Seeking to make good arguments might be a better goal than always thinking about the ends like whether homeopathy is true in the end.
This feels backwards to me, so I suspect I’m misunderstanding this point.
I’d say it’s better to test homeopathy to see if it’s true, and then try to work out why that’s the case. There doesn’t seem to be much point in spending time figuring out how something works unless you already believe it does work.
The Red Cross made this same point in a blog post recently: http://blogs.redcross.org.uk/emergencies/2010/01/help-not-hinder-haiti/ - I think it’s the first time I’ve seen a charity make the point so explicitly and publicly.
When choosing my beliefs, I use a more important criterion than mere truth. I’d rather believe, quite simply, in whatever I need to believe in order to be happiest. I maximize utility, not truth.
Have you ever the experience of learning something true that you would rather not have learned? The only type of examples I can think of here (of the top of my head) would be finding out you had an unfaithful lover, or that you were really adopted. But in both case, it seems like the ‘unhappiness’ you get from learning it would pass and you’d be happy that you found out in the long wrong.
I’ve heard people say similar things about losing the belief in God—because it could lead to losing (or at least drifting away from) people you hold close, if their belief in God had been an import thing in their relationship to you.
Text is faster than speech, but if the video isn’t important (e.g. with BHTV) you can listen to them during times that you couldn’t read. Such as driving, or walking.
I listen to a lot of podcasts on my way to and from work, and it effectively doesn’t use extra time in my day—I’d be travelling anyway, so I might as well make good use of the time.
What are some examples of recent progress in AI?
In several of Elizer’s talks, such as this one, he’s mentioned that AI research has been progressing at around the expected rate for problems of similar difficultly. He also mentioned that we’ve reached around the intelligence level of a lizard so far.
Ideally I’d like to have some examples I can give to people when they say things like “AI is never going to work”—the only examples I’ve been able to come up with so far have been AI in games, but they don’t seem to think that counts because “it’s just a game”.
The Roomba is an example that seems to get a bit more respect (although it seems like a much simpler problem than many game AIs to me), but after that I pretty much run out of examples. Maybe I’m just not thinking hard enough because a lot of AI isn’t called AI when it becomes mainstream?
Examples that are more ‘geeky’ would also be good for me, even if they would be dismissed by non-geeky people I meet.
That reminds me of http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett06/dennett06_index.html
“To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other’s work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who’s counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws. ”
Did he give a reason? Just wondering if you’re “not famous enough” for him to risk losing to you.
We could create a group on http://friendfeed.com for that. That’s how groups on there tend to be used. e.g. http://friendfeed.com/googlebits and http://friendfeed.com/dslr
I’ve never heard this before, can you provide some links/references for more info please?