> Clearly you'll have tons of collisions with that solution
Why?
If we assume the hash code assignment to one of the 2^32 people is uniformly random from a set of 2^160 codes, the odds of finding a collision are astronomically small (order of 2^-95 or so). Am I missing something?
Math is essential for this field, anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about. You can hack together something quick and dirty without understanding the underlying math, and you certainly can use existing libraries and tools to do some basic stuff, but you won't get very far.
Machine learning is easy only if you know your linear algebra, calculus, probability and stats, etc. I think this classic paper is a good way to test if you have the right math background to dive deeper into the field: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pd...
Agreed. Plus, the current notation is a result of multiple iterations by some brilliant people. If you look at older attempts at formal mathematical notation, some of it is laughably bad in comparison. We are standing on the shoulder of giants :)
No, I'm disagreeing with the statement that you don't need calculus as a statistician. You absolutely do. The expected value is an integral, and is the very first concept in stats / data analysis / whatever you want to call it.
Well people have varying abilities towards algorithmic thinking, abstraction/generalization, spatial reasoning, creativity, focus and attention to detail, etc.
Relational just means tabular in the context of relational databases. For storing large-scale social networks I would think of specialized graph databases before anything else.
AdTech is a broken industry with most participants providing zero to negative value to the world. They are basically just nodes in a messy, unregulated, scam-ridden chain of players moving an ad from technically illiterate buy side to an equally illiterate sell side, taking something like 70% of the money in the process. Zero value for humanity, no comparison to Wall Street...
Where exactly did they make you say "Sir! Yes Sir!"? I have worked in NYC finance and fin tech for years and have never seen anything close to the caricature you're describing. Also, what is Marathon?
What makes it right is purely pragmatic and a function of our abilities and limitations, scientific and computational resources, time constraints, etc. We could in theory run quantum simulations for everything, given the resources, but we don't have them.
Possibly poor wording, my intent was to say that you cannot dismiss or underestimate statistics in modeling the mind because the damn thing is a sophisticated statistical information retrieval system (with some higher-level structure on top for doing things like debating mind modeling on HN).
No I'm not arguing for a statistics-only scheme, just that you can't ignore it / abstract it away, and that its role is crucial in cognition. I think we agree with each other.
The issue being discussed is the choice of right level of abstraction and the right tools for modeling a given real-world phenomenon. My comment says that statistics is essential in modeling this particular phenomenon, based on my experience and intuition and that of many experts in the field. Responding with "who cares?" doesn't make sense to me. What part of my statement do you disagree with?
You need to use the right level of abstraction for the problem at hand. For modeling intelligence, abstracting away the probabilistic/statistical aspects of cognition greatly limits your options. Continuing the web development analogy, abstracting away statistics in cognitive science is like abstracting away JavaScript/HTML and using WYSIWYG GUI tools. With the same effect of only being applicable in toy problems and not scaling to real world scenarios :)
100% agreed. GEB is a great book, but Hofstadter hasn't been relevant in this field for a while now (AFAIK). Good old fashioned AI approaches show what a giant blind spot our minds are for our species, how little introspection goes on even within the brightest minds. Modern approaches to AI/ML have yielded tangible results and moved the field in the right direction, dismissing those results makes anyone look ridiculous in 2013.
You cannot not reduce it to statistics, vast majority of your cognitive activity is statistical in nature, in the more general sense of the word. The actual high-level structured thoughts are a very thin layer on top of a huge statistical information processing powerhouse.
Nah, data science is AI-complete, like natural language understanding. Think of current state of data science as just the next iteration / rebranding of statistics, powered by newest developments in CS, machine learning and software industry. There is no shortage of statistical data exploration and modeling applications, and we are pretty far from full software automation in this space.
Wouldn't it be in the best interest of memes to never let us figure them out though? To never obtain this view of the world where memes are exposed for the parasites that they are? Maybe "theory of memetics" is a next-generation meme that took over our collective consciousness to exterminate all the other primitive memes and gain world domination :)
Awesome post. About the "fantastic two-gene change": can't there ever be a force pushing for a species to obtain two independent mutations more or less simultaneously? What I mean by that is pressure on a species to maintain / promote a few existing mutations in the population (each individual may carry one, or the other, or none, but the offspring of carriers is likely to end up with more than one). I imagine in very narrow bottlenecks this could be the case, e.g. tough ecosystem forcing early humans to a. become bipedal and b. think/plan better. Such bottlenecks could also be caused by inter-species dynamics, climate change, etc.
Actually the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that multiple interacting species introduce a serious argument against the blind hill-climbing view of evolution. Essentially what you have is not a single point on a landscape blindly climbing in the direction of the gradient, but a probability distribution with a given mean point that could jump to another mean currently at its periphery given enough pressure / interference. E.g. a newly migrated predator eating away 90% of variance of the distribution of some existing sheep-like species, leaving only its tough "tail", thus severely relocating the centroid. Maybe this is something trivial I'm just realizing, I'm not a biologist.
There are two issues here, I think. One, as a layman in math you end up reading about / paying attention to the discoveries you can parse and understand, thus introducing a bias by ignoring the results that require years of math training to understand. Second, the specific examples you listed are not entirely accurate or even comparable (one is a theorem, one an axiom). There is a risk of misunderstanding the results when they are presented in English, oversimplified and converted to common terms. This oversimplification may lose important details (not just formal stuff) and may end up with a common-sense sounding phrase that trivializes the result and doesn't really do it justice.
I have noticed that in some small immigrant population pockets in the US the majority of offspring is boys, and I've been wondering about the biological causes for this phenomenon. The explanation I heard is that the acidity can be regulated by stress levels of the female, causing more boys to be born in a more stressful environment. At the time I thought it's pure pseudoscience.
Still, I think that specific issue is on the radar all the time and addressed by presidents and politicians precisely because of its divisive nature (can be easily used to divide people into warring factions, for historical/religious/whatever reasons). In the grand scheme of things, there are much more urgent problems to be solved. This is not meant to be dismissive of a particular group who have suffered a particular injustice in a particular point in time (there are many such groups and many injustices that are never discussed on a national level and turned into political shows).
EDIT: To clarify, I fully understand that it's a problem that needs to be addressed. I'm against any injustice against any group of people, based on arbitrary historical prejudices or otherwise. I'm just expressing my opinion on how the people who decide which issues to address and how to address them are motivated by political convenience vs actual priority.
Those are minor issues blown out of proportion to engage the population, divide it along imaginary lines and have them go through victories and defeats and enjoy the show. It's the circus part of "bread and circuses". Real issues are decided upon without ever consulting you. Just IMHO
You notice the corruption of mass media when they cover a subject you are closely familiar with, but the general population can be easily misled on (say, political situation in an obscure corner of the world). They don't try too hard to be careful and maintain plausible deniability in these cases, and go for outright lies and extremely biased pieces. I've seen this happen too many times across a variety of news outlets, which makes me very skeptical of everything else I hear on the news. This recent scandal is not helping their image either.