All of telms's Comments + Replies

Sad to say, my only experience with wargaming was playing Risk in high school. I'm not sure that counts.

Let me refer you to Computation and Human Experience, by Philip E. Agre, and to Understanding Computers and Cognition, by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores.

Guesstimates based on quick reading without serious analysis:

(1) Probability that Amnda Knox is guilty: 5%

(2) Probablility that Raffaele Sollecito is guilty: 10%

(3) Probability that Gudy Guede is guilty: 60%

(4) Probability that my estimates are congruent with OP's: 50% (ie random, I can't tell what his opinion is)

Hi, Antiochus. What areas of history are you interested in? I'm similarly interested in history -- particularly paleontology and archaeology, the history or urban civilizations (rise and collapse and reemergence), and the history of technology. I kind of lose interest after World War II, though. You?

I was able to follow this explanation (as well as the rest of your post) without seeing your physical body in any way. ... The fact that we can do this looks to me like evidence against your main thesis.

Ah, but you're assuming that this particular interaction stands on its own. I'll bet you were able to visualize the described gestures just fine by invoking memories of past interactions with bodies in the world.

Two points. First, I don't contest the existence of verbal labels that merely refer -- or even just register as being invoked without refering a... (read more)

Are you really claiming that ability to understand the very concept of indexicality, and concepts like "soon", "late", "far", etc., relies on humanlike fingers? That seems like an extraordinary claim, to put it lightly.

Yeah, I am advancing the hypothesis that, in humans, the comprehension of indexicality relies on embodied pointing at its core -- though not just with fingers, which are not universally used for pointing in all human cultures. Sotaro Kita has the most data on this subject for language, but the embodied basis ... (read more)

You make a very important point that I would like to emphasize: incommensurate bodies very likely will lead to misunderstanding. It's not just a matter of shared or disjunct body isomorphism. It's also a matter of embodied interaction in a real world.

Let's take the very fundamental function of pointing. Every human language is rife with words called deictics that anchor the flow of utterance to specific pieces of the immediate environment. English examples are words like "this", "that", "near", "far", "soon"... (read more)

You make some good points. Please forgive me if I am more pessimistic than you are about the likelihood of AGI in our lifetimes, though. These are hard problems, which decompose into hard problems, which decompose into hard problems -- it's hard problems all the way down, I think. The good news is, there's plenty of work to be done.

Thanks for that explanation. The complexity factor hadn't occurred to me.

Some representative papers of Stevan Harnad are:

• The symbol grounding problem

• Other bodies, other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem

A list of references can be found in an earlier post in this thread.

Is a computer executing a software emulation of a humanoid body interacting with an emulated physical environment a disembodied algorithmic system, or an AI ROBOT (or neither, or both, or it depends on something)?

An emulated body in an emulated environment is a disembodied algorithmic system in my terminology. The classic example is Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, which made significant advances in machine language understanding by adding an emulated body (arm) and an emulated world (a cartoon blocks world, but nevertheless a world that could be manipulated) ... (read more)

Jurgen Streeck's book Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning is a good summary of Streeck's cross-linguistic research on the interaction of gesture and speech in meaning creation. The book is pre-theoretical, for the most part, but Streeck does make an important claim that the biological covariation in a speaker or hearer across the somatosensory modes of gesture, vision, audition, and speech do the work of abstraction -- which is an unsolved problem in my book.

Streeck's claim happens to converge with Eric Kandel's hypothesis that abstraction happens w... (read more)

Hi, everyone. My name is Teresa, and I came to Less Wrong by way of HPMOR.

I read the first dozen chapters of HPMOR without having read or seen the Harry Potter canon, but once I was hooked on the former, it became necessary to see all the movies and then read all the books in order to get the HPMOR jokes. JK Rowling actually earned royalties she would never have received otherwise thanks to HPMOR.

I don't actually identify as a pure rationalist, although I started out that way many, many years ago. What I am committed to today is SANITY. I learned the hard ... (read more)

I'd suggest adding separate columns for actual WORK TIME versus total ELAPSED TIME after email turnaround, task switching, sleep, etc.

Prepare kettle of chili from scratch: 40 min work time, 3 hr elapsed time

Read a 350-page novel: 6 hr (work & elapsed)

Read 690 pages of economic history excluding references: 52 hrs (work time), 3 months (elapsed)

Let's see if I can take your college example and fit it to what Freakonics is investigating.

Before you roll the dice, you are asked how confident you are that if the dice roll 6, you will in fact enroll and pay the first semester's tuition at school X and still be attending classes there two months from now. You can choose from:

(a) Very likely

(b) Somewhat likely

(c) Somewhat unlikely

(d) Very unlikely

Then you're asked to give a probability estimate that you will not show up, pay up, and stick it out for two months.

Let's say you're highly motivated to do scho... (read more)

It's my understanding that, in a repeated series of PD games, the best strategy in the long run is "tit-for-tat": cooperate by default, but retaliate with defection whenever someone defects against you, and keep defecting until the original defector returns to cooperation mode. Perhaps the prisoners in this case were generalizing a cooperative default from multiple game-like encounters and treating this particular experiment as just one more of these more general interactions?

Mmm, that's not really where I'm coming from. There is an aggressively empirical research tradition in applied linguistics called "conversation analysis", which analyzes how language is actually used in real-world interaction. The raw data is actual recordings, usually with video so that the physical embodiment of the interaction and the gestures and facial expressions can be captured. The data is transcribed frame-by-frame at 1/30th of a second intervals, and includes gesture as well as vocal non-words (uh-huh, um, laugh, quavery voice, etc) to ... (read more)

Speaking for a moment as a discourse analyst rather than a philosopher, I would like to point out that much talk is social action rather than reasoning or argument, and what is said is rarely all, or even most, of what is meant. Does anyone here know of any empirical discourse research into the actual linguistic uses of semantic "stopsigns" in conversational practice?