All this makes ML extremely difficult.
I agree that for real world (and not necessarily state-of-the-art) ML applications, you have to handle many more fields in addition to these 3 fields. All I say is even these three things, when taken together, are very complex things to handle.
edit: typo
>>After much trial and error I eventually learned that this is often the case of a training set that has not been correctly randomized and is a problem when you are using stochastic gradient algorithms that process the data in small batches.
Take this single term from the above sentence: "stochastic gradient algorithms", they represent three key areas: statistics, calculus and CS.
These three things, even when they are to be studied in isolation are much complex. For ML, you must be able to juggle these 3 fireballs effectively. No surprise, it's much, much more difficult than many other software engineering problems.
First a question: Insulting to whom?
If you think it is insulting to Muslims, then I disagree. It may be offensive to some Muslims. Will criticizing Nazism be considered as insulting (to Germans)?
I agree with you. But we cannot disregard the dishonest behaviour performed by most leftists/liberals over the years. The leftists/liberals hurl so much social stigma against the republicans/Christianity but they dishonestly and criminally keep mum about e.g. Islam. Sam Harris and Bill Maher have pointed this out beautifully at [1] and [2].
The leftists have never allowed anyone to socially stigmatize Muslims about their faith in the very vicious, barbaric and most importantly "the most intolerant" ideology of Islam. So now this has came around them.
Mainstream left/liberal camp is completely dishonest about its take on the issue of intolerance of Islam.
Sadly but not surprisingly people like Trump will succeed to exploit such thing.
The saner people in the left should reflect on this dishonest behaviour of the mainstream/vocal leftists and must do something about it, else the intolerance will just grow.
A related note regarding Facebook here: AFAIK, Facebook's curators were very biased and were always removing anything to do support what "mainstream vocal leftists" find objectionable. e.g. Be it to do with the shameless suppression of news related to people like Geert Wilders or Pamella Geller who are not by any means right wing fanatics. Geert Wilders is a staunch supporter of homosexuals. Just because he criticizes the barbaric ideology of Islam he is labeled as a "right-wing nut" by leftists with covert/overt Islam-apologetic stances.
It is well known that Saudi kingdom has large investments in mainstream US media, that's what Trump drew people's attention to. Who knows how much of Facebook is controlled by Saudi and the likes. [1]
It's no surprise that mainstream media got the prediction about Trump wrong. I guess, there predictions and poll-results were in fact propaganda against Trump. I felt it that way, many people I know felt it and I am sure many more people must also have felt it.
Good and thanks for it. I do have many Muslim friends, some from Kurdish land. They are real good people.
>>copy paste some nonsense /b/ bullet points about how "Islam does X" in order to help you ignore the real human - this one, right in front of you! - telling you that faulty generalizations in the service of your priors is the telltale mark of a bigot. Go ahead, do what you want to do. And then, for the love of God - go to a doctor.
Who is doing a faulty generalization here? You may indeed be a good person despite being a Muslim, I have no problem in accepting that. But that doesn't make the ideology of Islam good.
And why only you? There are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are good despite being Muslims. Hundreds of German people living under Nazi regime were good. Does it make Nazism good? No.
>>I've spent too much of my life listening to hate preachers try to misinterpret various Surah and Hadith to achieve objective (x); x is almost always silly, always nationalistic, and always wrong.
Okay, tell me, how, according to you, Islam tells its followers to treat apostates? Also, tell me, how, according to you, Islam tells its followers to treat homosexuals?
I base my criticism of Islam on such issues.
>>which you still refuse to acknowledge, and which again, is sad and worrying and a sign that you please, should see a doctor for this anxiety - reminds me very much of the behavior of a typical hate preacher.
Thanks for your concern about my health, I am doing fine. Let me assure you, I don't preach hate. I am doing what I can do to help people realize the dangers posed by the ideology of Islam and I am telling them that do not confuse Islam with Muslim people. How is this hate preaching?
My issue with Islam is its ideology and its doctrine. It's very similar to my issue with Nazism and white supremacist ideology like KKK. Do we think, that when someone criticizes Nazism/KKK are they reducing all German/white people to some bad thing? No.
It's very similar when it comes to Islam too. I criticize Islam. I criticize Islam's pedophile, rapist and thuggish prophet Muhammad. I criticize Islam's treatment of women and kaafirs (disbelievers). I criticize Islam's barbaric misogynist doctrines.
>> You don't seem to have any single articulable criticism or complaint besides "the others are comin', see this scary video!". Have you even thought farther than that? Did you not feel the need to?
I gave links to those videos as a starting point for the western world. But I do not base my criticism on these videos. I do base my criticism of Islam on the very foundational scriptures of Islam called Quran and Hadiths. Very similar how I criticize the Nazi ideology based on Mein Kampf.
You may wish to look into those scriptures to educate yourself about the vicious ideology of Islam.
Once again, I am not reducing all Muslims to Islamists, so your argument fails. In fact, you are trying to reduce any criticism of Islam (the ideology/religion) as attack on Muslims worldwide. This same scare tactic is used by pseudo-liberals who wish to suppress any criticism of Islam in other public spheres too.
I am opposing the ideology of Islam and I do oppose other religious ideologies too. I am not a Christian. I have left all organized religions back long ago.
Sam Harris also is not reducing all Muslims to some thing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12486652
[edit]: point about reducing
Hope this [1] helps you see some reality. It seems UK has already allowed the barbaric and inhumane Sharia to exist there. So, that's not at all fantasy.
Similar thing applies to Christianity and other religions too. The Western world has been so successful on various fronts (especially on the modern, liberal and progressive cultural front) essentially because they defeated and discarded the barbaric Christianity by what we now call "separation of Church and state".
But Islamists (Muslims who wish/strive to bring Islam as ruler in the world) are trying to bring Sharia in the western world and the liberals here are quite dishonest about it.
Even democratic supporter Bill Maher has said "Bill Maher: I Wish Liberals Would Have Same Intolerance For Muslims That They Do For Christians" [3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M [2] https://www.samharris.org/islam [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8rZTuGfZo
The bad effects of such societal level bias against math can be seen in public spending in schools also. Enormous amounts of money are spent on football coaches/teams[2] in schools whereas not enough money for math teachers/students.
The society seems to equate success only with one's ability to earn money. Then you can see that many such popular public figures "getting successful" without math as they can be seen to earn large amounts of money.
This is sad as such people even if are successful on money front, cannot understand any of the complex aspects of modern societal/business/political structures (be it, things like privacy issues, or many public policy issues like taxes) and of course cannot understand any of the modern technological/scientific discussions (be it discussions regarding global warming or genetically modified food or statistical significance of some tests).
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1968613
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case...
I am a liberal but most prominent liberals in America are failing when it comes to dealing with the vicious and barbaric ideology of Islam.
China is not at all capitalist as there is no free market, and you may say it's not communist/marxist if it pleases you but it's a communist party controlled tyranny. *
If anything, China is much, much more tyrannical and dictatorial than USA. Tyranny and brutal dictatorships is only what communism/Marxism have produced in large amounts. The communism/Marxism have produced very little good and very large evil wherever they got foothold.
* A Chinese citizen cannot even move within China without getting permits from the communist politburo approved officials, forget about him/her being able to launch a business freely.
Edit: added * details
That's your opinion. FYI, China has the dreaded communist politburo running the show.
Communism/Marxism is one of the worst ideologies out there (along with intolerant religions). The western democracy is the best model the humans have invented yet. This is not to say we must not strive to improve it. But Communism/Marxism is not at all an improvement, it's an outright societal cancer. But I am seeing is the increase in criticism of US (and western democracies) by leftists and liberals. That in itself would not have been a big deal but these leftists praise Communism/Marxism.
This is a wake-up call to the people of united states who are listening too much to the unjust and undue criticism of the US govt for surveillance. Post-Snowden some leftists are taking undue advantage of the atmosphere to spread their fear mongering anti-democracy propaganda amongst US citizens.
But part of the training that a pilot of an "airplane with autopilot" has to undergo has to do with understanding what the autopilot can and cannot do and what the pilot has to do.
Tesla is not making this mandatory for their drivers to undergo rigorous training regarding this very feature that they taut so much. Then as you have pointed out they are opportunistically advertising that very feature and then when the unsuspecting user is caught off-guard, the Tesla is shouting "Gotcha, you didn't read the fine print. See, it is clearly mentioned here". If then the customer says that but that thing was mentioned amongst thousand other things and that too in font so small, Tesla will counter him/her "see, that's your problem not ours." If that's what they want then be it so. If that's what is making them happy then be it so.
It may help Tesla win some law-suit. But they will clearly and surely lose big on the customer trust.
>>"YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD IDIOT"
Btw, It's not fair to say the user an "idiot" when the larger idiocy (and not just idiocy but a cruel practical joke on the customers bordering on criminal activity as it may be at the cost of customer's life) is committed by Tesla manufacturers.
Sad, I was a fan of Tesla but no more.
Your argument fails as the analogy of car drivers with airplane pilots fails on various grounds.
a. The airplanes, which provides autopilot facility, their pilots have to undergo more rigorous and stringent training than what a ordinary car driver has to undergo
b. for different types of airplane autopilot systems the pilots have to undergo different types of trainings (you have not mentioned what kind of autopilot you have used, but I'd doubt if your autopilot training on one type of plane will automatically certify you to drive all kinds of auto-pilot planes out there, even within the same airplane category)
c. what Tesla is doing is on one hand it is saying (in fact, screaming in its adverts) that "we are bringing autopilot in cars", "we are bringing autopilot in cars" but when it actually is bringing just a driver assistance system and when that causes accidents, Tesla is putting blame on the customers for not understanding what is autopilot. This is not fair, as Tesla does NOT put any requirement for more rigorous and stringent training for its drivers the way airplane manufacturers/airliners put. So, Tesla is playing with the lives of not only its drivers but also of the other road users.
You are welcome to counter-argue my points. But this too much hoohaa about auto-pilot by Tesla and the subsequent bad publicity it is going to bring them is not good for them. People will not be subtle then because Tesla is not being subtle in their adverts now.
edit : typo
Hope this doesn't turn out that costly for Google. But I'd be happy if it does, if it is the way the interview was really conducted.
This is classic: the right answers!! Must be google getting infested with managers who don't have shit clue about what is programming and computer science.
Yes, and also the problem with metaphors linking the human body with society is they are essentially communist also. In communism, the individual has no place if he/she is lesser equal and has almost all importance/power if he/she is more equal like politburo member or their crony.
Need to change slightly. I, whether a man or a woman, am not allowed to chew gum in Singapore. I, whether a man or a woman, am not allowed to drink alcohol publicly in places like Dubai. I, whether a man or a woman, am not allowed to smoke outside in the city in parts of Australia. I, whether a man or a woman, am not allowed to wear full body swimsuits in parts of France. Welcome to the world.
But I, only because am a woman, and because the barbaric Islamic sharia law treats women as second class citizens, have to wear hijab/burqa in Iran (or other Islmaic country). Welcome to Islam.
edit: typo
That's not equivalent to saying: Yuan may become a "world go-to currency" if China manages to remove many communist-style controls from it and demonstrates their intent to make it free-to-trade by allowing Yuan free-to-trade for a continuous period of 50 years at the least.
The article doesn't say this with such a detailed clarification and required qualifications to claims. Hence it seems like a propaganda coming from a communist dictatorship rather than a well researched article.
This. This is a lot to do with today's society. We don't seem to appreciate the problem at all. People just think that they can throw some money at someone and get the things repaired and so they don't need to learn anything.
Society as a whole may have to bear a huge cost, and by the time they realize this they might have already lost their time.
Manufacturers are a lot to blame but today's lifestyle of "it's just a matter of few bucks, so why waster time?" is also to blame.
Great insight. I wonder how far we (as in general society) have come from the science/technology aspects of our day to day life. Even repairing simple machines like a washing machine is almost beyond the ability of most people even with the availability of all tools needed.
I conjecture that despite the availability of information, the percentage of people with hacker-mindset is declining. Companies are to blame for this (obfuscation etc), no doubt, but societal culture also seems to play a very important role here.
The society doesn't seem to value such knowledge anymore much. Am I missing something?
Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too.
But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is not at all the way. The recent decision by Yandex to shift from Oracle to Postgres should be seen here. [1]
[1] https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05....