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Justice, at least the way I've heard it used, is very much revenge without the stigma.
There is a lot to be gained by delegating to a central authority the responsibility of maintaining a credible threat of retaliation.
Is this supposed to be a haiku? It almost is one, but it's off by one syllable.
In the book, it's presented as a translation from the neo-dolphin language Trinary. I expect the resemblence to haiku is intentional.
What the?
I'll take the upvotes here as a request for explanation.
I see two things in the poem. The first that occurred to me was the best way to predict the future is to create it. The second is related: Observe the situation and put yourself in the best position to affect or determine the outcome.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: May 2011
Where does a ball alight,
Falling through the bright midair?
Hit it with your snout!
-- unnamed neo-dolphin poet, Uplift War by David Brin
For some reason no one does the obvious cancellation to end up in m^2. This even has an intuitive meaning, it's the cross-section that a line of fuel would need so that as you travelled along it you'd be "picking it up" at the same rate you were burning it.
Thank you for that humorous insight. I am entertained by the knowledge that my car has a fuel efficiency of 0.0784 mm^2.
And by the same token, we'll know we've nailed AI not when we have written a program that can have that conversation... but when we have written down an account of how we are able to have that conversation, to such a level of detail that there's nothing left to explain.
Writing a program which solves the Towers of Hanoi is not too hard. Proving, given a formalization of the ToH, various properties of a program that solves it, isn't too hard. But looking at a bunch of wooden disks slotted on pegs and coming up with an interpretation of that situation which corresponds to the abstract scheme we know as "Towers of Hanoi"... That's where the fun is.
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means. Yet.
(Apologies to Alan Perlis etc)
For an even somewhat rational person, pain is far stronger than necessary as a warning sign. As someone generally concerned with my own body's welfare, the mental equivalent of popping up a politely worded dialog box would be sufficient. I find that shame is likewise overkill for solving this problem.
...pain is far stronger than necessary as a warning sign.
It seems pretty clear to me that this was not true in our ancestral environment. It may be the case in our present artificially benign environment however.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: July 2010
It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets — and not simply piling up a lot of facts.
-- George Orwell
I think it would be more clear if it included the previous sentence:
Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind.
Or perhaps just substituting "[Scientific education]" for "It".
In response to
Rationality Quotes: July 2010
From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:
In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.
and
19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
[context added]
Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats--and then people were suddenly queing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around.
Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: "Tax the rat farms."
-- Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett
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The one which goes at 90 mph. For details see this subcomment.
Now I wonder what it is like to be a bat.
Perhaps there is nothing which it is like to be a bat.