Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • IMPORTANCE OF PUNISHING FREE RIDERS AND RENT SEEKERS Not that we haven’t know th

    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5978/617.abstractTHE IMPORTANCE OF PUNISHING FREE RIDERS AND RENT SEEKERS

    Not that we haven’t know this for centuries, and practiced it for millennia.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-03 09:37:00 UTC

  • PROPER PAGAN SOLSTICE RITUAL: Kupala I love this culture. Go to the forest. Get

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KupalaA PROPER PAGAN SOLSTICE RITUAL: Kupala

    I love this culture.

    Go to the forest. Get flowers from a fern. Make a wreath. Float it in the river. Men try to catch them. The river goddess assists the girls in choosing mates.

    Solstice bonfires.

    Ancient fertility rite. Same root word as Cupid.

    We were better then. :). Paganism celebrates our differences. Paganism is communal not political.

    Today it seems like its basically “girls night out”. 😉

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kupala

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-03 07:23:00 UTC

  • Can Computers Write Creative Programs That Solve Problems?

    ANSWERING YOUR QUESTION IN THE CONTEXT THAT YOU MEAN IT.

    In the context that I think you mean, creativity refers to the application of one pattern of relations to a different circumstance thereby solving a previouslly unsolved problem, and a problem whose solution is not already present in the domain of solutions expressed by the program code.  This set of associations is what produces ‘aha’ moments in humans: when ‘clouds’ of related ideas are connected.

    In this sense, I think the consensus is, that there is no reason we can’t build computers that can do this.  The problem is currently size, expense, and the structure of symbols’memories’ that we put into computers.  So, like interstellar flight, we are really just trying to find an affordable way to do it.  We CAN send someone to mars, or something to another star. It’s just absurdly expensive compared to what we THINK we can do with some innovation. So we’re waiting until its cheaper.

    I don’t have a lot of time right now to be thorough and the information is available elsewhere.  But the simple version is, that if you have a biological organism and start with basic stimuli (a subset of light, sound, vibration, touch, time and memory) that the structure of the physical universe, evolution and experience form a fairly accurate but simplified set of categories in our memories and therefore minds.  We build a set of symbols (patterns) from seemingly disparate stimuli, the same way we ‘see movement’ in the static figures of a flip-book.

    Computers we use today do not start with this atomic level of representation, they start with symbols. And we are just beginning to understand how to symbolically represent  physical reality in commensurable terms, and any computational system requires commensurable terms. Humans have senses,  instincts and preferences which largely form our commensurable terms; all language being an allegory to experience, and all systems of measurement producing allegories to experience.

    For example, money renders all things commensurable by price.  But without prices and money you couldn’t form a division of labor – a market. and we’d still be hunter gatherers or small family farmers.   Likewise  we can’t quite yet design software that symbolically represents reality. (ALthough this project has been underway for more than a century in philosophy, its largely been fruitless.)

    Since language (the written word) is an allegory to experience, that language should (in theory) represent symbols that are commensurable (subject to comparison and evaluation) even if only on ordinal (ordered), not cardinal (numbered) grounds – because humans operate ordinally not cardinally.

    The closest we have to that body of symbolic information that is broad enough in scope to represent enough of the physical world that the errors produced by sybmolic assocation are Turing-testable, is the Google search index.  (And google is fully aware of that). 

    But the computational power to use that data given that its index is not commensurable with other domains, (we think) is approximately equal to the total computing power present on the planet today. And even then, we suppose the mechanical process ‘thinking’ would be very slow.

    (I worked with a group of very bright people on the possibility of raising venture money for solving this problem, given that we are pretty sure how to a) create the programming tool set, b) use existing hardware technology, and c) represent the data in sets of mathematical manifolds, but it is far too early and far too costly to produce this scope of work. And to the venture community it is indistinguishable from snake oil.  So I’m not unfamiliar with the problem set, or the possible technical solutions. And I was willing to put my own money in. So I”m pretty confident.)

    Most solutions today are attempts to model the human brain with digital systems. The general idea is that it’s cheaper to do this with existing hardware than it is with to build dedicated hardware for the purpose.  And even with that technique, most recent estimates I’ve seen are in the billion dollar range.

    But it’s not that it’s not possible for computers to be ‘creative’.  Its that the minimum threshold for ‘creative association’ is a higher than the intelligence of a domestic dog, and we are still programming in symbols, not patterns, because those symbols incorporate our existing knowledge. And we’re doing that, it looks like, because it’s metaphorically the equivalent of a trip to the stars, and no one is ready to pay for that yet. 

    I think that in this short space, that’s the most accurate statement we can render.  It is a matter of money, not logical possibility either by the symbolic route, or the neural route, or the dedicated hardware neural route.

    Cheers
    Curt

    https://www.quora.com/Can-computers-write-creative-programs-that-solve-problems

  • HIGGS’ MORALIZING – PULL OUT OF EUROPE I think the answer to this problem for bo

    http://blog.independent.org/2013/06/30/why-fight-for-king-and-country/CONTRA HIGGS’ MORALIZING – PULL OUT OF EUROPE

    I think the answer to this problem for both sides is to pull the US military, state and intelligence organizations from Europe entirely so that European defense, international relations, and the stabilization of commodity prices is left to the management of Europeans. It’s not really necessary for Americans to stabilize the price of oil, or any other commodity, now that we’re close to being energy independent. And our dollar will remain the currency of last resort even more durably if we drop our international intrigues.

    That would stop the American cultural necessity for jingoism in order to preserve the cultural will to pay for the necessity that we police the world for largely European convenience. And it would allow us to save three quarters of our military expenditures, and focus our efforts on domestic reality rather than ideological propagation as a means of further discounting the cost of our policing. I’d be nice to have a domestic government rather than an internationally focused one actually.

    Conversely, it would force holier-than-thou Europeans to do all the nonsense that Americans now do and also to pay for it. Which would require the re-nationalization of european propagandism in order to motivate the already heavily taxed population to pay for.

    I’m sorry that you don’t like being a client state of Rome dear Athens-after-the-overreach, but without us you’ll be a client state of ether German political and economic power and cultural discipline, or Russian resource and military power.

    It probably doesn’t occur to silly people on the other side of the pond that it’s because Britain was so bad at containing its self interest, rent seeking, politics and policies that Americans ended up with the entire Empire in our lap, and had to militarize our entire country quite against our naturally isolationist inclination and will.

    (…)

    It is profoundly naive to think that nations have the degree of nationalism that they want to rather than the level of nationalism that they need to. People are too practical to waste their energy.

    Glass houses and all that.

    (NOTE: I attack my country all day long. I want it split up. But the arrogance of European criticism sometimes irritates the hell out of me – especially from the Brits. We dont directly charge Europe for providing its military, state, and trade policing services directly. We do it through the petro dollar. But Europe now has it’s Euro, and oil can be bought in Euros. So lets pull the USA out of Europe, save the money, and let europeans do their own dirty work so that they don’t have the privilege of insulting americans for it. Looking a gift-horse in the mouth and all. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-02 21:44:00 UTC

  • Enjoy this video which sums up my thoughts on birthdays

    Enjoy this video which sums up my thoughts on birthdays:

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-02 14:44:00 UTC

  • STUDENT LOANS If you want to fix student loans, the incentives in the university

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324688404578541372861440606.htmlFIXING STUDENT LOANS

    If you want to fix student loans, the incentives in the university system are currently perverse, and you can’t fix student funding without fixing university incentives.

    1) zero interest. Any amount. Six total years of coverage. This process can be repeated every ten years for lifetime performance.

    2) The amount is paid back as a payroll deduction over thirty years at fixed, x% of income . (This effectively reduces the student cost to zero, but doesn’t allow students to abuse it.)

    3) Colleges and Universities must use 100% of the money for undergraduates ONLY for the undergraduate program, only for undergraduate departments, only for undergraduate teachers who teach, and many not use any for research, sports, or for their endowment. Undergraduate departments must perform as teaching departments not reserach departments, and all publication requirements for teaching professors must be removed. No exemptions or devices for circumvention in theory or practice. Limit administrative overhead costs to 20%. And that will take care of the economics of the system, and make sure our students have the best professors in the world.

    4) Since all financial barriers are removed, then remove all quotas, and require domestic students receive full access prior to foreign students.

    Most of these are Sowell’s ideas.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-02 10:55:00 UTC

  • IN EDUCATION The percentage of people smart enough to work in science, technolog

    http://m.nber.org/papers/w19165.pdfFALLACY IN EDUCATION

    The percentage of people smart enough to work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is small and a function of genetic distributions.

    The fields can each compete with each other for that pool of students. But the size of that pool cannot be increased without demographic changes.

    Further, many smart people can be attracted by lucrative positions in law, finance, and commerce where individual achievement captures higher rewards, and where the individual has more control over the career cycle needed to capture those rewards.

    You cannot prepare someone for a career in the STEM classes unless he or she has the ability for doing the work.

    Our school systems are far more concerned about instilling undue confidence in children, and setting the stage for future disappointment, civil unrest, and economic uncompetitiveness than they are preparing children to be successful in the work force.

    American children have the highest confidence in the world but that confidence is demonstrably unwarranted.

    That this problem is the result of forced racial integration and the challenge this put in our educational system snd its culture is no so commonly understood.

    But any lie must be compounded with more lies to hide the original, and this is the result.

    The Finnish a german midels must be adopted at some near future point. Otherwise we shoukd just go back to teaching mysticism – which is about as sensible as what we currently do.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-02 06:52:00 UTC

  • MATTERS

    http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385479425/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkPRETTY MATTERS

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-01 16:26:00 UTC

  • WISH OUR MILITARY WAS THIS VIRTUOUS

    http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-egypt-military-ultimatum-20130701,0,7120476.storyI WISH OUR MILITARY WAS THIS VIRTUOUS

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-01 15:48:00 UTC

  • The Purpose Of Philosophy: in the Analytic, Naturalistic Philosophy of Action

    [T]he purpose of enlightenment program was isolate thought, morality and politics from the superstition of Magian religion. It was to launder superstition in favor of empirical reasoning in The analytic program’s objective was to incorporate the physical sciences into philosophy, but to hold onto the metaphysical program. The naturalistic, praxeological (action) and economic programs are attempting to launder the metaphysical program from philosophy. (Or that’s close enough for our purposes here.)

      [T]he assumption in this line of reasoning, this set of priorities, is that with more knowledge we have more choices to determine how to make ourselves most happy through the accumulation of experiences. The other line of reasoning, is that human beings are able at present to be happy if they seek to obtain The problem is that humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption provided by the first, and demonstrate a preference to expend the intellectual and physical labor of the second. More accurately: they want others to expend the effort on the first, and to reserve for themselves the experiences of the second. We call conflict of ambitions a desire for ‘free riding’. In fact, we can argue that more human calculation is performed for the purpose of pursuing free riding than any other end except sex. Curt Doolittle. Kiev, Ukraine. (NOTE 1: “Calculation, in its broadest sense, refers to any comparison that permits a judgement. So while numeric computation is included in the definition of calculation, but so is ‘Where can I get a peanut butter sandwich?’ and ‘Do I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream more today?’. We use ‘calculation’ to distinguish simplistic processes from reasoning, which has a higher standard of demands – namely substitution and transformation.) (NOTE 2: This approach abandons the metaphysical program.)