Richard Dawkins TV - Baloney Detection Kit video

Roko

See this great little rationalist video here.

Well, if I am pro-business, I have to be skeptical about global warming. Wait! How about just following the data?

See this great little rationalist video here.

Well, if I am pro-business, I have to be skeptical about global warming. Wait! How about just following the data?

But that's not how Richard responded. He literally restated the problem in different terminology, replacing the problems with black boxes that have the solution inside

I was being flippant. I mean, what were you expecting? Imagine that the person who first had the idea that thinking is done by neurons has just published it, and you ask them what you asked me. What can he tell you about finding a girlfriend? Only that it's done by neurons. The leg work to discover just how those neurons are organised to do it is the problem, and finding a mate isn't the place to start, experiments like Hubel and Wiesel's on cat vision are the place to start, or mapping the nervous system of C. elegans.

Likewise, I'm not passing off "it's done by control systems" as the solution of a problem, but as a basic insight that gives the beginning of a way to study living organisms. The place to begin that study and establish exactly what control systems are present and how they work is in studies like the one that you dismissed as a trivial game.

That's what real work looks like. Have a spade. A start has been made at the various PCT links I've posted. Maybe in 50 years you'll get an answer. But don't be downhearted -- it's been more than a century so far for "it's made of neurons".

The place to begin that study and establish exactly what control systems are present and how they work is in studies like the one that you dismissed as a trivial game.

Telling a person "Perform this task, which involves acting like a control system" and discovering that people can, indeed, act like a control system doesn't seem to demonstrate that people are physically made out of control systems. My desktop computer isn't a control system, as such, but I can emulate a crude thermostat with a few lines of pseudocode...

while(1) {

while(DesiredTemp > ActualTemp) {runAirConditioner(); }

while(DesiredTemp < ActualTemp) {runFurnace(); }

}

1SilasBarta17y

I was expecting you to show me how the controls paradigm does a better job of explaining behaviors than the prevailing, but messy, model of evolutionary psychology. (Not that they would contradict, but your model would have to be simpler and/or more precise.) That was the challenge I had presented to you before: show how "humans are control systems" is better at compressing a description of our observations. If it seems hard to do, it's probably because it is hard to, because it's not a better model, because the behavior is so hard to express in controls terminology. Finding a mate is simply not like making sure one line is under another. [...] If I were the first person to publish the neuron theory, it would include an actual model with actual moving parts and therefore have actual explanatory power over actual observations that actual other people can make. It would not say, as you have essentially done, "people think with neurons, so like, when you think, it's all ... neurony. Are you thinking about sex? Yeah, the neuronal model has that. Neurons cause that thinking too. See, once I know what you're thinking about, I can predict, using the neuronal model, what you're thinking." [...] But human behavior is where you've started, hence my confusion of what exactly the "humans as controllers" model accomplishes. [...] But it's not an insight unless it makes the problem easier. Everything you've presented here simply shows how you could rephrase the solution to predicting organism behavior into a controls model once it's been solved. So where does the ease come in? What problem becomes easier when I approach it your way? [...] I dismissed it as a trivial game because it is a trivial game. From the fact that I use proportional feedback control to keep two lines together, it does not follow that this is a useful general model of all organism activity. Believe it or not, I have put a lot of work (in terms of fraction of my spare time) into exploring PCT. I've

2orthonormal17y

In that case, why do you keep insinuating that control theory is useful as a high-level model of intelligence? That seems analogous to deriding computational neuroscientists for not using neurons in their models. ETA: By comparison, evolutionary psychologists can't do the math yet on the selective advantage of genes coding for variations in mental traits, but their derived models of human psychology allow them to make significant predictions that weren't thought of without the model, and which often check out in experiments. Does PCT have any novel experimental consequences that have been verified?