pfedor

You want per capita, otherwise you'd think China is wealthier than Switzerland. And you want PPP (though it doesn't make that much difference) since that reflects what people can actually afford. If you made $1M a month but the prices in your country were such that it would only buy dry bread and water, you'd still be poor.

For example, Alabama is almost as poor as France or Japan, and Mississippi (the poorest state) is almost as poor as Spain and New Zealand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP

For example, Steven Pinker looks into this a little in "The Better Angels of Our Nature", long story short there's nothing conclusive, and a sufficiently motivated person can find reasons to doubt it (e.g., the big drop in crime happened some ten years after the ramp up of incarceration rates, Canada experienced a similar decline in crime over that period without the corresponding increase in prison population), however, Pinker himself thinks that when all is said and done it seems likely that incarceration was one of the reasons. One other contributing factor was a large increase in the size of police forces during Clinton's presidency. On top of that, he argues the culture just for some reason shifted to being less violent.

(I want to also mention that he debunks quite convincingly the theory that the decrease in crime had anything to do with legalizing abortion.)

The author manages to make saving a billion human lives into a morally ambiguous deed: had the people starved, they wouldn't be polluting the planet!

Under a "Futarchy", the corn lobby can spend lots of money to "predict" that a sugar tariff will make the country better.

To do that they would have to bet a lot of money that the tariff will make the country better (by an objective metric which is decided upon by the voters), and if that turned out wrong, they would lose a lot of money.

Specifically, Bronze is a good game to get started, with some game features and a help system designed for beginners.

"Questions will be raised about Snowden’s mental balance. Also propaganda."

Why? Is it not a fair question to ask whether the guy who is the single source of all the revelations might not be playing with a full deck? The guy who said "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent" about Red China? Wouldn't it even be the most Occam-compliant assumption, unless your anti-American prior is so strong you automatically grant credibility to anyone who speaks against the US government?

"Snowden will be called a defector. Also propaganda."

Isn't that technically what he did?

defect 2 |diˈfekt| verb [ no obj. ] abandon one's country or cause in favor of an opposing one

(Biases on the table: I'm biased against people who defect from the US to communist countries.)

So pretty much your argument boils down to, "such a lookup table cannot exist, therefore any argument using it is irrelevant." Note that even Scott Aaronson disagrees with you in the article you cited.

If we were having this debate in the XVIII-th century, you could equally as well assert that any machine capable of playing chess should be considered a person. The motivation is exactly the same as with the Turing test: so far only humans can play chess, humans are sentient, QED.

Say someone said, "But what if a machine used a minimax algorithm." To which you could respond, armed with your knowledge of XVIIIth century technology, "Such thing cannot exist therefore it's an irrelevant question."

As for the creation of such a table, not that I consider that question particularly relevant, but here it is: Say a crazy scientist in the future created a program that actually simulated a human brain, then ran it (on future super-fast hardware) on every possible input (once again, the size of the input is bounded by the maximum length of a conversation a human can have), and stored the results on future super-large hard drives. Then he deleted the human brain simulation program, and gave you just the lookup table. The act of deleting the original program we may very well consider murder. But what about the generated lookup table?

Thanks for the link. I just read section 4 and I don't really see how it addresses the argument. It mostly seems to argue against the opinion that computer programs cannot be sentient. My point is much weaker: that it is manifestly absurd to insist that all computer programs which can pass the Turing test must be presumed sentient.

The article acknowledges that a lookup table could pass the Turing test--the author even uses this argument for his own ends. At the same time, clearly he doesn't think we should presume the lookup table sentient. The only passage which might be interpreted as an "objective distinction" is this one:

Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded.

And yet in the next paragraph the author says he's reluctant to stand behind such thesis.

Do you, unlike Scott Aaronson, want to adopt this amended postulate--i.e., do you believe all computer programs which can pass the Turing test should be granted personhood as long as they scale polynomially with the length of the conversation?

So while we're at that, how do the proponents of Turing test respond to the lookup table argument? Say I make a giant lookup table, with keys being all possible conversation prefixes and values being the answers. E.g., h["Hi"] = "Hi.". h["Hi. / Hi. / How are you?"] = "I'm OK, how are you?" etc. Sure the lookup table would be big but definitely finite, since its size is bounded by the maximum possible length of a Turing test conversation (which is at most the length of a human life--we would like humans to pass the test, right?) Will we be morally obligated to grant such hash table the same rights a person enjoys?

For example, consider this blog post: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=63

Now ask yourself: how on Earth did the author consider the information about Turing's persecution relevant to the subject at hand?

"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren.

If you don't have a connection to the world of physicists you may not realize how huge Mathematica is. I have a friend for whom it is the environment of choice for pretty much everything. Like, when he needs to do some image manipulation, he doesn't reach for ImageMagick, he does it in Mathematica. If he needed to set up a web server he'd probably do it in Mathematica too.

People say they can't stand Wolfram's lack of humility. Just get over it for your own benefit. People have flaws, that's life. If you get so enraged over his style that you can't listen to what he says, then you won't hear what he has to say which happens to be a lot of interesting things.

And just in case you weren't perfectly satisfied with the level of mathematical rigor of the article, here is a complete, formal, machine-verified and hyperlinked version of the proof: http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/eulerid.html

I think the vast majority of Americans would not object to the government building solidarity and shared values. That is and always has been a core function of the educational system.

Really? But Wikipedia tells me that After 1970 the desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model was challenged by proponents of multiculturalism,[4][5] who assert that cultural differences within society are valuable and should be preserved, proposing the alternative metaphor of the mosaic, salad bowl or "American Kaleidoscope" – different cultures mix, but remain distinct.[6][7]

You actually think that these states would still have slavery? To this day, thirty years after the last country in the world (Mauritania) abolished it?

I tried Elance and it worked surprisingly well for me, maybe I was lucky. Email me if you like and I'll give you details of the artist I'm working with and their pricing.

The reality is probably that no Linux (or FreeBSD) system in any configuration is secure from an attacker that can run native code in an unprivileged process.

There's a lot of web hosting companies which use Linux on their servers?. Are you saying they're all doing it wrong? Or by "an unprivileged process" do you mean "not specifically sandboxed process"?

As http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400 admits, large-scale entanglement most likely does take place in D-Wave's computer. So now he just argues that their proof of concept prototype is not as efficient as classical devices that have been perfected over fifty years.

If we lived in a world where nuclear energy was still just a theoretical possibility, and you had a company D-Uranium trying to build the first reactor ever, and someone like Scott Aaronson kept saying for years and years "You guys suck you haven't even demonstraded there are any atoms split inside your device, for all we know it's all heat from chemical reactions", and then, eventually in the face of evidence he was forced to admit that atoms indeed were being split in D-Uranium's pile, so he retreated to saying "But your reactor generates less heat than a coal burning power station so you guys still suck!"--what would that make you think?

Good to know, thanks.

I'd argue that perl gets it right--as the default behavior, this behavior would gravely violate the principle of least surprise, but for the 0.01% of people who want \d to match ੧, there's no harm to making it available as an option you need to specifically request.

Doesn't happen in Perl for me:

  pfedor@Pawels-iMac:~$ perl -ne 'print "Digit!\n" if /\d/'
  af
  3
  Digit!
  23fa3
  Digit!
  asdf
  ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹
  ৩৪৫৬৭৮৯੦੧੨੩੪੫੬੭੮੯૦૧૨૩૪૫
  ୧୨୩୪୫୬୭୮
  ౨౩౪౫౬౭౮౯೦೧೨೩೪೫೬೭೮೯൦൧൨൩൪൫൬൭൮൯๐๑๒๓๔๕๖๗๘๙໐໑໒໓
  234
  Digit!

From what I've read, the best approach seems to be to sit, but also to set a timer to get up and walk around for a minute every half hour or so

FWIW, that's exactly what my doctor recommended when I went to see him about back pain. I asked "Um, I hear great things about standing desks?", he didn't even say whatever, he said, "I don't want you to use a standing desk."

The truth is, D-Wave has done nothing to foster the coherence of their "qubits", and so they have built a very expensive, superconducting, classical computer. There is no quantum trick, actually.

Scott Aaronson, the self-described "Chief D-Wave Skeptic", disagrees with you:

Now, I’d say, D-Wave finally has cleared the evidence-for-entanglement bar—and, while they’re not the first to do so with superconducting qubits, they’re certainly the first to do so with so many superconducting qubits. So I congratulate D-Wave on this accomplishment. If this had been advertised from the start as a scientific research project—”of course we’re a long way from QC being practical— —but we’ve shown experimentally that can entangle 100 superconducting qubits with controllable couplings”—my reaction would’ve been, “cool!” -- http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400

Say I don't necessarily want to be ripped but I just want to do the minimum amount of exercise to be healthy. So I can go to the gym twice a week and do the program you advocate, or go to the gym twice a week and swim or run on the elliptical for 45 minutes. Your program will be better for me--unless I injure myself, and the risk of injury is much greater with free weight lifting than with swimming/ellipticals. Are the beneficial effects of free weights really that much better that they offset the risk of injury? Honest question.

For example, isn't it true that the Church of Scientology has been successfully using copyright infringement to quench speech against it?

I like C++, I think I know it reasonably well, I've been programming in C++ full time for the last 10 years.

I never managed to warm up to Stroustrup's book. I've tried reading it a couple of times. It feels like a schlep. There are many great books on C++. Koenig and Moo, Josuttis, "Effective C++", they all convey the technical information and at the same time read like page turners. I only read fragments of "Thinking in C++" but I think it's in the same category, it reads great. Some of them will no doubt have new editions, updated for C++11. So, not that there's anything wrong with Stroustrup's book, but it just can't compete. Much as I'm looking forward to reading a book on C++11 the language--there already exists an excellent one on the standard library, which is the new edition of Josuttis--it will not be "The C++ Programming Language", 4th edition.

This reminds me of something I witnessed when I worked at Google. There was this long-standing problem, I don't want to go into details but it had to do with websearch indexing and it had gone unsolved for years though it was regularly affecting search results in a negative way.

Then one guy solved it. The changelist he prepared wasn't even that long but it was crazy complex. Helpful comments contained links to a 100-pages long academic paper on top trees. Since it had been long established on the team that the guy was (a) a genius and (b) hundred percent reliable, it was generally assumed that the solution would work, however all code changes at Google need to be reviewed and nobody was able to review that CL. A number of people tried but they all dropped out, even though, unlike the ABC Conjecture professor, the author was absolutely willing to answer any questions you had.

Eventually the powers that be decided to trash the CL, not because there was any doubt regarding its correctness, but on the principle that you can't let anything that only one person can comprehend enter the codebase.

So do you believe that if you take a random sample of (eg) Google engineers, and a random sample of all software engineers, there will be no difference in ability between the two groups? Or do you think there would be a difference but attributable to something else than their hiring practices?

The corollary of course being that when you're so far gone that you can't even imagine anyone honestly thinking differently than you--that you're unwilling to even consider arguments in favor of other opinions--that you see what you believe as obvious and everyone as insane--then of course you will respond to any honest attempt at discussion the way you just did.

Anyone who thinks they're making sane hiring decisions based on conventional job interviews with developers is deluding themselves.

So for example Google, Facebook, Microsoft, are all deluding themselves? Would they be not any worse off if they replaced interviews with say rolling dice?