Reminds me of this excellent sentence of Hofstadter's, on the concept of treating language as a stack composed of clauses and popped by verbs:
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the 'verb-at-the-end', about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nunplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping."
The way I see it, common keyboards are underpriced due to extreme competition, and top-shelf keyboards are overpriced because they're a niche market. So common keyboards aren't that bad, even if they're very cheap, but I think it's definitely worth it to spend ~$100 on a keyboard, which I think is a lot more palpable to people whose job involves typing.
I'm going to make up some arbitrary numbers, hopefully they'll make it more clear. I use a Planck, which cost about $110. Looking at Amazon, I found an alright-looking Logitech for ~$15.
Is typing on the Planck 7x better? Probably not. Is it 2x more enjoyable? I'd say so! Unfortunately, there are no $30 keyboards that are as good, but I'm fine with paying the big premium because the cheap version is already so cheap.
It doesn’t matter per se that it isn’t 7x better. What matters is that there is nothing else that would improve your experience more for extra $95 you spent on your keyboard.
Bloomberg keyboards have no competition, but I understand that enormous energies are expended on their design.
I order HPE workstations for the front desk, because they invest in the thermal fluid dynamics and sound energy diffusion of their cases. The default benefits are tangible.
Keyboard quality is a factor more when it is the standard you encounter. High quality consistent keyboard experiences would be significant in broad effect, at least I'm convinced that would be the case.
Could it be called an ink coating? My understanding is that the distinction between ink and pigment is that ink is a solution while pigment is a suspension, can there be both kinds of coatings? or is it a meaningless distinction to draw in this context?
Sorry to barrage you with these questions if you don't know, but you brought up a pretty fine point so you seem knowledgeable about this :)
I'm no expert but in industry (and it may differ from company to company) coatings is mostly paints and inks are separate. Inks usually permeate (and add coloration to) a medium while coatings/paints bind and coat (to) a medium.
Off the top of my head, James Charles lost a million subscribers before people changed their mind about whose side they were on.
Toby Turner had rape allegations made against him which were later taken back. It's hard to say where his channel would be had that not happened, but the timing makes it seem like it was a major factor in its decline.
Why wouldn't it be? It seems to me that at worst we would have to wait for computers to become as powerful and complex as a human brain, and then simulating human intelligence would be a matter of accurately modelling the connections.
Is there doubt as to whether a neuron can be represented computationally?
That's one position, but there are three problems with it:
1. You have to solve the interaction problem (how does the mind interact with the physical world?)
2. You need to explain why the world is not physically closed without blatantly violating physical theory / natural laws.
3. From the fact that the mind is nonphysical, it does not follow that computationalism is false. On the contrary, I'd say that computationalism is still the best explanation of how human thinking works even for a dualist. (All the alternatives are quite mystical, except maybe for hypercomputationalism.)
1. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how.
2. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world.
3. True, but if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks, then we can infer the mind is not physical. In which case we can also apply Occam's razor and infer the mind is doing something uncomputable as opposed to having access to vast immaterial computational resources.
Finally, calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting from the logic of the argument.
I wasn't trying to argue with you, I merely laid out what is commonly thought about the subject matter. Sorry if that sounds patronizing (it's really not meant to). Anyway, if you want to publish a paper defending a dualist position nowadays in any reputable journal, you'll have to address points 1&2 in one way or another, whether you believe you have to or not. It's not as if that problem hadn't been discussed during the past 60 years or so. There are whole journals dedicated to it.
> if the mind can be shown to perform physically uncomputable tasks
That's true. Many people have tried that and many people believe they can show it. Roger Penrose, for example. These arguments are usually based on complexity theory or the Halting Problem and involve certain views about what mathematicians can and cannot do. As I've said, I've personally not been convinced by any of those arguments.
Your mileage may differ. Fair enough. Just make sure that you do not "know the answer" already when starting to think about the problem, because that's what many people seem to do when they think about these kind of problems and it's a pity.
> calling a position names, such as 'mystical', does nothing to determine the veracity of the position. At best it is counter productive by distracting from the logic of the argument.
That wasn't my intention, I use "mystical" in this context in the sense of "does not provide any better understanding or scientifically acceptable explanation." Many of the (modern) arguments in this area are inferences to the best explanation.
By the way, correctly formulated computationalism does not presume physicalism. It is fully compatible with dualism.
Yes, I understand computationalism does not imply physicalism, but physicalism does imply computationalism. Thus, if computationalism is empirically refuted, then physicalism is false.
I know the Lucas Godel incompleteness theorem type arguments. Whether successful or not, the counter arguments are certainly fallacious. E.g. just because I form a halting problem for myself does not mean I am not a halting oracle for uncomputable problems.
But, I have developed a more empirical approach, something that can be solved by the average person, not dealing with whether they can find the Godel sentence for a logic system.
Also, there is a lot of interesting research showing that humans are very effective at approximating solutions to NP complete problems, apparently better than the best known algorithms. While not conclusive proof in itself, such examples are very surprising if there is nothing super computational about the human mind, and less so if there is.
At any rate, there are a number of lines of evidence I'm aware of that makes the uncomputable mind a much more plausible explanation for what we see humans do, ignoring the whole problem of consciousness. I'm just concerned with empirical results, not philosophy or math. As such, I don't really care what some journal's idea of the burden of proof is. I care about making discoveries and moving our scientific knowledge and technology forward.
Additionally, this is not some academic speculation. If the uncomputable mind thesis is true, then there are technological gains to be made, such as through human in the loop approaches to computation. Arguably, that is where all the successful AI and ML is going these days, so that serves as yet one more line of evidence for the uncomputable mind thesis.
There are plenty of materialists who think the universe is not computable, thus it's totally possible to believe that the mind is not computable despite being entirely physical.
If the mind were found to be uncomputable, I think you'd find vastly more physicists would take that as evidence the universe is uncomputable than that the mind is nonphysical.
So they may, but that would not follow logically. If the lowest level of physics is all computable then the higher physical levels must also be computable. Thus, if a higher level is not computable, it is not physical. We have never found anything at the lowest level that is not computable. None of it is even at the level of a Turing machine, unlike human produced computers.
Any chaotic system (highly sensitive to initial conditions) is practically uncomputable for us, because we have neither the computational power nor the ability to measure the initial conditions sufficiently accurately. Whether there is some lowest level at which everything is quantized, or it's real numbers all the way down, is an open question.
I don't think your argument will seem compelling to anyone who doesn't already have a strong prior belief that the mind is non-physical.
I would argue it is the other way around. If people are truly unbiased whether we are computable or not, then they would give my argument consideration. It is those with a priori computational bias that will not be phased by what I say.
You're right, but people tend to have strong priors one way of the other, often unconsciously. This is one of those classic cases where people with strong, divergent priors will disagree more strongly after seeing the same evidence. So if you want to convince people you'll have to try harder than most to find common ground.
And that's why I'm not concerned with convincing anyone. The proof is in the pudding. If I'm right, I should be able to get results. If not, then my argument doesn't matter.
Explaining how gravity works doesn't tell you whether gravity itself is a real thing, whether it is metaphysical, whether it's an epiphenomena of something else. People talk about it being curvature in spacetime vs. a force, but we're just reifying the math, right?
And I don't think we have a completely firm grasp on what is possible computationally with a given amount of physical resources, given the development of quantum computing.
The metaphysics are unimportant. The important question as far as AGI is concerned is whether human intelligence is physically computable. And quantum computation is less powerful than non deterministic Turing computation. So, we can bound quantum computation with NTMs.
Yes there is doubt. Can you say for sure that we have a complete model of all physics, and that all physics can be represented computationally? We're still discovering new features of neurons at the quantum level. Who knows how far down it goes. There may be some unknown physics at play inside neurons that can not be computed by a Turing machine. https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-j...
We actually do have reason to believe that, since our current understanding of consciousness is very incomplete. Human consciousness extends far beyond our current understanding. I am referring to the full extent of the capabilities of the human mind, not some isolated aspects of it.
The physics of bridges is well known. That is basically a solved problem. Human consciousness/intelligence is an open problem, and may never be solved.
> We actually do have reason to believe that [intelligence relies on quantum properties]
Are you leaving the reason unsaid, or am I in fact reading your argument correctly: "We don't understand consciousness, and we don't understand quantum, therefore it is likely consciousness relies on quantum." There's already plenty of mystery in an ordinary deterministic computation-driven approach to intelligence.
No I'm saying: "We don't have a perfectly accurate physical model of consciousness, we know that physics is incomplete, and our current model of neurons extends to the lowest levels of known physics, therefore there may be unknown physics involved in consciousness, and those unknown physics may not be computable."
> > we have no reason to believe intelligence relies on [as-yet mysterious aspects of quantum physics]
you wrote
> We actually do have reason to believe that ...
and later clarified
> [some true premises], therefore there may be unknown physics involved in consciousness, and those unknown physics may not be computable.
Saying something could be is different from saying we have reason to believe it. There may be a soul. Absent convincing evidence of the soul, though, we shouldn't predicate other research on the idea that it exists.
I clarified it in my latest reply above. The original comment asked if there is any doubt as to whether a neuron can be represented computationally. We don't know exactly what a neuron is, and are still discovering new subtle mechanisms in their functioning, and they are part of the most complex structure in the known universe, therefore of course there is doubt.
The website doesn't claim that the font does anything better, except that it is more readable, effective, and elegant, in the experience of the designer, Rune B.
If you really do know about several fonts that Rune B. finds more readable, effective, and elegant than this one, I would urge you to contact them.
It seems a shame that 99.99% of humans will never have the opportunity to break the record. If only there was a category for people who race unassisted by a large team of pacers, cyclists who feed them specially designed gel, and laser-equipped pacer cars.
It's unfortunate that Eliud Kipchoge can afford to run first class while others can only run coach. However fueling is available at aid stations and along the route from a runners support crew in coach. Many people cannot even afford coach and will be lucky to run verified once or twice in their life. Pheidippides would likely be very jealous of coach, never mind first class.
WASI does not hate the player. WASI hates the game.
Also you are missing a bunch of nines because out of the 7.7bn people on earth there are probably only a a few capable of running that time; lasers or no lasers :) Seriously though, he ran the distance under his own power and nobody denies that. They are all just like *"Unfortunately it's not going to be official". Not official why?! Oh, because the IAAF doesn't recognize it; a little fact almost every news release leaves out. That sounds trivial and arbitrary. It should be called the "IAAF World Record".
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the 'verb-at-the-end', about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nunplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping."