Delta1212

 

Although I am not a wealthy man, I think there's something inherently unfair about having such a high tax rate on wealthy earners. At 91%, the government is suggesting that it's contribution to your financial success is worth 91%. The government is essentially saying that it is entitled to a majority share of your profits because the stable and secure environment it provides for your business to thrive makes it your controlling partner and, as such, should receive a 91% year-end bonus for the decisions, risks, and costs you shouldered alone. In consideration of the environment our government provides, I would consider no more than 50% to be a fair tax rate. I agree that the super wealthy should be made to pay more--but not to extremes exceeding an equal partnership.

Is that a maximum 50% total or marginal tax rate?

 

Me too.

 

Which convinces me that these tests are pretty bogus.

 

Amusingly, I had to guess most of the number series ones but it turns out I got them all right!

I took it a second time and also got 160+.

I must have had a growth spurt in my brain since lunch.

Why do you say this and where is your evidence? I guess under this premise you never have taken an IQ test; can this be associated with fear?

He says it because the IQ test was originally designed to identify students who needed extra assistant in an academic setting in order to excel and it was repurposed as a generalized intelligence test because people like scoring themselves, and it was what was available, not because it was especially useful for that purpose.

I was curious so I went to the site and took the test.

I must be a genius.

What control do you have over the chemical processes responsible for your sense of self and the postdictive illusion of choice? By your own logic, absent that you absolutely lack freewill. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_basis_of_selfhttp://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616641943http://neurosciencenews.com/decision-making-psychology-4148/.

Speculating about potential downstream consequences of a conclusion in no way negates the validity of the conclusion itself.

My contention is that I am the physical configuration of neurons and chemical pathways that make up my brain and that determine my decisions. It is true that I may make decisions prior to the fact of the de ion being made filtering through to the process that monitors my own thoughts and decisions, but this is hardly surprising. To claim this means that I didn't really make the decision at all is a bit silly because then what am "I" in this scenario if not the brain that ultimately did make those decisions based on its unique configuration?

I didn't choose to have that particular physical configuration, it is true, but if I had a different one, I would be someone else.

I think what he doesn't understand is that even though the sun is moving through space with a great speed, so are the planets, so no laws need to be revised at all. This is elementary. But wait:

 

 

 

What? How can you even say that? Do you understand that we would have moved out of the sun's orbit by now if that was the case? If the sun was moving faster than the earth, the earth-sun revolution wouldn't last for 365 days. In fact, we wouldn't have an earth-sun revolution at all.

 

If something is revolving around something else that is going at a great speed, it must be going at the same speed. (how else would it catch up and rotate around it?)

So, in fact, you are claiming that the earth doesn't rotate around the sun, right?

While his statement is incorrect, you are criticizing it for the wrong reason. There is no reason that the sun cannot be moving faster than the planets are moving relative to the sun.

For the same reason that, if I walk along the center aisle of a train going full speed, the train is moving faster than I am moving relative to the train.

The mistake is in not defining what the sun is moving relative to. You can give it any arbitrary velocity you would like based on the coordinate system you use, and it's speed could easily be significantly higher than the speed of the planets when measured with respect to the sun.

What about remembering an image is more difficult to attribute to changing pathways? Image recognition is one of the first breakthrough areas that artificial neural networks were applied to in the modern era and achieved exceptionally strong results through the exact method that you're saying you don't think should work.

I am not being flippant but do computers fear the darkness if they are left for years in the darkness of a computer room? Do they have a history of "self?" It is exactly as you mentioned - they are logical machines.My question involved the possibility that logical machines are better at survival than an illogical and emotional machine if you could program it to behave that way.

This is not strictly the case. Part of the problem, I think, is that most computers that we encounter are only tasked with relatively straightforward tasks that have (comparatively) simple algorithmicly determinable optimal solutions. And so we think of computers as being "logical."

However, just because computers are fast does not mean that they have infinite processing speed or power, and the solution space for some problems is far too large to be searched in a brute force manner even by the fastest of our machines. You need to the figure out how to approximate optimal solutions using shortcuts and simplifications that are easier and faster to compute. Start introducing imperfect information, and this process becomes even more complicated. many of our most complicated problems are managed by neural nets that are taught how to solve the problem through a series of training sets and trial and error learning where they are exposed to the problem and a predetermined optimal solution and then try to figure out how to rewire their processing to best match the desired output. Given enough such inputs you'll have a network that is optimized to give very good, sometimes even human-level or better, responses to problems that are not easily solved in a conventional manner, but this method is still imperfect.

One network that was trained to recognize Not Safe For Work images wound up keying in on red lips as a primary indicator because of disproportionate representation in the training set of red lipstick in the NSFW images. A network meant to recognize the presence of tanks in an image wound up detecting whether the sky in an image was overcast instead because all of the images in each example set were taken on only two days with the tanks being present all on one day and absent from the photographs taken on the other.

When you start getting into really complex problem-solving, there is always, always a trade-off between speed and accuracy, because the exact answer to some problems simply can't be computed within the lifetime of the universe, and the time constraint may be very small for decision making even in cases where the problem isn't as large as that.

Emotions are in most cases, short-cuts to workable solutions. They are messy and frequently induce behaviors that are not actually helpful. But they are always much faster than trying to reason through a given problem, and speed is often critical to survival, so getting it right 7/10 times but getting there in time to implement the correct behavior is better than getting the right answer 10/10 times but always too late to implement it, especially in scenarios where getting it wrong results in death.

It's helpful to realize that emotions are not irrational or imperfections but fairly straightforward shortcuts to making decisions in situations where either speed is paramount or where game theory means that everyone making optimal, rational decisions is liable to result in an equilibrium state that is less beneficial to you than may be possible if things are mixed up with a disruptive behavior or where the threst of disruptive behavior is reasonably expected and can therefore be used as leverage in negotiations.

There's a meme of humans being illogical/irrational and computers being superior in logic and unemotional, but that ignores the constraints of the problems that need to be dealt with and the reasons why emotions exist in the first place, which are things that computers attempting to operate in a similar environment cannot completely ignore.

I have just returned to this thread after endless late nights at school. However, can you program a computer to think about the past, reflect on it and consider the best past of action for the future? Can you program a computer to have a sense of being on a historical timeline as a unique individual? If you can, then the computer ceases being a computer and you have created a humanoid robot. You chose the definition for fear in quite a clever way. What about fear as a rational or irrational response to past experience which creates the feeling of fear? If the choice is logical or illogical, which one will the robot choose?

 

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/page2/the-uniqueness-of-human-recursive-thinking

 

I agree that there might be a spectrum of extraneous "stuff" but we seem to experience it as a part of our Facebook-style timeline that runs through our brains. Animals do learn from past mistakes but I don't recall, in my limited reading, of any animal that considered its place in its unique timeline in the same way as humans. IIRC, a chimpanzee which was asked, by sign language, what it was thinking answered in sign language :"food".

Computers don't make "logical decisions" in the way that people mean when they say that. They follow a mathematical logic that runs through the steps they should take according to how they have been programmed or, in the case of something like a neural network, how they have been trained to perform.

The ultimate decisions that they come to may or may not be considered logical decisions, and computer very, very frequently make very illogical decisions if the people who program them aren't careful in properly setting it up.

You could absolute program a simulated fear response analog into a computer and there is no reason it would decide that response wasn't logical and deviate from it. That's not how computers in general or AIs specifically work.

The whole point of a neural network is that you can reinforce or rewire pathways based on stimuli. Its advantage is that it can learn based on experience and is not a straight input-output machine.

If the brain operated the way you seem to think it does, it wouldn't be able to do basically anything that it does outside of maybe the autonomic processes like controlling heartbeat.

 

 

And (if that is what was meant - it wasn't clear to me, either) then one can train oneself not to react to unexpected shocks in that way.

I thought it was fairly clear that he means eludes.

The results of psychology experiments involving the Ultimatum game and Dictator game point to humans having an innate sense of fairness that they value at a disproportionate level to immediate personal benefit.

Evolutionarily speaking, I would venture that this is a bit of a hack for a species that exists primarily within long term social groups, promoting the behavior that means that people will learn that failing to offer you a minimally "fair" benefit when making a deal will result in you going out of your way to harm them even if it would have been better for you in that specific deal to take the offer, under the assumption that most people you interact with in a deal making capacity are liable to be people that you interact with more than once and that this behavior is liable to get you better deals moving forward.

Unfortunately, it also means that if the perception of fairness can be played upon in a modern context, it is very easy to get people to accept a scenario that is to their own detriment if it denies a benefit that they do not believe is being fairly given to another party.

I'm torn. I can't decide whether conservatives just don't want to lose profit by changing behavior, or if this is some kind of pundit-fueled irrational hatred (like the Clinton email server thing), or if some 1% group actually wants there to be some catastrophes they're poised to profit from somehow. Conservative fear seems prioritized for the short term. Better to fear losing profit this year on a "hoax" than to fear losing everything when your environment turns sour.

 

Or is this more collateral damage from the party that claims to represent workers by destroying their healthcare, represent the religious by using them to defund programs for the poor, and represent small government fanatics by sticking their nose into who we sleep with and what we do with our bodies? It's hard to tell if this is just monumental levels of stupidity or a coordinated lockdown of basic freedoms. Much of what the WH is doing seems like it's softening us up for a Russian invasion. Remove sanctions against them, divert funding from the TSA and Coast Guard to the Idiot Wall, defund FEMA, it all looks a lot like unbarring the gates from the inside, doesn't it?

 

But the EPA, this is just paying back donations from polluters. I understand many corporations are sending notes to the WH about regs that cost them profits.

It's a mixed bag. For some people, necessary reforms would impact their bottom line or threaten their jobs. These people either choose to ignore it or outright refuse to believe it because the personal consequences of it being true would be devastating.

For others, it's a political issue about government regulation of industry. They either don't care that it is happening or think it is overblown in an attempt to expand the role of government in regulating business.

For a portion it is because they either subscribe to conspiracy theories as a way or life and this slots nicely into that, or else they don't believe it because they have been told that it is a lie by people they trust and/or who they agree with.

And finally, some see denying it as a means of self-promotion by improving their stature among all of the above people.

And there are feedback loops that apply within and between all of these groups that reinforce those beliefs.

"Human activity is going to change the composition of the atmosphere to the point that it is going to cause a global temperature rise."

"No it won't."

"Human activity has caused a a change to the atmosphere that is going to cause a global temperature rise."

"No it won't."

"Human activity has caused a change in the atmosphere that has caused a global temperature rise."

"Ok, maybe temperatures are up but it's not because of anything we did."

The fact that you don't think there is a way for the brain to tell whether it has seen a pattern before shows a profound lack of knowledge of how neural networks work.

 

And what decides our temperament?

Generally speaking, things other than what we believe about how consciousness and free will work.

I don't know, I find that relatively easy anyway. That seems more like a temperament thing than a philosophy of consciousness thing.

 

Quite right my apologies, I'll try and think of a way. +1

 

 

My point is both free will and control are essentially the same, in that they both exist and are illusory, at some level; and you can't know what that level is.

 

 

Even the decision to go to work, is influenced by the cultural norm and our natural desire to conform to the norm.

I disagree about that making anything illusory, though. There are lots of inputs that go into shaping who I am, and not all of those are under my control, it is true. But the fact that I did not choose to be me does not negate the fact that, given that I am who I am, I am making choices based on my personal priorities.

 

That's a bit extreme. That implies jets that are exceedingly narrow a tiny fraction of a degree.

 

 

http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2016/grb/

 

 

So more like 1 in 200. For this type of GRB.

Wouldn't it be 1 in 250?

 

Have you read a single word I've written?

If I'm not understanding something that you are trying to communicate, perhaps you could find a way to restate it so that it will be more clear to me.

 

Really, which part?

Well, in fairness, I probably subscribe to a slightly different determination of free will than the one put forth by Eise.

I think free will manifests as the ability to freely prioritize available options and act according to those priorities.

In which case a set of limited options does not actually restrict one's free will. The only way to curtail free will would be if some outside agent had a method of determining your priorities for you and in a manner that somehow precludes rejection of those priorities as a possibility, or if they have the ability to force you to act in a way that runs counter to your own priorities.

In both cases, this would require some form of mind-control as even run-of-the-mill coercion merely restricts your options rather than removing your ability to choose from among them.

Outside of science fiction or fantasy at this point, then, the only way to infringe on someone's free will is perhaps to drug them.

 

Can you point to the place on the continuum, between completely limited and no limits, where free will begins?

 

 

That doesn't change the fundamental truth of my statement.

 

It doesn't matter how you try, you can't grow an infertile seed.

I'm not sure what that has to do with free will, though.

 

If we have free will as you suggest then we aren't manipulable, then how do you explain Derren Brown's shows?

 

 

Then our free will is limited and my argument stands.

 

 

If you plant a peach tree, it matters not what plans you have for it, it'll be a peach tree.

You seem, at the end, to be confusing planning with omnipotence. It is the argument that if evedything isn't within your power then nothing is.

Those who made too much of units had a point, but went too far IMHO.

If your numbers had worked out, your statement could have been made too work with suitable adjustments, Instead of attacking the whole idea.

 

Consider the following (correct) statement.

 

There is always one more post than panel in a fence with no gaps or loose ends.

 

Two different units, but it is possible to compare the numbers.

 

Which is greater, 1 liter or 5 meters?

It is quite amusing that in this forum we talk about AI being better than humans, but look at US today. The US may soon see AI getting equal rights to humans while humans suffer inequality at hands of other humans. Actually technological arrogance overrides people with sensitivities. Capitalism should die a horrible death.

AIs are not getting human rights anytime soon.