Comment author: Ron_Hardin 05 February 2008 10:52:33AM 0 points [-]

I remember a cold call from a stockbroker years ago, wherein he argued that if I didn't believe that the market was going to go down, then I must believe that the market is going to go up.

Leaving aside the stay-the-same option, that isn't A or not A.

``Believe'' has its own grammar.

Wittgenstein : 575. When I sat down on this chair, of course I believed it would bear me. I had no thought of its possibly collapsing.

In response to Rationality Quotes 5
Comment author: Ron_Hardin 23 January 2008 07:04:42PM 0 points [-]

Check out Stanley Cavell's _The Claim of Reason_ if you like Wittgenstein ; lots on intelligent and empathetic robots too, in looking at what forms skepticism takes in people.

It's likely to affect your understanding of what Wittgenstein was up to, as well.

Comment author: Ron_Hardin 14 January 2008 09:02:54AM -1 points [-]

95% confidence means that if you repeat the experiment you get the right answer 95% of the time.

That depends on your thoughts because what counts as a success comes up in the repeats.

The experiment itself does not tell you what would have counted as a success. It simply is. No confidence concept applies.

In response to Beautiful Math
Comment author: Ron_Hardin 11 January 2008 10:49:07AM 0 points [-]

Carl Linderholm notes in _Mathematics Made Difficult_ that the next number in 1 2 4 8 16 _?_ has to be 31, based on just those differences.

Lautreamont on mathematical objects.

Comment author: Ron_Hardin 02 December 2007 11:34:57PM 0 points [-]

Death spiral comes from airplanes and pilot disorientation leading to corrective action making a descending turn progressively worse. Without the disorientation, it doesn't happen.

Flying blind without instruments leads to disorientation very fast, if you're doing the flying. If you're just a passenger, you reorient from what the pilot does; but it's fatal if the pilot does that, without instruments to reorient himself from.

Disorientation is the key to take away.

Comment author: Ron_Hardin 02 December 2007 05:52:41PM 0 points [-]

Phlogiston was the cause of fire. It's a reification error, is all. Like ``power'' in political discourse, which is supposed to be a thing you can acquire, or lose, or contest. Whole analyses depend on it.

Comment author: Ron_Hardin 29 November 2007 01:03:35PM 0 points [-]

Derrida must have done a thousand essays on how an author trying to be very precise about how language could possibly work, winds up in an infinte loop clarifying a final point that amounts to in effect starting over.

This contributes a lot to an indefinite future, whatever the modulus problem, if you take AI as just such a project.

View more: Prev