Dennett's Turing Test Example

When people imagine what a Turing Test conversation would look like, they frequently underestimate the conversation. I find Dennet's example of an imaginary Turing Test from Consciousness Explained to be a good counterexample:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett: “The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all.”

160 chars: Surplus

"Too many musicians = healthy for culture, not so much for aesthetics, and shit for musicians" http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ … - via Rocknerd

160 chars: Praise

Old days: people praised the powerful.
Nowadays: mixed feelings about power, praise reserved for pets.
Organised religions please note.

160 chars: For Iain Banks

call me highway call me conduit call me lightning rod scout catalyst observer call me what you will i was there when i was required #toiain

The Internet since 1995

re: The Internet in 1995

The internet has done things that few people imagined back in 1995. The internet is now about 7000 days old, its already completely changed media and commerce, how we socialise is being transformed, the next big shift is probably in education (which thus far has been based on the idea that you need to get people into a room together if you want to disseminate knowledge efficiently). Ultimately, I think its going to change the way we think as well.

In 1995 I was literally wasting hours of my life debating things with people that could be largely settled these days with 5 minutes of googling. I'm starting to realise that most of the pre-internet thinking I did was akin to stumbling around in the dark.

(originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

In our hands

Haha they made a handheld device that contains all human knowledge and now we make fun of each other for looking at it too much

— David Thorpe (@Arr) March 7, 2013

Left, Right, and how they see each other

(originally from a comment on this metafilter thread)

... I believe it is possible for some people on the right to genuinely believe their way is better for everyone in the long run (rather than just being self-interested etc, which is the usual way the left views the right), and such a hypothetical honest good-intentioned right-winger would argue thus:

"The left wing aim of redistributing wealth to help people in need is well intentioned, and I would allow some of that for the most needy cases. In general though, such hand-outs engender dependency and yes, lets admit it, possibly lazyness and lack of motivation in some cases. Also redistribution by the state is always inefficient and clumsy and slow. Its better for most people to have to fend for themselves to a large degree (excepting some extreme cases) and a country of people standing up for themselves will be dynamic and productive. Redistribution if left unchecked would grow to cover more and more cases and dampen the whole economy and although it would hurt the rich first, it would eventually hurt everybody. Thus (in corb's wording) voting for the left eventually fucks everybody"

I don't agree with that position, but I do admit the possibility that some people honestly think like that, and that they honestly believe their way is for the ultimate good of everybody.

160 chars: LHC for Ideas

"We are the first generation to have the information equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider for ideas." http://gigaom.com/2010/06/06/does-the-internet-make-us-smarter-or-dumber-yes/ …

Play

I was pretty olymposkeptic (see my mefi comment history) but I was looking forward to the ceremony because I like Danny Boyle and because all the #savethesecret people said it was good.

I really liked the ceremony - presenting the Industrial Revolution as both something epic and something terrible. Having a whole section for the NHS, and the 'Frankie and June Say Thanks Tim' social-media bit devoted to Tim Berners-Lee* was brilliant. I totally lost it when the panning-back camera revealed Rowan Atkinson on keyboards.

The naff bits (reading the oath of 'olympism', speeches etc) were the bits that the IOC mandate as _having_ to be in the ceremony.

The parade of nations was great (imagine how much more amazing those parades would have been 30 years ago when people travelled/internetted less). And the torch was great.

In the end I was left thinking - "That was a beautiful spectacle, ending with a lovely tribute to world togetherness etc. Shame its all about sport rather than something I'm actually interested in" ... as in, to me, it seemed _too_ epic to just be about a running and jumping competition. Why don't we have ceremonies like this to celebrate other things, like science, or literature, or just the fact the we exist at all? (I suppose the millenium celebrations were celebrating that, which is why they were great)

And that line of thinking - 'why such a large tribute to sport instead of something really important?' led me to "get" sport for the first time. I get it now. Humans like to play games. Sport is just play. But play boosted and codified and regulated for the world stage. We, as a species, like to play, and when we play big it ends up looking like the olympics.

So I guess I'm a bit of a convert now. Still dont like all the sponsorship nonsense, but at least they kept that out of the ceremony.

* Tim Berners-Lee appeared with his original NeXTcube and sent this tweet just before he appeared

(originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

160 chars: Leaders

Theory: Leaders that are imprisoned before they get into power are better than leaders that are imprisoned after they get into power?

160 chars: Unity

Is there any point in Unity if it's not in opposition to something?

Looking for the Magic Answer

From Looking for the Magic Answer, interview with Noam Chomsky, 17 years ago:

The question that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer still -- really, I don't know any other people who have answers to them -- is, "It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer." The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any answer other than, "Get to work on it."

There are a thousand different ways to get to work on it. For one thing, there's no "it." There's lots of different things. You can think of long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that's what you're focused on, you're going to have to take steps towards them. The steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment's in serious danger. There's no one thing that's the right thing to do. It depends on what your interests are and what's going on and what the problems are, and so on. And you have to deal with them. There's very little that anybody can do about these things alone. Occasionally somebody can, but it's marginal. Mainly you work with other people to try to develop ideas and learn more about it and figure out appropriate tactics for the situation in question and deal with them and try to develop more support. That's the way everything happens, whether it's small changes or huge changes.

If there is a magic answer, I don't know it. But it sounds to me as if the tone of the questions and part of the disparity between listening and acting suggests -- I'm sure this is unfair -- "Tell me something that's going to work pretty soon or else I'm not going to bother, because I've got other things to do." Nothing is going to work pretty soon, at least if it's worth doing, nor has that ever been the case.

Inside Job

Finally saw Inside Job the other day, and it did pretty well in explaining what seemed to have happened. I felt that more could have been put at the door of the ratings agencies - private companies whose function is written into law, lets not forget. For example look at the graph in this Reuters blog post by Felix Salmon - is shows the world issue of AAA bonds since the 1990s. They went from non-existent to being about half of all issued bonds by 2006. As Felix says:

That’s possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk.

An article in today's Guardian about the Black-Scholes equation is also pretty interesting. Ian Stewart (Professor of Maths at Warwick) points out that the financial industry has repeatedly used equations beyond their stated limits and then got us all into a mess. His paragraph at the end caught my eye:

Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork. The stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere. The system is too complex to be run on error-strewn hunches and gut feelings, but current mathematical models don't represent reality adequately. The entire system is poorly understood and dangerously unstable.

This ties into my earlier blue-screen metaphor for the crash, but also his statements that the stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere gave me a jolt. Having grown up in the 80s I guess I'd internalised the conventional wisdom that over the longer term the stock market is always a good bet. But if you look at the recent era, the era of super fast transactions and derivatives, it certainly no longer seems to be the case. Since the mid 90's the FTSE 100 has just been bouncing from about 3500 to about 6500 and back again. If you look for an inflation adjusted FTSE 100 it looks even bleaker. But in the meantime, the trend has been for people to base more and more of their savings and mortgages on stock-market products. Hmmmm.

Edge is a Conversation?

Something about Edge bothers me - it bills itself as a 'Conversation' and supposedly its all about getting smart people to talk to each other. According to the Guardian, its the "world's smartest website" and its partially based on the ideas of James Lee Byars - "gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in and have them ask one another the questions they'd been asking themselves"

So it makes it sound like its based on dialogue ... That would indeed be a fantastic site. Socrates showed us how to arrive at the truth through dialogue. And as Wittgenstein said "A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring".

But the reality of Edge seems to be occasional open questions, with long essays for answers, and none of the thinkers ever being challenged on what they said or entering into a dialogue with any of the others.

If they really want to advance knowledge, it should be a forum, where maybe only certain people are allowed to post, but everyone is allowed to read. Then we'd get some really interesting discussions.

They are missing this obvious direction (allowing dialogue) in such a huge way that it must be a deliberate ommission. In its current form, Edge seems more optimised towards selling books than advancing knowledge.

(Originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

160 chars: Complexity in finance

Good article: Why is finance so complex? http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2669.html  Answer: To fool people into taking more risk then they realise they are taking

Mandatory Banking

Here's a question I've been pondering that I'd like to throw out for the economists - my understanding is that although people tend to think of the money in their bank account as 'theirs', in practice they have 'lent' the money to the bank who then lend it to other people but promise to give it back to the lender if they need it (as often noted, a promise they can only keep under certain conditions). So really the money is only 'theirs' if they keep it under their mattress or something.

Now, it seems that in the modern world, for all intents and purposes, having a bank account is pretty much vital if you want to do anything at all - e.g. try getting your employer to pay your salary if you don't have a bank account - so we now live in a society where lending money to banks is (for all intents and purposes) mandatory. I have a feeling this should change our whole concept of what money is and several of the fundamental principles underpinning it. So: How does 'mandatory' banking affect the theory of money?

(originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

Steve Jobs

In about 2000, Douglas Adams wrote a really good essay (called 'Turncoat', in the Salmon of Doubt) about how he saw the torch of zeitgeist moving from pop music (the Beatles) through to comedy (Monty Python, whose stardom rose as the Beatles faded) and then on to ... technological innovation. Its partly an essay about being disillusioned with comedy, but also an essay about Douglas's conversion to being a fan of technology rather than a satirist of it.

So he makes the case that the people really doing the cool stuff these days are not the pop stars or the performers (I mean, music is great but when's the last time that music changed the world? Thirty years ago?), but the people building new ways for us to communicate and play and work together.

So for people wondering why so many people feel so affected by Steve Job's death - its because we're living in the future, and the people inventing new stuff in tech and on the internet are as important to our culture as pop stars were in the 60s.

(originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

Good Will Hunting

This thread on mefi got me thinking about Good Will Hunting. Its a long time since I saw GWH but I remember being annoyed by the "Hollywood" smart person aspect. I think there's a scene where he flicks through his girlfriend's textbook for 20 mins and then does all her homework for her. Savants exist in some fields but not like that. Good Will Hunting is to 'intelligent' as Rambo is to 'resourceful with guns'.

But I did like this monologue:

Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cuz I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying, "Oh, send in the marines to secure the area", 'cuz they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cuz they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cuz he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, it ain't too long till he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starving 'cuz every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure: fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.

Cognitive Surplus

I've had a quote rattling around in the back of my head for a while, about the time taken to create Wikipedia versus time spent watching TV. I found the original source when I started reading Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus:

"Imagine treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of measurement, so lets start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit - every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought* ... One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television?

Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year."

* Of his Wikipedia time estimate, Shirky says: "Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but its the right order of magnitude."

That one comparison alone gives plenty of food for thought. Shirky's style is to carefully reinforce subtle points by repeating similar examples (often with similar paragraph structures) which can make the book seem repetitive. But he is repeating in order to tease out the subtleties; every example he gives in the book is saying 'people can work together to do stuff' - which is obvious - but the value in his examples is the deeper anaylsis of how they are working together, why, and how more of the same can be made to happen.

See also this Guardian Review

Near the end of the book, one paragraph in particular really stood out for me, not because it was about anything internetty, but because Shirky casually crystalised a thought that I had been struggling to form - about 21st century politics and how it is converging on variations of 'free market with state support for some things', with the 'big ideas' of the 19th and 20th Century now seeming hopelessly simplistic:

"Neither perfect individual freedom nor perfect social control is optimal (Ayn Rand and Vladimir Lenin both overshot the mark), so it falls to us to manage the tension between individual freedom and social value, a trade-off that follows the by-now-familiar pattern of having no solution, just different optimizations that create different kinds of value, and different kinds of problems that need to be managed."

Review of "Outside"

This Metafilter comment from mefi user aeschenkarnos back in March 2008 is a fantastically written review of the multiplayer video game "Outside". It already been widely quoted elsewhere, and its well worth quoting in full here.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of "now what?"

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game's social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.

Aeschenkarnos, March 2008