Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
My blog about philosophy, coding, and anything else that interests me.
Tweets
An archive of my tweets and retweets through . They may be formatted slightly differently than on Twitter. API access has since gotten prohibitively expensive – I don't know whether or when I'll be able to update this archive.
But in case I will, you can subscribe via RSS – without a Twitter account. Rationale
The plot thickens. If true, highly relevant and eye-opening as to how the communist party in China has been covertly pressuring Western politicians into executing lockdown measures. twitter.com/MichaelPSenger…
David Deutsch offers a compelling, hopeful and inspiring vision for society in his book “The Beginning of Infinity.”
Forget @jack’s disastrous donation of $10m to aggressor @DrIbram. Peanuts, it would seem: BBC now allocating £100m to finance self-censorship and, presumably, active discrimination against those who fit “the wrong script,” meaning white colleagues and collaborators. twitter.com/BBC/status/127…
RT @ChipkinLogan:
My story about Constructor Theory has been published with Gizmodo - gizmodo.com/a-meta-theory-…
@RosePastore @gizmodo @DrBri…
@infexm1 @ExmuslimsOrg
Interesting thought. To me it seemed to indicate she knew exactly what he was getting at but didn't want to admit it.
I didn’t say that was the purpose. That’s the way he wants to achieve his purpose. And surely you would agree that it’s ironic if his goal really is to reduce racism?
A better way to reduce racism is not to put so much emphasis on race and not to stir up hatred like Kendi does
@ckshowalter @giantcat9 @_Islamicat
Jabril is has left for Somalia
By discriminating against white people for being white? Do you see the irony in that?
And today they're writing articles arguing that telegrams are racist.
Does this quote sound to you like he wants to help heal the recovering wounds of the past, or tear them open and put salt in them for political gain?
A quote from his recent book:
"The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
$10M toward hate, division, and coercion. twitter.com/jack/status/12…
Remember when "the lungs of the Earth" were burning and everyone thought the world was ending?
Was Leonardo DiCaprio able to fix it or what happened?
I’ve thought about it. But then tomorrow substack might support BLM. May be better to go fully self-hosted.
Are you familiar with the concept of universality? Explanatory and computational in particular?
When I worked at General Assembly (bootcamp web-dev course), they also had a check mark in every row.
@Yankuniz @CNC3P0 @SamHarrisOrg
If someone told you to obey some demand you disagree with—e.g., they force you to go outside and mingle with old people, thereby increasing their exposure to the virus—how would that make you feel? Would you not consider resistance your moral duty?
@berndj @ModelsofMind @CNC3P0 @SamHarrisOrg
If we are mistaken—and we almost always are—coercion must entrench our mistakes.
@berndj @ModelsofMind @CNC3P0 @SamHarrisOrg
That’s not to mention that we can be mistaken about which ideas are true or false, better or worse, etc.
@berndj @ModelsofMind @CNC3P0 @SamHarrisOrg
I didn't say all opinions have equal merit (they don't).
I was arguing against coercion. It's not okay to coerce someone even if they have ridiculously false (seemingly or not) ideas.
Oooh that’s a very good idea.
How come there’s no shadow of the plane itself at the tip? Too small/blurry maybe?
It moved with the plane and got longer over time. https://t.co/BxrPxUucdl
I once saw a single, thin, black line on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. What might that have been?
Maybe one of the most exciting silver linings of Popperian epistemology being underrated is that, recent progress notwithstanding, it's still largely underdeveloped—many great discoveries remain to be made and you can actively shape the field.
It's a good time to be a Popperian.
Wasn't meant as a refutation, sir, only as a contribution.
Only problem is, you can’t have one without the other.
@_Islamicat @JarvisDupont @TitaniaMcGrath @TheBabylonBee
Is sad day for free speech but great day for catliphate.
I'm not sure there is a "best" way, but I suggest focusing on problems you want to solve and pursuing what's fun and interesting to you. That's what I did when I started. In case it helps, I wrote a bit about the topic here: medium.com/swlh/anyone-ca…
That, despite being false, the claim is so widespread?
RT @jdnoc:
The reason my product generates $35k MRR is because my product generates $1,000,000 MRR combined for my customers (1000 customer…
@EraseState @liberty_deity
*cooperative
I should tweet less from my phone.
@EraseState @liberty_deity
Yes, they want to introduce real exploitation and coercion into a peaceful and cooperate system that they somehow perceive as coercive.
Same with SJW and their perceived injustices.
@arejaygraham @lynz_h55
Yes, such as reinforcement “learning,” inborn rules for communication and change of behaviors, etc. So long as we can explain these things that way, we’d really want evidence of knowledge that couldn’t be inborn.
@arejaygraham @lynz_h55
Have we not seen much more complex phenomena that we explain through biological evolution? Such as beaver dams, animals’ physiology, spider webs, certain parasites controlling the brains of other animals etc. Yet all of these things can be explained through unborn algorithms.
@arejaygraham @lynz_h55
Can you think of a way all that could be traced back to inborn knowledge?
Well, today it would read “the telephone is racist.”
Children do not learn via reinforcement, if that’s what you’re suggesting.
And btw, the idea that we can explain anything animals do through genetically-inherited, i.e., inborn knowledge, and that therefore we should be careful to consider them intelligent, originated with David Deutsch; I’m just trying to build on the idea.
Nor could explanations ever be established anyway (see Popper’s work).
Re the wolves, yes, their hunting skills are pre-installed. I expand on that explanation with the thought experiment of chess-playing dogs in this interview, starting at 32:54 soundcloud.com/doexplain/11-a…
It doesn’t matter whether the findings are established, only how good they are as explanations. If we judged new explanations by how established they are, they would never have a chance simply because they’re new and couldn’t have been established yet.
Well, it depends. Let’s consider a pack of wolves. Are their hunting skills a pre-installed app in each of their “minds,” or did they create those skills themselves, during their lifetimes? Or better yet, are you familiar with the example of chess-playing dogs?
My point was that by your own definition, none of it is biological.
Okay. Since you define it as an act of creation, and those pre-installed apps are just that—pre-installed—doesn’t that mean that intelligence, by your definition, is not biological? And if so, doesn’t that contradict what you wrote earlier, namely:
Okay. When you use the term “intelligence,” are you referring to the sophistication of those pre-installed apps, the creativity algorithm itself (regardless of how sophisticated the knowledge it produces may be), the sophistication of the knowledge it produces, or something else?
The difference is that people are creative. We are not born with knowledge of how to communicate, or how to recognize faces, or how to build space shuttles, etc. We learn this after birth by creating the knowledge ourselves.
Yes, rules for simple communication can be determined entirely genetically. So the example of crows recognizing faces over generations need not be evidence of intelligence.
You'll see, but can you answer my question?
So we can agree that the arrogance doesn't have any effect on a claim's truth value?
Regarding your other point, do you then think that the spaceshuttles people have built were genetically encoded? If they were, how come it took us so long to build them?
What do you think we do know about the human mind?
I know nothing about you or your background knowledge, so I’ll just say this: some people do know. Not all of humanity thinks or knows the same things.
I can expand on what we know about the topic if you’re interested. Up to you.
He later sends the Spartans a poem "in commemoration of our wrestling competition."
Am I the only one seeing this?
Plato tells the others about how he's been hanging out with some Spartans, and how they "were up all night, wrestling by candlelight." He then "smiles indulgently in recollection."
They say homosexuality was much more common in antiquity than it is today.
Chapter 10 of "The Beginning of Infinity," called "A Dream of Socrates," contains a fictional dialog between Socrates and some of his associates, including Plato.
🧵👇
Sure thing. I didn't use a library for that. Server-side filter functions based on topics should do the trick. That's not to say it might not be easier to use a library!
Which story gets them more clicks? A doomsday one or an optimistic one?
So it take it your answer to my question is, "it's stored in the beaver's genes."
Where do you think that knowledge comes from?
Do you think that, if a statement is true, if it is made arrogantly, that that changes it to being false?
Exactly. And can you think of a way communication could be done non-creatively?
Can you think of a way to explain this that doesn't involve Lamarckism?
Ah, good point, so let's take perhaps the most complex of artefacts some animals create, such as beaver dams and spider webs. Where do you think the knowledge of how to build beaver dams resides in the beaver, and where does it come from?
Do you think a newborn baby can do as much as a newborn dolphin?
Humans know about the properties of uranium from explanations (which they created themselves), not from rewards or punishment (i.e., positive or negative reinforcement).
In the case of humans, those ideas originate from their creativity. But in the case of pigeons, these behaviors are just variations on inborn ideas, slightly changed according to a reinforcement-"learning" algorithm.
Depending on what you mean by "capacity," that may amount to a belief in the supernatural; see David Deutsch's concept of "universal explainers," explained in his book "The Beginning of Infinity."
No, datascript has a listen! fn to listen for any transaction made on the client, which transaction I then send to the server, which transacts it against the database, and relays it to (some or all) other clients, who run the transaction (only) locally in their turn.
@HeuristicAndy @ToKTeacher
I think the getting dizzy/high is a side effect and not what the pigs are seeking. The reward may just be some genetically-determined response that says "the nutrients contained in this food are good, eat more of them."
Kitt, are you interested in starting a thread in the 4S group and discussing it?
The main reason people doubt the achievability of AGI is failure to understand the implications of computational universality.
The main reason those who claim to work on AGI don't actually is failure to understand that it requires epistemological work.
I think you're still thinking in terms of the knowledge crows, monkeys, and dolphins contain, not in terms of the knowledge they create, and you're then considering the fact that they contain sophisticated knowledge as evidence of their intelligence. Am I wrong about that?
There are uncivilized tribes who live in the wild and they have spears, fire, high-level language, they build roofs and huts, albeit primitive ones. Have you ever seen a dolphin, crow, or cow do any of that?
And is there no way to possibly explain that, too, through genetically determined behaviors?
I reiterate the difference between "smart" and "intelligence" a lot with people but usually they keep giving me more examples of smarts and claim they're evidence of intelligence, which they're not.
Which can be explained through the use of an inborn facial-recognition algorithm, which is admittedly impressive and sophisticated, but doesn't require intelligence.
Not sure which part you're referring to, but either way: ironically, it's only because we are humans that we can even have these thoughts.
Regarding illiteracy, you should have more faith in your abilities, and your ability to improve them.
You're interested in discussing a complex problem, and that alone shows you're capable.
Having a society is cool but some animals have tribes and primitive "societies" too. And in any case, intelligence is an attribute of individuals, not societies.
In "The Beginning of Infinity," Deutsch explains clearly and lucidly what makes people different (and infinitely special). In short, it's that we're what he calls "universal explainers." Highly recommended!
Again, we'd want some explanation in favor of animal intelligence so powerful that what I'm saying couldn't be right.
But I think the better explanation is, that crow has no idea what cars are, didn't want to save the hog, was just pecking at it for food, which happened to make the hog move, and that all this happened on a road with a car approaching is incidental.
...because that means they must have created that knowledge during their lifetime (modulo reinforcement "learning," which doesn't count).