bascule

Okay, how can this possibly not be posted yet? I TOLD U I WAS HARDCORE

That's... why the poll is phrased in the form of a question. That'd be a red herring, if this thread were anything more than idle speculation... Cool. Want a cookie? Sorry, you just forfeited your cookie... maybe you ought to click the unnamed person's link and educate yourself about hurricanes a bit more

Is that supposed to be a reply to my comment? It seems like you quoted me then went off on a totally unrelated tangent

I'm hearing a lot of opinions being expresed here which... don't logically follow from a rule-by-logic system. She's provided reasoning for her actions free of logical fallacies, and stated axioms from which she draws her conclusion. What she's expressed isn't a consistent formal logic system, but it cerainly isn't illogical. All that aside, you seem to argue that logic is inherently cruel, heartless, and evil. None of those concepts are in any way tied to logic. When we think of someone as being "cold and calculating", that's because the axioms they are operating upon don't include compassion. Utilitarianism embodies a logical moral system with compassion as one of its fundamental axioms. (And I can only hope that our hypothetical Friendly AI ruler is a Utilitarian, or at least espouses a Utilitarian-derived moral philosophy) My view is that in an age of information ubiquity where all human knowledge can finally be sorted into consistent, logically constructed ontological systems, anyone attempting to argue contrarily to the super Philosopher King AI system wouldn't have a leg to stand on. I guess, in the end, compromises would have to be made in the form of axioms, and some participatory involvement would be required in order for Philosopher King AI to construct the axiomatic structure and choose what compromises are necessary to keep the entire system consistent. You seem to be confusing artificial intelligence with expert systems. While the logical system constructed by AI could be implemented in the form of an expert system, the degree of seperation between the programmer and AI will be one as immense as the seperation between groups of neurous and mind. If AI made a mistake, it would be no different than a human making a mistake. If AI remotely resembles human consciousness (I personally think AI will arise from a functional model of the neocortical column, once a project like BlueBrain manages to create one), then it will be based on immense collections of self-similar structures (the neocortical column is repeate millions of times in the brain, accounting for roughly 20 billion neurons). Failure to properly implement the self-similar structures would make the entire system fail completely (it couldn't construct a model of reality from input patterns alone). Logical errors on the part of AI would be due to a failure in reasoning. As the Internet evolves more and more into a semantically annotated ontological structure, the role of AI will be more to traverse (and collaboratively develop) this structure. Thus the logic errors will more than likely be a result of (repeated, distributed) error in semantic annotations created by humans (or at least, resulting from human mistakes) than a failure of the AI itself. All that aside, once we have consciousness in a computer and can profile and eliminate bottlenecks as well as find ways to scale up the capacity of data the system can keep in working memory, it will surely (if AI is fundamentally possible of course) outperform the ability of any human programmer, and, having access to a program which describes its own inner workings, will have the capacity to detect logic errors in its own design (as well as continue work on eliminating bottlenecks and scaling its own capacity). This concept is called seed AI, and was popularized in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. I find libertarians (The Cato Institute sort, at least) to be vocal proponents of logic. That doesn't make them good people, but there's no reason to assume that a Philosopher King would take an authoritarian position. Not saying that you're doing that here, necessarily, but I wanted to get that out there.

Surgical strike by black ops to take out their nuclear facilities

A method for organizing and semantically annotating (into a unified ontological structure) the entire system of human knowledge (at least digitized human knowledge) would need to be assembled, as well as consciousness capible on acting on that structure as a whole. Such an intelligence (if benevolent) is the only sort of being who could possibly fulfill the role as the ultimate Philosopher King... So, yeah, to sum it up I'm talking about friendly AI here...

Yes The system would have to dynamically adapt and restructure to accommodate changing axioms. Paradoxes would have to be resolved either by adapting arguments to ensure consistency, or adding/changing axioms

If by simplistic you mean overly idealistic and impractical, I agree. However, I already conceeded that, and that isn't what this topic is about. Puerile? How so? That's certainly not what I mean. I mean: possesses the best decision-making methodology given the available information. Wandering into strawman terroritory here. I'll assume it's from a legitimate misunderstanding. Although if you call Plato's Philosopher King a dictator, then so be it, yes, I'm describing a rule-by-logic dictatorship. There are also logic systems for compassion and caring. It's called Utilitarianism. I think the phraseology you're looking for is "There is no set of universally agreed upon governmental axioms" From the above, I believe your understanding of the fundamental concepts behind logic is flawed. And now you've certainly demonstrated that you don't comprehend logic. The validity of axioms says nothing about the validity of logic systems constructed from them. The logic system can be rendered inconsistent by changing axioms, however this doesn't necessarily follow from changing axioms themselves; it's a different case entirely. It's possible to change axioms and still retain a consistent logical system from which a new set of conclusions follow, depending on how the logic system is constructed.

Might I suggest... a shirt that says on the front: "Schrodinger's Cat is dead" And on the back: "We at it at Wei Chung's Chinese resturaunt"

We are ruled by politics, which, for all intents and purposes, is the art of compromise. Sadly, this includes compromise with illogical people. Therefore, politics can't be purely logical until everyone doing the politicking agrees that all arguments for a position should be free of logical fallacies. Thus politics remains a haphazard, illogical decision making process. It is my belief that a logical government would govern best, and that law should represent a consistent formal logic system with prespecified and universally agreed upon axioms (which can change over time) from which every law can be derived through logical argumentation. I'm not saying this is practical. I'm saying this is best. If axioms change in such a way to invalidate the logic from which particular laws are derived, then those laws should automatically be rendered invalid. I think this is what all governmental systems throughout history have attempted to become. In America, for example, the Constitution would represent our set of axioms, the fundamental set of rules which all other laws must fall within and not invalidate. This set of rules is changable, but the process is difficult. Agree? Disagree?

Ruby's creator's goal was to create a language which maximizes programmer expressivity, allowing you to write as little code as possible and avoid writing the same code over and over again (embodied in the mostly Rubyist acronym DRY - don't repeat yourself. They've even made it into a verb... DRY out code) Rails motto tends to be "convention over configuration", i.e. if 99% of people do something the same way, then make things hard for the 1% in order to make it the default for the 99%. Well, there was a huge prescription fallacy-based argument I saw today: http://gregluck.com/blog/archives/2006/07/report_from_osc.html Bottom line: The runtime is slow compared to bytecode-based runtimes like Java and Python. Ruby uses dynamic typing, which many argue makes it hard to use on large (i.e. enterprise) projects, where type errors are caught at compile time. Rails' solution is to advocate test-driven development, where you write tests first then code second (meaning your tests will fail until you write code that passes them). That way your code at least does what you designed the test to test for. The solution for catching type errors then becomes to catch them with tests, rather than when compiling. I've used a number of different languages for web development. The first language I ever used was... C, back in 1995 when it was either that or Perl, and I really hated Perl. After that, I jumped on the PHP3 bandwagon circa 1999, and stuck with that until I discovered Rails. I soon discovered PHP's lack of a cohesive framework became a huge problem, and I ended up writing very similar database glue over and over for everything I wrote in PHP. Eventually PHP5 came out, and I started investigating some database abstraction libraries (technically Object Relational Mappers or ORM) such as Propel and EzPDO. I found these to be an XML-filled headache. Then I discovered Rails, where everything was automatic. Huzzah! Bottom line: Agile practices (which are infused into Rails and the way you're expected to use it) lead to faster development with less code and substantially less debugging time (since the overwhelming majority of your debugging can be done by tests) You can throw new people on a project and let them manipulate the code without worrying that they'll silently break something. If they do, then hopefully the tests will catch it!

What matters more, a potential life or a potential cure? -- Colbert Hmm, from a Utilitarian perspective, the answer is obvious...

Ruby on Rails is awesome, even if revprez likes it, but it's okay, because I've been coding it professionally since before he knew it existed! What is it? Well it's only the latest, great way to develop web applications. Rails is the name of a framework (a set of libraries) which was developed for the Ruby language, which is kind of like Python but Japanese. In many ways the syntax looks a lot like Perl. Anyway, in 5 - 10 minutes you can develop your first Ruby on Rails application. Just follow this tutorial and it will help you get started: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html

I talked about the Bohm interpretation on another thread. It was basically constructed to demonstrate that non-local hidden variable theories are possible. It isn't supposed to be an accurate description of the universe. Although I did post in Speculations, before reading about the Bohm interpretation, about something similar. It was more just sophistry coming from the perspective of "If I had to come up with a data structure to store the universe, how would I design it?"

They don't work very well. And they create ozone. And they use a lot of electricity. Recommendation: AVOID!

Whatever's happening, it's some sort of electromagnetic reaction with air molecules. Turn on a lifter inside a vacuum and... nothing.

The hurricane season is underway and we're in the middle of what's shaping up to be the worst heat wave on record. What do you think the hurricane season will be like?

I'd say... something similar to the Bohm interpretation. What I'd really like to see is a Universe-as-CA sort of interpretation where the specific nature of wavefunction collapse is dependent upon the state of the system as a whole (which is, as I understand it, the supposition the Bohm interpretation makes)

Famous Last Words is also a Tears for Fears song o/` Hand in hand we'll do or die listenin' to the band that made us cry... we'll have nothin' to lose... we'll have nothing to gain... just to stay this real-life situation... for one last refrain

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/21/Sept.11.prof.ap/index.html?section=cnn_topstories I'm pretty torn on this issue. On the one hand, I think 9/11 conspiracy theorists are completely delusional, propagate a bunch of hearsay/lies/misinterpretations/half-truths between each other. This pisses me off more than Ward Churchill (at least I could see where he was coming from) However, I can see a legitimate free speech angle here. In the end, I'd lean towards saying can his ass for teaching lies. In the words of the Onion... what do you think?

http://www.physlink.com/News/102605NuclearPetition.cfm The DOD is requesting nuclear first-strike capibility against non-nuclear targets. Over 470 physicists have signed off in opposition.

In a controlled demolition, the building's structure doesn't end up "loaded" as load-bearing trusses bend under the weight as they are heated by fire.

On the contrary, I'm being skeptical of the conspiracy theorist claims. The official report is substantiated by a mountain of evidence. Conspiracy theories are fueled by logical fallacies, specious reasoning, hearsay, and half-truths. Before you go accusing others of a lack of skepticism, maybe you should try applying a skeptical eye to the conspiracy theory.

Oh, and let me add: I'm glad we have a moralistic, evangelical President who can save those poor, dead babies' stem cells from helping the maimed and dying. Those aborted fetuses should go into an incinerator where they belong! No one should profit off of the abortion murder factory, they should suffer with their horrible, debilitating diseases!