Popcorn Sutton

If you guys need help with the spam bots, I might be able to write a program for you. But to prevent it entirely is probably going to need user name detection of spammers which could accidentally ban innocent people.

I want to take credit where it is due, but I do not want to put my life on the line to do it. It's a fine line that you tread when your putting intelligence out there. I trust the current powers of the world, if they wanted me, it wouldn't be too hard for them, but I don't trust the immature and irresponsible.

Thats no queen tar lol

I guess if you put it that way, I don't have a professional career in science. I wish I did though. He did suggest that the math is being calculated after the fact that the predictions are adjusted.

I've made it a point in my professional career in science to make likeability a function distinct from probability. It usually happens after the fact that something occurs, but it does seem to have significance in defining the future behavior of an agent. In AI, it's probably in our best interest to incorporate likeability for the sole purpose of avoiding future dilemmas such as putting a nuclear weapon in the hands of someone irresponsible, and other clearly analogous behavior.

Your right, sorry, I'm used to calculating probabilities for now and whatever is within the closest proximity. I would, however, like to distinguish a clear difference between probability and likelihood, and in this case, it would seem to me that we are calculating likelihood rather than probability. Likelihood requires that someone knows reward and punishment odds on top of probability.

Tar, No dice. If you come to know anything about me, know this. I will not bet on dice. I will, however, bet on a distinguished card counter. Or a very precise dice rolling calculator...

Tar, I have to concede on the grounds of the anthropic principle. There is no omniscient mortal that I am aware of. That does not go to say that if I were the person in control of the water that I could have done differently, because I do not believe that I could have. I don't think our views are different though

Question answered. Thanks, I will keep my name to myself. Safety is of the utmost priority for my heavy brain and relatively light body ;D

The science forums are technically my publisher atm. Same was true about other forums.

Will it be displayed publicly? I want the benefits of being known without the risk of having a bullet put in my head.

I decided that I'm going to go with Krauss' something from nothing hypothesis because that seems to abide by Occams Razor and where my thoughts have been for some time But for a more precise argument as to my reasoning behind supporting Krauss, see my first post on this thread. Basically, time is like a string, and our observable universe is probably confined to this string of time which is being repelled from tge gravitational center, and solidifying at the parameters of this galaxy, thus becoming projected as a part of the hologram, speeding up as it reaches the parameter causing a membrane, but slowing down toward the center where time is being emitted and all matter diverges from nothing.

You count the number of successful attempts and divide it by the total number of attempts for both cases. Subtract the latter from the former and youll have the change in percentage.

I agree with Sam Harris and mr Dennett that we don't have a free will, just that we have the illusion of free will, and more particularly, freedom itself. I have good reasons to assume this is the case as well. As a linguist and an engineer, I can't believe in free will for the sole purpose that it makes things indeterminate, which is highly undesirable. I cannot accept any premise that suggests randomness, chaos, or indeterminacy even in the slightest bit, it's inconsistent with all observation to say the least. As Dan puts it, given the replication of the exact precise moment that a choice arises, the "decision" that is made will 100% of the time be the same exact decision.

Hey Mike, I believe that most philosophers (and even the supreme court here in the US) have made a consensus that the "free will" is an illusion.

Oh the toils of having a limit to observation. Woe... Woe! What about a multimacroverse. I've often thought, what about the idea of everything growing larger and our brain as a tool to decelerate this macroscipation, hence, acquiring memory and allowing for multimicroverse theory to be plausible. Or I might just be living in a proctocracy lol!

All I did was put the alphabet in math, how is that biased?

I said that I can write the program which you can look at. It will have no bias, I promise. It will take the essays, run a simple algorithm, accumulate knowledge, and present us with the most statistically significant sequences to be placed on the test, which we can use for both the voters and the candidates Part of the code is used in my program for ai and can also be used to skim through websites like this. It's not hard at all.

I don't have the battery power to address your entire post at the moment, but I will elaborate when I get the chance. The point I do want to make is that a completely unbiased computer program will analyze the essays written by the people and the questions will emerge. No one decides how to word the questions, the popular questions will emerge statistically. We could make the system so you have to answer the significant questions first in order to answer the less significant questions. There may be equality in the popularity of questions, but it will be statistically based and completely unbiased.

There is no evidence to support your claim though. The system hasn't even been tested on a small scale. I read the wikipedia of arrows impossibility theorem and I don't believe that anything is impossible (you also used the word 'cannot' which implies impossibility). I think we have a great country, but I also believe that things do need to change in time. This system is outdated, it's not at its last whim, but it's not sufficient to keep up with the rate at which things are changing and I think that corruption and laziness is avoidable. We know practically nothing about our candidates and they commit the slippery slope fallacy often! The popular candidates often will not discuss or even take a clear stance on the key issues we face. They don't want to risk losing the vote. I don't even know what it means to be a democrat or a republican. I've got all this schooling and it still makes no sense to me. I'm no exception either. I think that if we try it out, even on a small scale, we will see that careful measurement is the way to go rather than arbitrary selection. In my experience, measurement works much more efficiently. Try it in one township, then move up to one county, if it works, try a state, if we like it, then why not do it in a country or even the entire world. Just try it somehow. I could write the program to analyze the essays in one afternoon and make it spam proof if you guys decide to try this system out. Even if it is just student body elections, or just an experimental election, I'd be happy to write the code for you guys. There is a way to get the best candidate even if the voters only end up completing the 5 first questions. Say that we consider the best candidate to be the one that is most informed on the current consensus. This means that that person would have taken a good portion of time and spent a lot of energy on filling out the questions given to them in their candidates test, possibly also elaborating on every one in a short essay. This would make the 5 questions that the quiz taker answered automatically get cast towards the candidate that answered all 5,000(arbitrary number, the test could in reality consist of 100,000 or more questions) questions of the quiz, agreed with the quiz taker completely, and even elaborated on the key issues causing him/her to gain more favor from the key sequences. That way, we have the most intellectual people in positions of power, which has in the past showed the greatest promise for economic growth. We could be sustaining a GDP well above 8% on an annual rate just by making this simple transition to an essay, test, quiz ordered system of elections. It would base public policy on evidence, which I think is much more desirable for the people who live in the area being governed. It is worth noting that if we don't make an immediate and universal transition from the current political system to scientocracy we will be faced with dilemmas between those who are less informed and those who have been chosen through this system that may cause setbacks. (Though, the setbacks will only be temporary and may not be any more significant than our current dilemmas, in fact, they would probably still be progressive). I'm probably going to write the code anyway and post it here (with the permission of the moderators) when I get the chance just for the sake of easy experimentation in case someone does choose to test out the system.

Wow Split. I'm sorry for your experience, you moved me with that post. I can say nothing less than I love you. I think you do this world a great service and I'm glad to have you here with us. If there is anything I can do for you, let me know.

Ok so how about this, everyone who wants to be a candidate can be a candidate. All candidates take a test that addresses the topics of interest (and they can choose to elaborate to increase the odds of being selected due to key words/phrases being used). A computer will generate the topics of the quiz by asking that the people participate in an essay about the current status of their country where we can easily pick out common sequences. We start the quiz and the candidates test with the most common sequences (grammaticized of course) and continue the test until the generated sequences are not statistically significant. The quiz takers can answer as many questions on the quiz as they want and stop at any point knowing that the following questions are less significant than the previous ones by the consensus of the majority. Now that we have such a large base of candidates in the election, we will have many candidates that share the same beliefs, and I assume that we will have plenty of candidates that just barely differ from the next. This way, we can pick out of the crowd the exact candidate that is most likely to be in favor of the public, and hence, have favor of the other politicians who have also been elected in the same way. Problem solved. As for your other remark, I'm sorry for who I am and especially if I have had any negative impact on your life. If I have a say in the naming of this type of system, I would call it popcornism as an ideal, or scientocracy as the implementation.

Sorry I made a typo, I meant should*. But why do you feel that way? Are you by any chance involved in politics as a career? That would make your statement biased. Wow D H, it makes much more sense to me now as to why we have the system we have. Maybe we can save my quiz idea though by saying that the quiz does not automatically determine a candidate, but it can determine a decision? My point is that we need something like a quiz system to get what we desire, otherwise it just seems that we don't have a say in the most part. But then again, from a scientific perspective, I don't believe in desire.

I think that the voting system is flawed, and that a lot of us will agree. So, I want to propose the idea of replacing it with a quiz system instead. My goal is to get this idea nationalized. Instead of voting (especially for the same redundant right or left who a lot of us know nothing about) why not replace it with a quiz system? It would be a much more efficient method of elections imo for getting what we, as a public whole, desire most. An example of the quiz would be a simple "Do you want to legalize x? Yes, No. Do you want the money to go towards y? Yes, No." I hope that we can change our system as soon as possible to this new proposed system for the greater good. At the end of the quiz, it will be determined that your vote is automatically going towards the candidate who agrees most with your position. (And I would hope that this system should be demonstrably not biased)

I hate to join in without reading the previous 69 pages but that is what I am going to do (sorry no offense to the rest of the posters). Split, I learn more about you every post. It's nice to get to know more about you, I had my suspicions about who you were, but those have been put to rest by now. I do not believe that people who believe in god are broken. What does it mean to be "broken" in the first place? I assume that it means something along the lines of having a negative impact on society. I think we can all agree that we are all victims to cause and effect and that our minds are no exception. That being said, the issue of whether there is a creator or not is still moot, and I'm not sure if the issue will ever be anything less than moot. Therefor, to say that people who believe in God are broken is a gross overgeneralization. It doesn't hold for everyone. I consider myself to be along the lines of agnostic, not that I have no theory of a creator, just that the only plausible theory IMO is that a creature is responsible for the computational program that we live in (if that statement has any merit). Therefor, is this belief (one that I have not yet conclusively made a stance on and will not for good purposes philosophical) in itself a belief that will cause me to justifiably kill or harm innocent people? Even if the answer is yes, I would also need to believe that I have a body that will allow me to perform those actions. So, given this bit, the premise that the belief in God (in itself) is detrimental and, in [fact], a harmful belief for society, all things being equal, is not sufficient to conclude that it should be eliminated from our knowledge. Imo, there's no harm in believing in god, and the belief itself will not make you "broken". Cause and effect, pragmatically speaking, is, however, a good premise on the harmful nature of beliefs, but only if, in every circumstance, that belief was presumed in the action and/or used as justification for an immoral action.