I've read a good few of Miéville's novels - I found Perdido Street Station to be the weakest in terms of prose though I guess that could be cause it was only his second novel, or it deliberately homages Lovecraft (whose prose I'm not keen on either) in its style.
Still a wonderful book though.
I haven't read any of his other books -- is there any you could recommend? Maybe one of the recent ones, like Embassy Town and Railsee?
Here you are: Best of short rationality quotes 2009-2012. I created it with a one-line modification of the script I used here: Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition. The threshold is 400 characters including XML markup. The user-names for the newer quotes are missing, I'll fix this for the 2012 Edition.
Great! Thanks a lot for this!
Every time I read something by Searle, my blood pressure rises a couple of standard deviations.
One has to commend Searle though from coming up with such a clear example of what he thinks is wrong with the then-current model of AI. I wish all people could formulate their phylosophical ideas, right or wrong, in such a fashion. Even when they are wrong, they can be quite fruitful, as can be seen in the many papers (example still referring to Searle and his Chinese Room, or even more famously in the EPR paradox paper.
I like the Rationality Quotes, but it seems it is dominated by fairly long entries, rather than the small gems that I prefer. Now, obviously some people like those longer entries, but it'd be great if I those could be filtered out in some way. Is there a way to do that?
That's true, and unfortunately you could link it back to a phenomenonal argument relatively straightforwardly by saying something like "AI will never be developed because anything technology does is just a computation, not thinking."
In fact, laying out the argument explicitly just shows how weak it is, since it's essentially just asserting AI is impossible by definition. Yet, there are still people who would still agree with the argument anyway. For instance, I was looking up an example of a debate about the possibility of AI, (linked here http://www.debate.org/debates/Artificial-Intelligence-is-impossible/1/ ) and one side said:
"Those are mere programs, not AI." Now, later, the person said "Yes but in your case, Gamecube or Debate.org is simply programming, not AI. There is a difference between simple programming and human-like AI." and then: "This is not learning. These devices are limited by their programming, they cannot learn."
But I suppose my point is that this gets first summed up with an extremely weak lead in argument which is essentially: "You are wrong by definition!" which then has to be peeled back to get to a content argument like "Learning" "Godel" or "Free Will"
And that it happens so often it has it's own name rather than just being an example of a no true Scotsman.
The most famous proponent of this "those are mere programs" view may be John Searle and his Chinese Room. I wouldn't call that the weakest argument against AI, although I think his argument is flawed.
perhaps the better advice, then, is "when things aren't working, consider the possibility that it's because your efforts are not going into what matters, rather than assuming it is because you need to work harder on the issues you're already focusing on"
That's a much better advice than Godin's near-tautology.
Perhaps in the introduction (or title?) it should be mentioned that AI in the context of the article means human-level AI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect seems to detail a weak argument against AI. I was going to sum it up, but the Wikipedia page was doing a better job than I was, so I'll just mention a few quotes from the beginning of the article.
The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real intelligence.
Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."[1] AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, Oh, that's just a computation."[2]
That argument is primarily about what the word AI means, rather than an argument against AI as a phenomenon.
I'm also interested. There's a list compiled by Lukeprog et al. about the best textbooks in every subject, but that's just textbooks.
Perhaps opening a thread asking peeps to post a few books would be useful? I'd ask for one or two books for each of...
Favorite
Most influential (towards your life, your thinking, idk)
Most fun
Best outside of a genre that you normally read
and others. maybe.
I think the textbook-list was a nice idea, but in the ended didn't really work that well, since too few people were involved, and, as you say, it's only textbooks -- not my normal digest of books.
So as my own little contribution, I'll try to add a few books every time the Media Thread comes up; hopefully more people will do that. Let's fight against Sturgeon's Law!
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I think I'm three behind on his books at this stage, not even counting his children's book... but the other books set in Bas-Lag (the Perdido Street Station world) are very good. The Scar is probably my favourite of the three. Iron Council is also pretty good - among other thing, it's a clever pastiche of a number of different kinds of story - but a lot of people get turned off by how heavily political it is. (Miéville is very very Marxist, as far as I know.) It didn't bother me too much.
The City and the City is very good. I've heard it described as a police mystery by Kafka (I've not read Kafka, but I've heard this a few times). It's set in contemporary Earth, rather than a fantasy setting. His short story collection is also good - there's one Bas-Lag story, and a few horrors. I started Embassytown and it seemed promising.
The main issue with Miéville is he adds a lot of concepts and doesn't explain them clearly until well into the book, if he even outright explains them at all - that works to the book's advantage sometimes but I found it a little tough in Embassytown.
Huh, that means I've read only half his adult books! Better catch up!
Oh, thanks a lot for the information! I'll check those out!