I'm defining intelligence as "the thing we think people have when they have a high IQ" — similar to how depression is currently medically defined as "that which is measured by a forced swim test."
Obviously, measured intelligence is not "real intelligence" ("g", whatever that is) — but at the same time, people increasingly use the term "intelligent" to refer to someone who has high measured intelligence (IQ), whether or not they have high "real intelligence." So the definitions sort of collapse into one-another over time. "The measure becomes the target", but for language.
IQ testing is not how anyone measures intelligence and hasn't been for quite some time.
I suspect the problem lies here: Intelligence requires a multi-part definition, to use your analogy, much like swimming.
Swimming is defined as the action of moving oneself through water using your limbs.
An intelligence definition should include the ability to extrapolate, comprehend and innovate information accurately as far as we can understand the world. The more precisely one can do this and the more depth of knowledge one has the more intelligent one is.
A tricky thing to define.
> An intelligence definition should include the ability to extrapolate, comprehend and innovate information accurately as far as we can understand the world.
What? "Intelligence" is not a psychology jargon term; it's just a word, defined by the way lay-people put the term to use in conversation. Language is used to communicate; we define words (jargon excluded) as what the majority of people understand them to mean.
When jargon and regular words collide, the lay-definition wins, and the jargon definition gets lost. (See e.g. "begging the question", which has become a lay-term for "something that has an obvious corollary or unstated flaw" rather than its meaning as a jargon term in logic.)
That's why academics invent terms like "g" — to make sure that the jargon term has no lay-term it's colliding with.
Lay-people have incomplete information, therefore even if they "win" with common usage their opinion can be casually disregarded.
If you are suggesting that I give in to the ignorance of the average human simply because they have numbers you and me have a serious irreconcilable problem.
I am suggesting that the purpose/point/craft/art of communication has the goal of packing the model in your head into a portable "universal standard" form, so that it can be unpacked as losslessly as possible, in minds with models as different from your own as possible.
The concept of a lingua franca is that there is an optimal encoding for information conveyance, if you're recording that knowledge without knowing the target audience in advance; and that that encoding is the one that uses the language, the dialect, the terms, the idioms, the mode of speech, etc. that — at least measured by current world trends — will confound the understanding of the fewest such potential audiences.
Or, to put that another way: if the people you want to communicate already think like you... do you really need to say anything at all? They can probably independently come up with the same thought you want to convey. Communication exists to bridge gaps in understanding, to create mappings between non-isomorphic mental models where those mappings aren't already implicitly embedded in the models' shared structure. Communication is work done upon other people's mental model to converge them closer to you own.
That work does not consist just waving at others from over where your own mental model sits, and demanding that they bridge the understanding gap with you from their end, so that your words will make sense to them. Why would they bother? If you want to communicate something, you're the one struck with a motivation to optimize toward a world where other people know the thing you know; the other people who you'd be sharing that information with, have no such motive.
This is why tools like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children exist: the work of moving someone's mental model closer to your own, of bridging that gap, cannot be accomplished in a single leap; you must often take a circuitous path around (what you consider) the truth, to create a sturdy bridge that will reliably bring people's mental models in line with your own.
Refusal to do this painful-but-O(1) work—presumably under the expectation that the N parties that consume your communication will instead do their own painful mental labor to understand you, for an O(N) aggregate workload—is a disengagement from the entire concept of communication.
That's a straw man. The problem is tons of research and development won't happen without the state, but the main avenue the state funds development (as opposed to research) is the military.
There are many possible futures, and the world is highly non-ergodic, so there is a real cost here to biasing the development of technology in this matter. "Opportunity cost" doesn't do the concept justice.
We don't have to stop military research, but we should bring up the Arpa-E and other such things to bring balance to the situation.
> That's a straw man. The problem is tons of research and development won't happen without the state, but the main avenue the state funds development (as opposed to research) is the military.
The reason the op's comment is not actually a straw man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man) is because the first governments were developed out of a necessity to ensure a unity of peoples, the functioning of essential systems, and the protection of said peoples and systems. It's also why (for instance) the very first sentence of the US constitution has multiple touch points with national security:
> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, *establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty* to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
To summarize: defense is how so much of our monetarily non-viable societal advances take place because defense is primarily why governments exist at all. Even arpa-e (thanks for your edit—it's a good topic to bring up) exists to minimize our reliance on foreign energy, which is directly motivated by national security.
We know what government is per se, regardless of the motives of the earliest state governments.
But here we miss an important point which is that government is natural to human societies. The mistake is to think that government is some artificial construct at odds with human nature. Tribes are governed. Families, the smallest society, are governed. What we call "government" is just a modification of the most basic form of government of the family (kings, for example, were analogically fathers of the kingdom). The authority of the state is derived from the authority of parents through the principle of subsidiary.
I agree with the spirit, but I prefer to reject the natural/artificial distinction. Societal and biological evolution can be a very "arbitrary" processes. Sometimes something just happens, and is good enough, and sticks around. It's ultimately pretty subjective which things are "over-determined" and what wasn't (photosynthesis? agriculture? Something like eukaryotes from endo-symbiosis?), without being able to run a bunch of difficult experiments.
Government and money are two institutions who's origins are much debated, but I would be find replacing them with something else, "self-perpetuation" replaces "natural" for me.
I also so think this is dovetails with the best argument for reproducible bootstraps (as the follow up to reproducible builds). Without that, and like with our socials institutions, we have a a "historical bootstrap" we are constrained by. But by making an artificial bootstrap, we gain some freedom to tinker rather than being completely constrained by historical happenstance.
With software it is clear what this looks like. With something like governance and money it is less clear. Certainly it's hard to imagine the John Locke style arguments bootstrapping from "primitive man" working out, as children must be raised in a culture before they get the privileges of democracy, and are thus biased. But perhaps there are other more feasible ways.
Well could you point to the downside of this? From teflon to internet and countless other things you use every day that came out of DARPA and other def. research, what would have changed if it was funded via different model?
The problem is privileging technologies that have defence capabilities. There are likely countless ideas that could have similar success to DARPA projects if they had similar access to capital and state support.
However, unless it can show off some military capability its funding can't be justified using the current model, leaving a gigantic subsections of technologies that could have similar innovative impact underserved by this level of support.
Without defense, the others cannot exist. Without defense, you cannot have a space within which you can securely do other work. So it cannot be a matter of competition but prioritization.
Of course, we can criticize the massive amount of funding that goes to military contractors and the like (Eisenhower did). That's where the devil is: the military-industrial complex.
DARPA does lots of good things — I have in fact worked on a DARPA project and enjoyed it. It's well run.
But each of those things has to be contorted to have a military purpose, even if the main benefit we get in the end is not military-related.
We should be able to research those things just because they are good, without laundering their best purpose. And we should open the door to other things that seem just as promising, but are harder to so launder.
The fact I can't tell you the counterfactual is kind of the point — most of us have no idea about the world-changing effects of the development not persued might be, just as the average person on the 1970s did not envision today's internet. The world of possible futures is simply too open ended.
I think the complaint is not that the government funds research for defense, it's that it could be funding energy, medical, etc research.
I honestly don't know if I fully agree with his complaint, because I'm fairly sure the government does fund a lot of other research that isn't defense focused (see a lot of universities).
It funds many sorts of research but much less development. Research ideas do not develop themselves and so the story of modern academia is zillions of abandoned ideas.
One prominent one is that we use fear to control other countries instead of love.
We spend so much human talent on defense, and sure we got a bunch of great technologies, but who's to say that we wouldn't have got them through some other avenue, later? Or perhaps even better technologies. I only speculate about the former, but I am quite certain a lot of the violence in the world has been caused by American Neo-colonialism and the terrorism we imposed upon the world. I am a betting man, and I bet that if we didn't fuck the Russians over so hard in WW2, that we wouldn't have had the cold war.
How did the US fuck over Russia in WWII? And are you aware of the billions of foreign aid many countries get from the US which is tied to issues like human rights, freedom, and democracy?
The US let the Russians break themselves fighting the Eastern front while they invaded north Africa. The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening, and if the US applied more pressure to Germany in this period, as the Russian requested, the Germans probably would not have done so much population damage to Russia.
Bitterness of this fueled a lot of ideological tensions. I was also taught that a large motivation of dropping the Bomb was to scare the Russians.
Source: My Highschool education. Obviously, commentary on WWII is not objective, but I stand by my thesis, considering the actual action that the United States engages in in present times. Its in our history to be both ideologically driven and meta gamers.
It’s hard to imagine the scale of the U.S. air operations against Germany and say the U.S. let the Russians break themselves without doing anything to help. Or look at the disaster that was Market Garden and think the U.S. could have invaded earlier. The U.S. was under no ethical obligation to throw away lives uselessly in a German blender as a distraction.
That line of argument doesn't make any sense to me. The Americans were actually in FAVOR of a cross-channel invasion in 1942-43 (see operation sledgehammer and operation roundup), but were shouted down by the British. Which, to their credit, was fair: the Allies lacked the ability to launch a large amphibious assault in 1942 into France. They lacked a sufficient fleet of landing craft, along with the proper doctrine, the same degree of air superiority they would have in 1944.
"The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening"
That doesn't make any sense. Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria) didn't even start until Nov 8th, and Montgomery's position in Libya was hardly "secure" before November. But the Soviets were already launching counter-offensives and encircling the German army by the end of November. If you're counting from the beginning of the main Stalingrad offensives, August 1942, yeah maybe you could call the North African theater "stable", if by stable you mean that the Allies just one a defensive victory and managed to stall out an offensive into Egypt. But it's not like they could cancel their planned invasion of Algeria and Morocco and re-plan for an invasion of France in a couple months.
Plus the US would be invading mainland Europe Sept 3rd of 1943, and I really don't think they could have performed a successful invasion anytime sooner.
Straw Man
noun
1.
an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.
My comment speaks directly to to above post as follows:
"It really sucks that there's a 'D' for 'Defense' at the front of the acronym. Their website says they're "creating breakthrough technologies and capabilities for national security". Horrible that national security is the reason for this, when it should be human progress."
As for the world being difficult to predict, or to use your phrasing "non-ergodic", it is in fact easy to predict that security will be necessary. It is difficult to predict exactly what the threat to security will be. This uncertainty alone justifies development.
Also, DARPA tech is well known for spreading outside of it originally intended remit. Ie the research itself can be of use in other areas.
America is preventing Russia from antagonizing Europe, all the while we foot the bill for maintaining a capable military.
China is a looming threat. If you don't see that, I don't know what I can say.
Take away America's military and see what happens.
Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Spratleys, 9-dash, water rights, Belt+Road indebtedness, Crimea, Ukraine...
The US has to be strong out of necessity, and we get treated like shit for it. America is far from perfect, but it's Democratic and celebrates individualism and free speech. And I'm not persecuted for being LGBT. I'd hate to be in Russia or China where I'm told I can't think my own thoughts or have my own preferences.
If we didn't have to pay so much for our military capabilities, maybe we'd all get to enjoy the same free health care and social programs that Europe, Canada, and other nations enjoy.
The cat is out of the bag, Ukraine gave up 3d largest Nuclear arsenal on the promise that other nuclear powers mainly US would provide security. Everyone saw how that played out so a country would need to be suicidal not to start a nuclear program.
> Ukraine gave up 3d largest Nuclear arsenal on the promise that other nuclear powers mainly US would provide security
> mainly US
You missing historical order here. Ukraine gave up their arsenal long before they decided to drop Russia as an ally and play with Europe/USA (latter happens after "Maidan"). So at given time point (when Ukraine signs memorandum) they done it with _only_ Russia' protection in mind (as there was single country in past and they're both slavic)
> By 1996, Ukraine transferred all Soviet-era strategic warheads to Russia.
> Ukraine received extensive assistance to dismantle ICBMs, ICBM silos, heavy bombers, and cruise missiles from the __U.S.__ funded Cooperative Threat Reduction Program
Citing wiki:
> Euromaidan was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on the night of __21 November 2013__ with public protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv
well even by your convoluted logic you would have to go back to Orange revolution in 2004. But none of what you site has anything to do with Russia being considered a mil ally. by Ukrainan gov. Russia was considered the biggest threat to Ukraine independence starting with Ukraine's first president.
The only convoluted thing here is your own history as you see it.
> Russia was considered the biggest threat to Ukraine independence starting with Kyivan Rus'
Until Yushchenko there was no such president. Relations never were stable, though.
Look at A.I. Kuzmuk paper "Ukraine military doctrine evolution" if curious. VDU-1993 and VDU-2004 never considered Russia as a threat. VDU-2004 states there is no direct military threat against Ukraine, just possibility of being involved into bigger conflict. Kuchma even cancelled statement about NATO integration in VDU-2004, by making it more smooth.
I highly doubt Kuzmuk ever read that book to begin with :)
He certainly never wrote it :). To argue an empire is not a threat to the country that gained independence from it in very recent time is very toll order and Kravchuk always aknowleged Russia as a threat to Ukrainian independence as did Kuchma.
Ukraine did not have as much of a choice as one would think. All the nukes were set up to be controlled by Moscow and it would have taken enough time to bypass the controls that the Russian army could feasibly have invaded or destroyed them.
They were not a major portion of Nuclear Weapons R&D and manufacturing were done in Ukraine including design and manufacture of majority of electronics including guidance systems, comms etc. as well as most top tear weapons were designed by Yuzhnoye Design Office (Dnepr Ukraine) and manufactured by Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant (Dnepr Ukraine)
Ukraine indeed had a lot of manufacturing and design of nuclear weapons. Even then the control, launch and timings were all centralized in Moscow. They would have had to reverse engineer and hack a lot of it amidst attacks from Russia and perhaps even the US.
I think you are still confused the control systems were designed and manufactured in Ukraine there was nothing to reverse eng. The only step not done in Ukraine was uranium enrichment.
Ukraine never really possessed nuclear arsenal. There were nuclear weapons on their territory but they lacked full operational capability to employ them, and didn't have the technical infrastructure to maintain them without Russian support. Those capabilities could have been built out in time but it would have required significant resources.
That's not the problem of Ukraine. The whole world sees what agreements like that are worth. Alternatively, if that would be the binding memo, and USA broke the "legally binding" promise, nobody would prosecute. The reaction of the world would be about the same.
Whataboutism is far from useless. By comparing similar subjects one can see their traits with greater clarity. When whataboutism is used to deflect from the original subject then it is useless for anyone seeing clarity.
Like many tactics it all depends on how it is used.
There are two extremes here. One extreme is excessive work while the other is no work. In between the two lies a range of working hours which is tolerable to humans.
Being uncertain is in the middle. It's a position that too few humans are willing to take on any issue, treating it as if it were madness. If you are uncertain your options are to either ignore the issue or explore all the options.
No, that's not the point. That what your think, and i think, it's a little harsh and dismissive for you to judge someone else's life work or experience or what they amount to and say they've achieved nothing. I bet a lot of other actual human beings would reject your characterization of them. I think you should think of that and I think not enough people remember the human in this topic. And I think that's selfish and cruel
Yeah there aren’t three fixed points of either disbelief, true middle ground, or belief. It’s a spectrum and I fall more towards the disbelief point in this case, but that doesn’t stop me from critically evaluating the possibility that I’m on the wrong end of the spectrum
Of course some peoples "rights" will have to be stepped on. In order to have and maintain a civilization that civilization requires people who are competent at the skills needed in that civilization. These people are the most necessary. The obvious targets for suppression should be the people who provide the least value to society. No other method is practical.
It is important to remember that "rights" are imaginary despite grandiose titles such as Universal Human Rights. The universe provides no such framework. Pragmatism has to come first. Providing for the least is a luxury.
As far as corruption goes, there is no passive method to prevent overreach. it needs to be actively rooted out. Think of this as error correction.
I also think that only small groups of humans could achieve such a system. Expecting this at the country or planetary level at this time in history is delusional.
Value here is defined as the NECESSARY tasks required to maintain the civilization whether they be menial or intellectual. Needs not wants. Tasks that provide food, shelter and the basic life sustaining requirements so that other ventures can be pursued. No civilization can exist without these. People that don't or cannot work are not as valuable. This is harsh but is in tune with reality. People that choose to invest in their own interest form a split. Some when investing in their own interests create value for their civilization. Others do not and in fact drain value from civilization. They do this because they can. Any civilization will have a given amount of drainers and can indeed sustain a certain amount of drainers unless they drain enough resources to collapse the civilization.
The other consideration is that while what I have said uses logic, many humans rely of emotional reasoning over logic. In order to make these people provide value a certain amount of emotional manipulation is also necessary,
I read the GP as meaning that people spreading lies provide less value than people spreading truth.
Of course, deciding what is a lie isn't trivial, so system that enforces that will be complex and unstable. But that does not automatically means it's a bad system.
Yeah, I admit it does use some of those elements. However this is reality. Trying to provide to those less fortunate is a luxury. The idea of creating an equitable society is only possible if the members of that society are ever-learning and hardworking. In our reality people like this are drained from two sides 1) the less fortunate and 2) the greedy. This is pragmatism. The main difference between my views and what you are referencing is that I'm not picking the membership arbitrarily. Competent people HAVE to come first BECAUSE they are needed. You can't drain what you need and give to less fortunate. You can only build your civilization until you can afford to help out others. We are not in that situation currently. Harsh reality cannot be ignored forever.
It sounds like general problem solving ie. Collect all the individual components of the problem and research the known methods of connecting the components to each other to achieve the desired result. When the desired result is found the problem is solved. It's how basic word problems are formatted. This is well documented. The problem is getting humans to follow the steps instead of making what they think are intuitive leaps but are really mental errors.
When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19.
This is how I test my assumptions.
Really quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this.
To be fair unless you're somehow intune with Europe at that time an average American will not really know how really bad it is (they might have an idea that something bad is happening - but they might described it as mostly targeted attacks to leaders, not knowing about the civilian killings).
I'm not especially "intune with Europe", and that conflict ended when I was a small child, but I knew the violence extended to civilians. Not sure why you assume people wouldn't know that.
I'm referring to the average American populace and not to the average HN poster. For example, I knew the details of the Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks and know that it was caused by a "new religion" cult but an average person outside Japan wouldn't really remember that as clearly as I am (unless you are somehow in Western Australia since a farm area there was refurbished to produce sarin). It is like 9/11 outside America: an average person knows it enough to remember whatever inconvenience they encountered that day but not the whole details.
Sunday Bloody Sunday is a well known song, don't forget. It wasn't that long ago that the IRA was putting bombs in trash cans. I think this is far more known in the US than you'd think, especially given it's intra-Christian violence.
Surely the bombs in London and Manchester were international news at the time, at least throughout the Western world?
Next you'll tell me the average American is unaware of the 7 July bombs on the London Underground, the ETA bombs in Spain, Breivik in Norway or the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo.
The average American will have probably seen some coverage of those things, but for stuff that happened years ago that aren't closely tied to ongoing, present-day in-the-US issues, they won't recall many details.
Even "world news" segments in the American news largely involve America in some capacity. Maybe half of world news in the US is completely unrelated to the US.
I would guess that the average American (I really mean average here, not average among HN posters) will have heard of nothing on that list, but also not heard of any US political violence in that time period.
This. The HN crowd vastly overestimates how unknown these can be on an actual person. Even when they knew about the explosions in the (London) Docklands and in Manchester, they would only knew it to be terrorist attacks, not specifically the provisional Irish Republican Army (unrelated to the Irish Army).
Edit: definitely not the Australian city of Docklands (and not any city named Manchester ouside England!)
I think the [Provisional] IRA is well known in America. Every other American seems to think they are 'part Irish' and I think the average American's awareness of The Troubles is high, at least compared to other foreign conflicts (at least for Americans old enough to remember the 90s at least anyway.) Furthermore 'Irish car bombs' are a tactless but popular bar drink in America, which indicates an awareness of the conflict.
My father has a story about being in Irish bars in New Jersey in the 70s and 80s when Irish men would occasionally come into bars and announce they were collecting the 'Irish tax'. People would chip in a dollar or two, with the understanding that the money would be used to support the IRA in some way.
Occasionally I've met people who wondered where the drink name came from, but everybody else in the room was always quick to explain it. Americans may not know all the nuance and details, but the basics ('there was a violent conflict between the British and Irish, particularly regarding Northern Ireland") really are widely known in my experience.
Now, I know all of these events though clearly though, but I'm referring to the average populace. Yes, they might know that happened and they might be inconvenienced by it but not enough to know that (for example) the sarin attack was due to a "new religion" cult. It is like 9/11 outside America: an average person knows it enough to remember whatever inconvenience they encountered that day but not the whole details.
I am a very average American, born in 1983, and I’ll admit that I have only the vaguest idea of The Troubles. My first real concrete memory of hearing of Ireland’s issues was the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
If you were born after 1990 in America, I am doubtful you have much knowledge of that era at all.
I love your humour during these times, also thought by "Ireland Event" he was talking about "The Troubles" coming to America and clicked but I guess we have different stereotypical images of Irish folks.
Potatoes, a new world food, were a monoculture in Ireland at the time. These days there are a huge number of potato varieties grown, so a devastating potato blight seems unlikely to occur again.
How devastating? I expect few if any would starve; we grow more than enough grain to keep people alive. Potatoes farmers would be put in a hard financial situation, but they'd probably get bailed out and could replant with other varieties for the next season.
I don't think the bar is as low as "could the government make enough gruel to keep you from starving." And, given the current experience with vaccine distribution, even that is not certain.
Think of all commercial food products that contain potatoes that could no longer be produced for a time. Potatoes are a significant source of cattle feed. Potato starch has many non-food industrial applications.
Perhaps we wouldn't have millions of deaths, but a year without potatoes would be an historic catastrophe that Americans would remember for decades.
And I assumed it would be about the coronavirus, because the neurons that knew about the virus surge on the island answered first. And the framing of the event on "2 months" made me think of current events rather than distant past ones.
I initially thought the same, in part because I recall a HN comment yesterday predicting the US would see such events soon, comparing them to the troubles.
Same. Also a bizarre example of someone coming up with a better analogy than I've been able to muster about my own expectations, when in fact they did nothing of the sort.
