I've occasionally wondered about the feasibility of LWOP with a euthanasia option, exercisable at the discretion of the convict. "You are stuck here for the rest of your life, but if you wish, we will cut that short." It would obviously require rigorous safeguards to prevent misuse/abuse: psychological assessment to ensure competence (and "wanting to die" would not be evidence of lack of competence), repeated declarations (with witnesses) over some period of time to ensure that the convict was committed to the termination, etc.
I think that has some of the same problems as the use of the death penalty to force plea bargains, especially given current prison conditions. That is, it may be that some innocent and competent people would sincerely want to die if sufficiently convinced (possibly in error) that they'd never get out. Presenting them with that official alternative would be a further abuse.
James Killus's point at #55 concerning plea bargains is very powerful, and one I hadn't heard or thought about before.
I think many death-penalty advocates support it because they see the justice system as a means of giving people what they deserve, and they think some people deserve to die. I think that second statement might well be true--there are extraordinarily evil people in the world, and some of those are never going to stop being evil no matter what--but that there's a huge difference between "this person deserves to die" and "we should kill this person". We (meaning the rest of society) are not infallible judges of what people deserve, nor do we escape harm ourselves when we kill somebody.
The strongest AI position I know of is that it's possible in principle to design a non-organic entity whose behavior will give us just as much reason to regard it as conscious as we have for other human beings.
The positions get much stronger than that. For instance, I think Roger Penrose might agree with you, and he's anti-strong-AI. It's just that he'd say this non-organic entity would have to possess some apparatus for doing the same weird quantum whatsis that he says goes on in microtubules; and the strong-AI folks (along with a lot of other people) would disagree with that.
My impression of the strongest strong-AI position is that the essence of conscious thought is an algorithm, or, put another way, the evaluation of some enormous function; and any computing machine that could instantiate such an algorithm, regardless of its physical construction, would be as conscious as a human while doing so.
Personally, I think that this may be true but may also be moot, for practical reasons of performance. In other words, if you ran the consciousness-simulating algorithm on any general-purpose computer of conventional construction, it might run so slowly that you'd wait your whole life for it to grind out part of a thought, and doing better would require tailor-made architectures bringing the machine closer to an analogue of a physical brain (though maybe not so close that you'd need to build it out of meat).
...As for whiter-than-white, most white fabrics you see already are whiter-than-white to some extent, because they've got fluorescent pigments in them that convert ultraviolet light to visible. You'll discover this if you enter a room lit by ultraviolet "black light" while wearing a white T-shirt or white socks.
In Searle's case I think it's pretty obvious that he doesn't want to believe in physicalism, and is grasping at whatever straw he can find to deny it. I take from his arguments that he finds the notion of a non-physical consciousness somehow ennobling, and the idea that the human mind and consciousness††are physical is just degrading to human dignity. Do I need to point out that this is a religious argument, and not in any sense either a scientific or philosophical one?
If I recall correctly, Searle claimed it was the other way around: he was the true physicalist and strong-AI advocates were dualists, because they thought mind was the instantiation of an algorithm, independent of its physical substrate, whereas Searle insisted it was something that could only be done by a meat brain made of a particular kind of matter. But I never got what he thought these special "causal powers of the brain" consisted of.
As Steve Taylor and Clifton Royston said, "trolling" used to mean something generally more benign, though that usage is long gone on the wider net.
As far as I know, the term actually originated on alt.folklore.urban as part of the phrase "trolling for newbies". There were certain topics that were so beaten to death that only a rank newbie would pipe up if you mentioned them, so people would occasionally do that just to watch them all chime in ("Didn't Monty Python make a three-sided record once?" was a favorite). It was all gentle and in-group, and disrupting the community wasn't the purpose. A.r.k and other groups generalized it to include the wacky crossposted performance art, but eventually it just became a synonym for flamebaiting or generally being a jerk.
Registration problems leading to rainbow fringes are common in color composites from Cassini photos, because the spacecraft and the target are often moving significantly between color channels.
One interesting thing I (probably re-) discovered while I was messing around with JPEGs off the raw image site with a photo editor is that if your misregistration problem produces red and blue fringes, it's much less noticeable than if you create, say, green and magenta or yellow and cyan fringes. Part of this is just that the eye is less sensitive to red and blue light than to green, but I'm guessing (just guessing) that part of it is that our heads do a certain amount of inherent correction for chromatic aberration in the eyeball.
I live in Massachusetts not too far from there. Now you've got me wanting to go up there and take a look.
(I had no idea Newburyport was the model for Innsmouth; it's even closer to here and I was just there watching a friend morris dance.)
Congratulations!
The statue of Ultraman makes this, I think, the best Hugo ever.
Todd Larason: That page detailing the mistakes in the annotated C standard just got more and more infuriating as it went on. I'd keep thinking "hey, I didn't know that--wait a minute, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd buy such a book in order to know".
21st Century Science and Technology, the LaRouchite pseudoscience journal that originated many anti-environmentalist talking points that have since passed into the conservative mainstream (the general "volcanoes do more X than human civilization" argument came from there).
Some commenters have already mentioned some physics books; physics has a vast crank literature in popular books, to the extent that any argument originating in a popular book, or promoted in a popular book in opposition to the journal literature, is probably suspect. There are also huge numbers of self-help and New Age books that reference quantum mechanics in a meretricious manner.
CRV@283: Yes, but your actions bore some relation to 9/11. I'm talking about the people who, as Michael Berube joked, found that because of 9/11 they had now become outraged over Chappaquiddick.
"I am a lifelong Democrat, but I've had to start voting Republican over [[my pet issue]]."
"9/11 plus anything"
These, of course, go together like milk and cookies: one sees arguments of the variety "I was a liberal until 9/11 changed everything, and now I believe that progressive income taxation is theft." Mocked by Tom Tomorrow here.
Many people who say such things may simply be posing as lifelong liberals, but, I think, not all of them. John Judis and Ruy Texeira argue here (scroll down partway) that there's some sort of cognitive phenomenon going on that they call "de-arrangement". The September 2001 attacks actually did seem to push American opinion rightward on all manner of issues having nothing to do with terrorism or foreign policy--temporarily, for a few years, and the effect is now wearing off.
I first heard "whinge" in an Australian sitcom that I saw on PBS sometime in the 1980s. The word was completely unfamiliar to me then. I don't even think of it as particularly foreign any more, and I think it's entirely because of the Internet.
Somewhere years ago I saw somebody insist vehemently and at great length that any American who spells "aesthetic" with an a at the beginning is a pretentious, culturally-cringing Anglophile who probably paints himself with woad, and I was terribly embarrassed because that was the spelling I had always used after seeing it in books--I never even thought of "aesthetic" as a British spelling. If you actually use the ligature, maybe.
It seems to me that the double standard linnen mentioned--virginity for girls, promiscuity for boys--also feeds into the need for cheap labor. If you have that kind of sexual double standard, you must have socially designated whores and sluts
...unless, of course, the sanctioned male promiscuity is exclusively homosexual. Which I think is pretty rare, though I suppose some societies might have come close.
It seems to me that the double standard linnen mentioned--virginity for girls, promiscuity for boys--also feeds into the need for cheap labor. If you have that kind of sexual double standard, you must have socially designated whores and sluts. These women in turn have sons and daughters--and these same societies generally put a heavy stigma on illegitimacy. That implies the existence of an entire underclass (though of course there could be many other reasons for one).
I've seen social conservatives write longingly of the day when people knew the difference between the kind of girls you married, and the girls of easy virtue who you went to for fun--and I've also seen them lament the loss of the Stigma of Bastardy. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is tied to authoritarian, hierarchical attitudes, the insistence that in all things there must be Higher and Lower and the Lower must know their station.
Using "Wiki" to mean Wikipedia is especially unfortunate given that one great benefit that's come out of the project is the MediaWiki software itself, which is used in most other public wiki projects.
The thing that fascinates me about Teresa's criticism is that it's almost the exact opposite of the typical complaint about Wikipedia. Usually the standard complaint is that it's less authoritative than print sources and is filled with trivialities of interest to white American tech geeks (some manga gets more lines devoted to it than the Congo Civil War, etc.)
When I heard these sorts of complaints early on, it kind of bothered me that they were phrased so as to imply that it might improve Wikipedia not to beef up the article on the Congo Civil War, but to just delete all the horrible geeky stuff that was improperly getting more attention, so as to achieve somebody's idea of the right balance of emphasis.
Then, a couple of years later, I found out that people were actually starting to do that.
I suspect that part of the problem is what some other commenters have said, that the general sniping at Wikipedia-as-silly-geek-sandbox from newspapers, The Register (which has been calling all Wikipedia editors "wiki-wankers" for years), etc. got under some Wikipedians' skin and provoked this ham-fisted effort to make Wikipedia not be that, even at the cost of destroying it.
Nevertheless, part of the wiki "ethic", such as it is, is if you see something wrong, instead of griping, take responsibility and fix it.
You often can't. It may appear that you can, but you actually can't, because somebody will say that you're an interested party, or that your edit is original research or inadequately sourced, and revert the edit with enough authority to make it stick. Or, somebody will simply be more crazy-obsessive about the topic than you are, and revert the edit with sufficient persistence to make it stick. Editing the page is not the end of the problem--if you've got any significant opposition, you have to be willing to defend your changes in an edit war, and most experts don't have the time or the inclination for this kind of pissing match.
I recall that for a while there was some outright crackpot material on the "Big Bang" page (don't know if it's still there) that I entirely avoided fixing, though I had the knowledge to do so and William Connolley was trying to persuade me to get involved, simply because it looked like the guy responsible was a passionate crank who would be able to outlast and outfight me in any conflict over it. I might well have been able to whip up a consensus to protect my changes with sufficient persistence, but I had other things going on in my life.
People talk a lot about the importance of building online communities, but I increasingly think that the problem with Wikipedia is the community. It might be better off with less of one. The most and best content on Wikipedia tends to be added not by longtime contributors but by drive-by editors, often experts or semi-experts who don't even get accounts on the site, or people who have some knowledge in a given subject and dump it all in there in a burst of early enthusiasm. The community does wikification and syntactic cleanup, but it also includes pedants who delete, dilute or deprecate useful material and occasional persistent cranks who poison the content. Drive-by editors can't be bothered to fight these people, and they really shouldn't have to.
One can take this too far. The kind of deconversion experience people go through when they get disillusioned with a community often involves extreme flips in attitude--people go instantly from thinking Wikipedia is a great idea to thinking that Wikipedia must be destroyed and everyone who contributes is a sad sick person. I have friends who still edit Wikipedia a lot--I go back there occasionally myself and poke around in uncontroversial corners--and I'm not about to say that these people are doing something bad. But the site does have a lot of pathologies and doesn't seem to always learn from past efforts at dealing with the same pathologies.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2007 | 26 |
| 2006 | 21 |
| 2005 | 42 |
| 2004 | 11 |
| 2003 | 5 |
| 2002 | 7 |
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