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From the New York Times science section:
Is Geometry a Language That Only Humans Know?
Neuroscientists are exploring whether shapes like squares and rectangles — and our ability to recognize them — are part of what makes our species special.
By Siobhan Roberts
March 22, 2022… What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry. …
Plato believed that humans were uniquely attuned to geometry …
Plato was a smart guy. He was probably wrong a lot about his most complex beliefs, like The Forms, but his “Well, of course …” assumptions in passing tended to be brilliant. For example, when I finally read The Republic a half decade ago, I noticed that he more or less anticipated in the first few pages both Adam Smith’s idea of the division of labor and David Ricardo’s of comparative advantage, with which Paul Samuelson responded to mathematician Stanislaw Ulam’s challenge to present one finding by an economist that was both true and non-trivial. Apparently, Plato’s views of economics were more sophisticated and modern than Aristotle’s, but Plato mostly couldn’t be bothered with economics.
Language is often assumed to be the quality that demarcates human singularity, Dr. Dehaene noted, but perhaps there is something that is more basic, more fundamental.
“We are proposing that there are languages — multiple languages — and that, in fact, language may not have started as a communication device, but really as a representation device, the ability to represent facts about the outside world,” he said. “That’s what we are after.”
This kind of question about “What makes Man different from the animals?” was popular when I was a child. I can recall reading a National Geographic for Kids article in the late 1960s about Jane Goodall and she had taken pictures of chimps breaking off sticks to use them to get ants out of a log or something like that. This was supposed to be a big deal because it disproved something that Thomas Carlyle or somebody said about man being the tool-using animal.
But, over the years, I’ve noticed that individual animals do all sorts of crazy things that, a priori, you might assume only people do.
For example, when I was a child, I assumed that inter-species altruism was a human-only trait (yeah, I know, that sounds like an implausible thing for a child to have an opinion about, but I read a lot of science fiction, which was obsessed with these kind of questions about the nature of Man) until one dinner time when my dog was begging for food from the table, so my parakeet dragged two pieces of lettuce he’d been eating off our plates (we let him fly around the house … my mother was a saint) over the edge of the table and dropped them to him. Which my dog ignored, because it was just lettuce, but still …
Back in the 1990s, The Atlantic was always trying to hit upon something popular for their back page, and so sometimes they would invite readers to send in anecdotes about their pets, and they’d send in wild stories that would make old time philosophers’ eyes bug out. Could I trust them? Probably. My feeling is that The Atlantic in the later 20th Century tended to attract earnest and sincere readers, so, yeah, I’d likely believe their letters to the editor more than those of the fraternity brothers at small liberal arts colleges who wrote letters to the editor of Penthouse about how they’d never believed the letters to the editor in Penthouse until the evening when …
But in this century, YouTube has come along and is absolutely filled to the gills with videos of animals doing the damndest things, or, as we now call it, Hundoism.
So, proving that baboons don’t think in geometric terms is interesting (and, as Plato implied, plausible), but it doesn’t prove that animals as a whole never think geometrically. For all we know, somebody will post a YouTube video tomorrow of a shoebill stork distinguishing pentagons from hexagons.
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Animals recognize shapes all the time. Shapes are frequently used in research experiments and are almost certainly relied upon by animals with less than perfect eyesight. This enjoyable three minute video of a nautilus demonstrates that, while a checkerboard was evidently a play too far, the creature definitely recognized a square.
And there’s that ancient gif of the shape-rotator dog who successfully figures out how to carry an unusually shaped stick across an unusually shaped bridge.
https://youtu.be/xqr-Y_6ckP0
For example, when I was a child, I assumed that inter-species altruism (or cunning……..)
https://fb.watch/bX-2FILLfO/
But surely the theory of comparative advantage is not without its critics, so just to say it is “true” is going a bit far.
Incidentally, some years ago I taught part-time in a university – not Economics – and once used a photocopier directly after an Economics faculty member. He had left what he had been copying behind and I glanced at it. It was basically a memo to some other staff members saying that the students were of very low quality and “didn`t even believe in the theory of comparative advantage”, which I found quite amusing.
Heresy! I trust the offending students were burnt at the stake.
By WWI, GB was wholly dependent upon imported food to feed itself, thanks to “comparative advantage.”
The Chinese have no use for “comparative advantage”, and their economy is doing just fine. As the factory floor of the world, they will rule us all in a generation.
Only in “elite” business schools in America is “comparative advantage” taught as both true and universally good.
Where something is made, however, matters enormously - why even a “moron” like Donald Trump could see that!Replies: @ThreeCranes
Consult the ghosts of all four US presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore, as well as Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Henry Carey, Henry Clay, etc.
It is presented as an undeniable fact not because it is an undeniable fact, but to stifle dissent from the current elite policy of outsourcing manufacturing to cut labor costs and boost elite profits.
There are, however, some absolutes in economics. For example, as Malthus pointed out, if people try to double their populations every 25 years or so (that is to say: do not voluntarily limit their fertility rate to less than the current maximum), without break or respite, exponential growth is just too powerful and before too long they will fail and be crushed into subsistence poverty and the fertility rate will be driven down the hard way. That is true - current good examples are India and Syria.
Anyone else have a counter-example of a nation without an open frontier, and that had more than a tiny starting population, doubling and redoubling its population every 25 years for several centuries without break? Many have tried: all have failed.
A more general principle along these lines is that if it is impossible for something to continue, it will stop. Now there's an economic law to believe in.
What makes you think Plato was wrong about the forms. Some kind of formal realism must be true if anything is intelligible at all. Considering how much time you spend writing about what you believe to be true, you may want to think harder about this issue.
You knew all that stuff about quantum theory was nonsense, but you couldn't prove it. You just knew it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRhhZ3_smLI&t=2s
https://fb.watch/bX-2FILLfO/Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Hypnotoad666
That’s funny.
Nah, I don’t want to try to think as hard as Plato. He was just plain better at thinking hard than I am.
This research is too rudimentary.
Also, it is not very convincing that there is “one thing” that differs humans from animals. Probably a complex of abilities & functions no other animal posseses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgDE2DOICuc
And there's that ancient gif of the shape-rotator dog who successfully figures out how to carry an unusually shaped stick across an unusually shaped bridge.Replies: @Rohirrimborn, @Spangel226
Yes animals recognize shapes. The puffer fish creates beautiful art to attract mates.
Even though the pufferfish's suffering and memories were virtual, they feel real and will last for the rest of his pufferfish life, because he thought that other guy was hiding extra krill.
Plato’s not “wrong” about the forms but he’s locked into a Humian inability to ever know if the cat is dead or just dreaming about electric sheep. The forms are definitely suggested everywhere in nature but never become provable, there cannot be a mechaniam for climbing the ladder, and then the gnostics show up and mess everything to fullness. Furthermore, if natural laws hold, does it matter? Aristotlean physics work perfectly well even if the forms are canon.
Thanks, Rohirrimborn. That was amazing. How can this all be instinct?
Excellent, it’s a DS9 reference.
Even though the pufferfish’s suffering and memories were virtual, they feel real and will last for the rest of his pufferfish life, because he thought that other guy was hiding extra krill.
I don’t see any evidence that there is anything “innate” about human geometric thinking. There aren’t a lot of right angles in nature and humans didn’t have to think about them at all until they started surveying agricultural land. Physics, on the other hand, is everywhere. Birds, and animals that jump from branch to branch, must have an innate sense of angles and momentum. Same for humans who hunted with projectiles.
But why would any animal (humans included) have an innate understanding of relationships between squares, circles, and triangles? I think geometric thinking is just a special discipline we created by measurement and experimentation.
Incidentally, some years ago I taught part-time in a university - not Economics - and once used a photocopier directly after an Economics faculty member. He had left what he had been copying behind and I glanced at it. It was basically a memo to some other staff members saying that the students were of very low quality and "didn`t even believe in the theory of comparative advantage", which I found quite amusing.
Heresy! I trust the offending students were burnt at the stake.Replies: @Nodwink, @Paul Jolliffe, @TG, @The Germ Theory of Disease
I sense that a lot of economic theory is derived a posteriori from economists’ entrenched political views. Everyone seems to be able to find an equation to support their preferred worldview.
Are there any YouTube videos of (untrained) non-human animals lighting a fire then sitting next to it?
Q.E.D.
Incidentally, some years ago I taught part-time in a university - not Economics - and once used a photocopier directly after an Economics faculty member. He had left what he had been copying behind and I glanced at it. It was basically a memo to some other staff members saying that the students were of very low quality and "didn`t even believe in the theory of comparative advantage", which I found quite amusing.
Heresy! I trust the offending students were burnt at the stake.Replies: @Nodwink, @Paul Jolliffe, @TG, @The Germ Theory of Disease
Ricardo’s “comparative advantage” theory was first used in the latter half of the 1800’s by elites in Great Britain as a justification for shedding the high labor costs of the British working man.
By WWI, GB was wholly dependent upon imported food to feed itself, thanks to “comparative advantage.”
The Chinese have no use for “comparative advantage”, and their economy is doing just fine. As the factory floor of the world, they will rule us all in a generation.
Only in “elite” business schools in America is “comparative advantage” taught as both true and universally good.
Where something is made, however, matters enormously – why even a “moron” like Donald Trump could see that!
That deal about only humans using tools was the theme of the beginning scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I never read the book, but my take is that that big obelisk was there to move the apes one quick step further up in evolution by somehow getting them to use bones as tools.
Who knows if some animals, such as cats, would like to use tools, but without those opposable thumbs, find it exasperating. Retractable claws are pretty cool though.
As with so many excellent ideas, the great Gary Larson was there first
https://tinyurl.com/33an44kjReplies: @Achmed E. Newman, @The Anti-Gnostic
YouTube has many videos of parrots placing blocks into matching-shaped holes. Wouldn’t this be an example of animals recognizing shapes?
Good work by the Japanese Puffer Fish, but it is a little tendentious of the narrator to say, “In his head, a plan of mathematical perfection.”
The “plan” is likely, “My libido drives me to exaggerate the ridges and grooves of the seafloor without straying too far from the point where I want to mate.”
After all, honeybees create perfect hexagonal grids, but is that because they grasp Platonic forms or is that just because tightly packed circular cells naturally settle most efficiently into a hexagonal pattern?
The puffer fish is doing a little more than the honeybee (maintaining consistent radii and such), but then fish are more complex than insects. Also, he’s Japanese, so…
Wild chimps upgrade termite-fishing toolSure, it could be pure trial and error, advancing and disseminating via a sort of Lamarckian "cultural" evolution, though this anthropologist thinks otherwise:Termite-fishing chimpanzees provide clues to the evolution of technology"They have a mental template of the right tool for the job, and there's no mistaking the different tool types," Musgrave said. "Puncturing tools are made from a species of tree that's very durable and resistant, while fishing probes are made from smooth, pliable stems of vegetation."And this New Caledonian crow sure looks like it's going through a process which could be described as:1. Recognizing the need for a hooked tool
2. Modifying the end of the wire in accordance with its mental template for an appropriately sized and shaped hook
3. Deploying the newly-created tool to retrieve the bucket of foodIn relatively short order.https://youtu.be/TtmLVP0HvDgSee also:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33143583/ New Caledonian crows plan for specific future tool use
Who knows if some animals, such as cats, would like to use tools, but without those opposable thumbs, find it exasperating. Retractable claws are pretty cool though.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @kaganovitch
“That big obelisk,” the Monolith, also represents the very movie screen upon which the movie you are watching is projected, rotated ninety degrees. You now have one in your living room. You are a monkey staring at a Monolith. Meta symbolism at its finest.
The first episode of Season 2 had not just hundreds of great cars, but Jim and Rocky went to the G/A airport (I assume Santa Monica), driving a pizza delivery VW Bug, to meet their friend who flew in in an old Lear - I think a 25. There were so many classic planes too! (V-tail Bonanzas, etc.)
.
* 3 more posts on this favorite of mine:
Jim Rockford - In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land YachtReplies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Buzz Mohawk, @The Anti-Gnostic
Humans and other organisms that move about have an innate geometric sense because some such sense is important for survival. On the other hand humans have no sense of what neutrinos are although gazillions of them pass through our bodies every second. But they have no effect on our biological functioning.
Humans have no awareness of the Earth’s magnetic field but many other animals do and use this knowledge for navigation.
I doubt that there is any mental ability of humans that is completely restricted to our species. There is nothing biologically unique about humans. We are not fallen angels. We are biological organisms just like wombats only not as cute.
As others here have already described, some animals clearly can distinguish between different geometric shapes. Apes have been taught to push buttons with shapes on them to communicate.
But that is not the question. Geometry is not “recognizing shapes” but applying logic to them. The difference between a square and a pentagon is not that we can tell by the shape, but that we can logically deduce properties for example derived from the fact that a square must always have parallel sides.
Animals don’t do this sort of thing. They recognize shapes, but they don’t do geometry (or if they do they can’t communicate with us about it.)
In other words, they cannot conceive of the category of shape.
By the way, good watchable vids on our cousins, most of them containing a good presentation …
Yeah, I’ve seen that 47″ monolith/obelisk in our living room, Buzz, but the only thing it has shown any of my family recently is The Lion King and Seasons 1 and 2 of The Rockford Files* This is 47 year old stuff that shows me how mankind has devolved.
The first episode of Season 2 had not just hundreds of great cars, but Jim and Rocky went to the G/A airport (I assume Santa Monica), driving a pizza delivery VW Bug, to meet their friend who flew in in an old Lear – I think a 25. There were so many classic planes too! (V-tail Bonanzas, etc.)
.
* 3 more posts on this favorite of mine:
Jim Rockford – In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land Yacht
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/13/7b/5a137bfb403aa863cf5ef9c249085508.jpg
Almost as cool as a gold Firebird.
https://www.fantomworks.com/wp-content/uploads/1977PontiacFirebirdJimSuva.jpgReplies: @JMcG
The pig takes the shapes and goes straight for the right slots-
It has to have some sense of which shape is which.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgDE2DOICuc
And there's that ancient gif of the shape-rotator dog who successfully figures out how to carry an unusually shaped stick across an unusually shaped bridge.Replies: @Rohirrimborn, @Spangel226
This guy:
I have always thought that the damndest most egregious example of non human – and non animal!, non cerebral! – of ‘intelligence’ is possessed by the fungus(!) Cordyceps, and its rather extraordinary reproductive strategy.
You see, its spores infect the neural ganglia of ants, takeover the ganglia and change the ants’ behavior, forcing the ant to climb up a tall stalk and dig its mandibles into the top of the stalk, and remain there. The spore uses the ants’ flesh as food, and produces another fruiting body, which sprouts out from the husk of the dead ant. In time, the fruiting body produces spores, which infect other ants, and so ad infinitum.
Strangely enough, Cordyceps is a sought after and traditional Chinese medicine.
I suspect your parakeet was imitating human behavior, if the dog thought he could get food by begging at the table.
The Pet Collective has tons of videos of dogs repeatedly trying to carry a long stick through a narrow opening.
You do know the obsession with spatial rotations and ravens matrices and other minimal use brain tricks is a workaround for the fact that testing people’s ability to understand paragraphs by Dickens and dialogs by Shakespeare is RACIST.
Right?
” … the fraternity brothers at small liberal arts colleges who wrote letters to the editor of Penthouse about how they’d never believed the letters to the editor in Penthouse until the evening when … ”
Always seemed odd that they all wrote with exactly the same style, or lack thereof. “Much to my pleasurable surprise …”
That’s not to say that I ever looked at those nekkid pictures. No, I was just reading the scholarly articles.
Don’t know what precise properties distinguish a “human being”, but i know one when i see one.
… Or at least, i used to think so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDZDnXQu0Y
Well…the late great Bill Thurston would most definitely say so…
What better way to learn about math and get excited about math than for a kid to learn about polyhedrans and polytopes…and soccer ball topology…onto Euler’s formula…onto Chern-Simmons Form…
Can your pet dog unknot it’s leash attached to the post?…Humans seem to have an hardwired instinct for unknotting….Can your German Shepherd unknot his tangled leash..?
Steve, you can stop worrying about covid. Your immune system is in fine shape.
The Third Man argument is why Plato was wrong about the forms, as Aristotle knew. It’s one thing to insist upon formal realism. It’s quite another to demand that Beauty also be a perfectly beautiful thing which, if we have the intellect, we can use to judge whether things in this world resemble it or not. Likewise, for Justice. No one today thinks that Justice is itself just. It simply isn’t the sort of entity that is just or unjust.
Nonetheless, Anon is correct that "some kind of formal realism must be true if anything is intelligible at all." Plato's Theory of Forms was the first major metaphysical breakthrough in Western philosophy: it was a giant step toward a synthesis of the One and the Many (i.e., the perennial problem of universals) that had bedeviled everyone before him. Aristotle modified Plato's theory by immanentizing the forms, which resolved the Third Man problem, but seems to me to have introduced a new problem (how are the forms that exist in things caused if there are no universal Forms that exist independently of the forms in concrete things?).
Later thinkers especially in the Christian tradition synthesized the Platonic and Aristotelean views into a theory that avoided both problems by identifying Plato's transcendent Forms with Divine Ideas in the Mind of God. Neoplatonism achieved a similar synthesis.Replies: @John Pepple
Plato would agree as he pointed out, using an analogy, that though the Sun allows for sight - is indeed the cause of our seeing - it is not itself sight.
The Über-Forms - the Good, the True and the Beautiful - are not themselves good, true and beautiful events, statements or objects. The Form of the Beautiful, say, is what we encounter when we're hit by that je ne sais quoi radiance of a natural beauty.Replies: @John Pepple
Beautiful – I laughed too long.
A friend of mine’s brother owned an African Grey parrot which was one of those smart specimens you see in videos. He used to call the family dogs by name over to his perch, and drop bits of leftover biscuits, chicken etc. saying “here eat this, it’s good”.
Maybe it won't seem so funny in a hundred years time when they are sitting/perching on the Supreme Court.
spiders know geometry
Not only apes, but many human species, and most females in general, are useless at geometry, and any real mathemtics.
So, as far as I can see, many schools don’t teach maths past simple arithmetic and the simplest algebra, then fill the course with bullshit that has nothing to do with mathematics so that the women and maths-weak species do alright.
The result is a bad joke.
Looks like it will have serious consequences:Yep, there are plans to create scientists and engineers who are innumerate. If so, I hope the plan stays only in U.S. so that at least other countries can produce real scientists and engineers.Replies: @Che Guava, @Che Guava
What did the little acorn say when he grew up?
Shortest paths across difficult terrain follow the same mathematics as diffraction of light. If you have some pavement, then a river, then some grass, the shortest path across this strip is a weird bendy thing that looks pretty much exactly like light going through media of similar densities. In particular the river swim is very short but not actually minimized.
To calculate this on the fly requires calculus. It’s a differential equation.
Dogs always take the shortest path.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations
P.S. Plato’s forms can be repaired without too much work. I’m not sure how to word a proper pithy explanation, but definitions are basically Forms.
Definitions don’t exist outside the mind that forms them, and you can define them arbitrarily, but once they’re defined and held, they function exactly like a Form would. Ideas are ideals – almost as if “ideals” is formed from the word “idea” or something crazy like that.
If you want a Form of the Good, then define Good, and hey presto that’s it, you’re done. They’re even still universal in the sense that anyone who defines it in the same way will end up with the same Form. It’s just that there’s nothing outside the mind which forces you to use one definition over another. There is no “correct” definition, except insofar as they have to be logically coherent. There are only definitions that are more prudent or less prudent. A good definition is cheap and powerful. They’re tools, not moral obligations.
—
I’m not terribly interested, personally, I think about goods, not Good. A good is wealth, and wealth is stuff or events which minds find valuable. Value is about preference intensity, which is an emotional intensity. Yes, goods == fee fees. Taken correctly man is in fact the measure of all things. It’s just that for [all things] to exist to be measured in the first place, they must have some form of independent, objective being.
I have it in good authority that plants and animals are well attuned to identify white privilege.
Steve, did you see the NYT’s linked article about the Fermat’s funder:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/science/james-vaughn-fermat-theorem.html
I went to undergrad in urban Texas for a while and did note the random “Science!” infrastructure these men tend to leave around (while their series of wives tend to found very nice sororities and art galleries instead).
The first episode of Season 2 had not just hundreds of great cars, but Jim and Rocky went to the G/A airport (I assume Santa Monica), driving a pizza delivery VW Bug, to meet their friend who flew in in an old Lear - I think a 25. There were so many classic planes too! (V-tail Bonanzas, etc.)
.
* 3 more posts on this favorite of mine:
Jim Rockford - In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land YachtReplies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Buzz Mohawk, @The Anti-Gnostic
Ah, The Rockford Files and Mannix.
My brother-in-law landed his airline’s Grumman Goose (N14CS, now in the Smithsonian) in the water off Catalina for the Mannix film crew. His landing appears in an episode where somebody has to go to the island for something.
Almost as cool as a gold Firebird.
The first episode of Season 2 had not just hundreds of great cars, but Jim and Rocky went to the G/A airport (I assume Santa Monica), driving a pizza delivery VW Bug, to meet their friend who flew in in an old Lear - I think a 25. There were so many classic planes too! (V-tail Bonanzas, etc.)
.
* 3 more posts on this favorite of mine:
Jim Rockford - In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land YachtReplies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Buzz Mohawk, @The Anti-Gnostic
Ya know what? The landing was in fact for The Rockford Files. Waddaya know. It was so long ago I got confused.
…
That’s where you lose me, Steve. I didn’t believe them either, until one day at the laundromat when I found myself alone with the Chinese lady who ran the place and an old negro washerwoman…
Who knows if some animals, such as cats, would like to use tools, but without those opposable thumbs, find it exasperating. Retractable claws are pretty cool though.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @kaganovitch
Who knows if some animals, such as cats, would like to use tools, but without those opposable thumbs, find it exasperating.
As with so many excellent ideas, the great Gary Larson was there first
https://tinyurl.com/33an44kj
He had a lot to say about people too:
https://www.peakstupidity.com/images/School_For_The_Mechanically_Declined.jpg
(Reminds me of a few Chinese and Indian grad students from 25 years back.)
Jim Rockford did a lot more flying in small aircraft in the show than I remembered (as I wrote about regarding the very 1st episode). Whenever he got on an airline flight – it all went on the expense account – he seemed to take off in a 707, and then it would morph into a 747 for the landing. Weird, that …
That’s cool about your BIL. They have a paved strip on Catalina too. I only went there by boat, once on a 36 foot Catalina (yep) and once on a 2-man rubber raft with a 2.2 hp Mercury.
I’ll let you know when I see that Catalina scene, Buzz.
When those parrots realise what you’ve done to them they won’t be too happy about it.
Maybe it won’t seem so funny in a hundred years time when they are sitting/perching on the Supreme Court.
As with so many excellent ideas, the great Gary Larson was there first
https://tinyurl.com/33an44kjReplies: @Achmed E. Newman, @The Anti-Gnostic
Thanks, K. Gary Larson was a treasure.
He had a lot to say about people too:
(Reminds me of a few Chinese and Indian grad students from 25 years back.)
... Or at least, i used to think so.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Hey, you’re not a biologist!
At one time during the civil rights days there was a whole thing about how goodWhites should never buy German shepherds. Because blacks fear German shepherds because of racist police or German shepherds hated blacks or something.
Geese know how to fly in chevron patterns, and hawks can fly in tightly controlled circles. Squirrels seem to know the shortest path out of danger in a roadway is perpendicular to the curb and that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
So, as far as I can see, many schools don't teach maths past simple arithmetic and the simplest algebra, then fill the course with bullshit that has nothing to do with mathematics so that the women and maths-weak species do alright.
The result is a bad joke.Replies: @epebble
The result is a bad joke.
Looks like it will have serious consequences:
Yep, there are plans to create scientists and engineers who are innumerate. If so, I hope the plan stays only in U.S. so that at least other countries can produce real scientists and engineers.
I think that Japan, with the blind following of OECD bullshit about tertiary education percentages, must be having the lowest level of graduates ever, but it seems mainly to be in commerce, economics, 'humanities' and c.
I understand that the U.S.A. has particular problems with stupid people feeling entitled to university degrees, but the OECD ranking system just makes it worse, everywhere. Many places changed their teacher and nurse training, art school, etc., colleges into universities overniight.
An enormous gravy train for the, respectively from above, maniacs, drones, and bufoons suddenly elevated to 'professor'.
People should be able, as in the past, to leave the school system at twelve, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, and have a meaningful path ahead.
My father, a very intelligent man, left school at twelve. My mother, also smart, at fifteen or sixteen.
Both had meaningful paths to employment, although after my and my younger sibling's appearance, my mother devoted most of her time, at times to beimg our mother, for over ten years.
Today's system of subsidized compulsory education to tertiary level, even for the dimmest bulbs on the planet, is just a system to encourage bullying and boredom.
Govt. child minding and brainwashing centres for 12 to 24?
GTFO.
No, that is exactly what you have in the U.S.A., and most 'allied' places, I am sad to say that Japan is not as different as should be.
To calculate this on the fly requires calculus. It's a differential equation.
Dogs always take the shortest path.Replies: @epebble
It’s a differential equation.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_variations
https://fb.watch/bX-2FILLfO/Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Hypnotoad666
Very funny. There may be a CBD (“Canine Biodiversity”) angle there. The smart dog seems to be some kind of terrier mix. He’s way ahead of the Weiner dogs. I’ve had both and can confirm that Wiener Dogs are sweet but not the brightest.
Incidentally, some years ago I taught part-time in a university - not Economics - and once used a photocopier directly after an Economics faculty member. He had left what he had been copying behind and I glanced at it. It was basically a memo to some other staff members saying that the students were of very low quality and "didn`t even believe in the theory of comparative advantage", which I found quite amusing.
Heresy! I trust the offending students were burnt at the stake.Replies: @Nodwink, @Paul Jolliffe, @TG, @The Germ Theory of Disease
“Comparative advantage,” at least as presented in standard economics texts as applying to trade under all conditions, is clearly false.
Consult the ghosts of all four US presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore, as well as Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Henry Carey, Henry Clay, etc.
It is presented as an undeniable fact not because it is an undeniable fact, but to stifle dissent from the current elite policy of outsourcing manufacturing to cut labor costs and boost elite profits.
There are, however, some absolutes in economics. For example, as Malthus pointed out, if people try to double their populations every 25 years or so (that is to say: do not voluntarily limit their fertility rate to less than the current maximum), without break or respite, exponential growth is just too powerful and before too long they will fail and be crushed into subsistence poverty and the fertility rate will be driven down the hard way. That is true – current good examples are India and Syria.
Anyone else have a counter-example of a nation without an open frontier, and that had more than a tiny starting population, doubling and redoubling its population every 25 years for several centuries without break? Many have tried: all have failed.
A more general principle along these lines is that if it is impossible for something to continue, it will stop. Now there’s an economic law to believe in.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5a/13/7b/5a137bfb403aa863cf5ef9c249085508.jpg
Almost as cool as a gold Firebird.
https://www.fantomworks.com/wp-content/uploads/1977PontiacFirebirdJimSuva.jpgReplies: @JMcG
I rarely disagree with you, Buzz, but a Grumman Goose is way cooler than a gold Firebird.
…He said, “Gee; I’m a tree.”
Humans have no awareness of the Earth’s magnetic field but many other animals do and use this knowledge for navigation.
I doubt that there is any mental ability of humans that is completely restricted to our species. There is nothing biologically unique about humans. We are not fallen angels. We are biological organisms just like wombats only not as cute.Replies: @David, @Joe Stalin
It’s pretty neat that in the 16th century, Montaigne imagined that it was quite likely that some animals would be able to sense magnetism: “The properties that we call occult in many things, as that of the magnet to attract iron — is it not likely that there are sensory faculties in nature suitable to judge them and perceive them, and that the lack of such faculties causes our ignorance of the true essence of such things?”
Humans have no awareness of the Earth’s magnetic field but many other animals do and use this knowledge for navigation.
I doubt that there is any mental ability of humans that is completely restricted to our species. There is nothing biologically unique about humans. We are not fallen angels. We are biological organisms just like wombats only not as cute.Replies: @David, @Joe Stalin
Note 2007, wired wasn't complete ass yet.
https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/
Oak-kay…
The first episode of Season 2 had not just hundreds of great cars, but Jim and Rocky went to the G/A airport (I assume Santa Monica), driving a pizza delivery VW Bug, to meet their friend who flew in in an old Lear - I think a 25. There were so many classic planes too! (V-tail Bonanzas, etc.)
.
* 3 more posts on this favorite of mine:
Jim Rockford - In Pursuit of Carol Thorne
Inflation indexed to the Rockford/Davenport basket of goods
Rockford Files: Bug v Land YachtReplies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Buzz Mohawk, @The Anti-Gnostic
Steve has ignored my requests for a retrospective on The Rockford Files for years, including whatever quirk of LA land use law that allowed Jim Rockford to live in a mobile home on a beach parking lot. I don’t think the series ever explained that. I guess it was just a bit of insider/local lore that the writers picked up on.
As with so many excellent ideas, the great Gary Larson was there first
https://tinyurl.com/33an44kjReplies: @Achmed E. Newman, @The Anti-Gnostic
Plato’s forms have made a great comeback in this new model in physics called The Structured Atom.
You knew all that stuff about quantum theory was nonsense, but you couldn’t prove it. You just knew it.
LOL, I know, but I am capable of saying things for effect.
My brother-in-law flew lots of cool airplanes. I got to go along in some of them.
Probably the coolest was the Bird Innovator, the world’s only four-engined PBY:
He gave me a radio navigation lesson over the Desert Southwest in that plane on our way from Colorado to California. I rode in the pilot’s seat for that. A guy in Lake Tahoe had just bought the plane from Dr. Bird and hired my brother-in-law to fly it. They picked me up in Boulder.
https://www.wired.com/2007/04/esp/
Note 2007, wired wasn’t complete ass yet.
https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/
https://youtu.be/xqr-Y_6ckP0
It has to have some sense of which shape is which.Replies: @Wade Hampton
This is why I have a problem eating pork. Chicken, salmon, beef, but not pork. Pigs are clearly smarter than many of the creatures we call human.
And of course the Chinese eat dogs which is clearly an abomination
Modern scientists are obsessed with seeming ‘nice’ and refuse to acknowledge that anyone (except modern white cis men) can possibly be un-nice. No no it wasn’t a “battle-axe” culture, it was corded ware! They didn’t rape and murder their way across England, wiping out every competing man, it was merely…displacement.
Which is a problem because the main thing which distinguishes the savannah primate from other animals is killing at a distance. Projectile weaponry.
(Secondly fire and cooking, which came even earlier.)
Unlike all other animals, dire apes can kill another dire ape with essentially no risk, at least as long as you have a bunch of friends to help you throw the stones. The species sports many throwing-related adaptations such as an enlarged butt. These add up to being able to apply lethal force beyond melee range, which invokes Lanchester’s Square Law.
Because of this adaptation, mortals can cheaply enforce laws against the initial defectors.
Also you can see how this encourages seeing the future. Instead of attacking by instinct, the thrower must predict the arc of projectile and target. Having this much prediction, there’s a predictive framework upon which natural selection can act. Turns out prediction is an extremely useful adaptation, so you get strong selection for better predictions.
And then the other acorn responded, “Holy shit, a talking acorn!”
Pufferfish seem to me to be far more intelligent than we realize.
I remember a few years ago, I arrived early at a restaurant to meet and eat with friends. I waited by the bar, next to a fish tank. In the tank were assorted small saltwater fish, and one small puffer fish, who was just kind of wandering about the tank.
So as he made a lap past me, I tapped on the glass, and he stopped and stared at me. I wondered if he was actually paying attention to me, so I moved to the other side of the tank and he followed me. Then I moved back, and he stayed with me. Then I put my finger on the glass, and moved it around, and he followed it around for a bit. Then he stopped, and just floated there looking at me.
So as things were going on in the restaurant, I looked away. Then I heard a rapid clicking noise. Repeatedly. I turned around, and it was the puffer fish making the sound, presumably to get my attention. When he had my attention, he blew a massive bubble out of his mouth. About 3 times bigger than he was.
I thought, “how the hell did he do that? And why?”
So, he rushes to the back of the fish tank, where the mass of bubbles that oxygenate the tank was, and stationed himself right in the middle of the bubbles for about 20 seconds. Then he swam right up to my face, and blew another massive bubble in front of my, then started excitedly making the clicking noise. He did it about five more times, as if he was showing me his clever trick for my entertainment.
I moved a few times to the other side of the tank, and he always followed me. Then he’d go back and do his bubble trick. I kept thinking, how can a fish that small come up with all this clever behavior? He was acting like a playful dog! He seems to recognize me. He seems to know a self-taught “bubble trick” meant to attract my personal attention. And the clicking to get my attention! Sitting in the middle of those bubbles so that he could accumulate enough extra air to blow up a huge bubble to get my attention was… amazing. It indicates creative forethought.
All going on in that tiny brain! HOW?!
Anyway… thanks for that video. Owing to my experience with that tiny pufferfish, it doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still astounding that so much intelligence can be found in such a small package. We probably know a lot less about that world than we think.
Hopefully, he got better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB5ig6vpQug
Seriously finally, thanks for that story.
I get a kick out of that one about infinity consumer wants. Of course, when pressed, they just redefine everything, e.g. leisure time, as a commodity.
There is a professor at a well-regarded US university in the South for this discipline whose published papers on robots I admire for their depth of scholarship and original ideas.
The man’s name would identify him as a person of Russian Jewish heritage, and I had a mental image of him as a balding man of slight build, someone looking much like Saul Bellow, who iSteve mentioned as someone able to reside in the Chicago Hyde Park neighborhood because the Chicago Police Department kept the streets safe for University of Chicago professors who didn’t look physically intimidating.
I finally saw this man’s picture on his faculty Web page, and he doesn’t look anything like that. This scholar of mathematical theory of the geometry of robots is a Neanderthal! He is a broad-shouldered brute with low cheekbones, a prominent brow and the hairline of an ape.
I am not linking his picture. Were he a public figure, especially someone who makes a nuisance of himself, I would gladly give out his name to iSteve’s readers. But he is a smart guy who quietly writes mathematical papers.
But his photo is evidence that Europeans have Neanderthal genes, and that Neanderthal Man had really good spatial-visualization skills and was capable of deep abstract reasoning.
Mel Gibson’s character in Lethal Weapon had a trailer on a beach as well.
Matthew's Malibu Airstream:
https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/58051ece13027a4c2910531c/4:3/w_740/matthew-mcconaughey-airstream-trailer-1.jpg
www.architecturaldigest.com/story/matthew-mcconaughey-airstream-article
The scary thing is this is happening with Engineering professors with regard to claims for Renewable Energy and the Climate Change thing.
humans are no different than the other things occupying the animal kingdom. This “exceptionalism” business leads to sophistry such as humans are somehow immune from natural selection and evolution.
nonhuman animals can recognize shapes, patterns, which is handy for operant type learning studies.
I just read the linked article. That’s incredible- adding outboard engines as flow improvers for the outer wing sections. Enlarging the vertical stab. The FAA was a far different beast 50 years ago. I’d have given my eye teeth to have been on that ride.
Not only Aristotle, but as Plato knew as well: he addresses the Third Man problem in one of his dialogues, I forget which one. Plato’s first major critic was Plato.
Nonetheless, Anon is correct that “some kind of formal realism must be true if anything is intelligible at all.” Plato’s Theory of Forms was the first major metaphysical breakthrough in Western philosophy: it was a giant step toward a synthesis of the One and the Many (i.e., the perennial problem of universals) that had bedeviled everyone before him. Aristotle modified Plato’s theory by immanentizing the forms, which resolved the Third Man problem, but seems to me to have introduced a new problem (how are the forms that exist in things caused if there are no universal Forms that exist independently of the forms in concrete things?).
Later thinkers especially in the Christian tradition synthesized the Platonic and Aristotelean views into a theory that avoided both problems by identifying Plato’s transcendent Forms with Divine Ideas in the Mind of God. Neoplatonism achieved a similar synthesis.
That is a cool plane.
Likewise, for Justice. No one today thinks that Justice is itself just.
Plato would agree as he pointed out, using an analogy, that though the Sun allows for sight – is indeed the cause of our seeing – it is not itself sight.
The Über-Forms – the Good, the True and the Beautiful – are not themselves good, true and beautiful events, statements or objects. The Form of the Beautiful, say, is what we encounter when we’re hit by that je ne sais quoi radiance of a natural beauty.
But that is not the question. Geometry is not "recognizing shapes" but applying logic to them. The difference between a square and a pentagon is not that we can tell by the shape, but that we can logically deduce properties for example derived from the fact that a square must always have parallel sides.
Animals don't do this sort of thing. They recognize shapes, but they don't do geometry (or if they do they can't communicate with us about it.)Replies: @Ian M.
Indeed. Many animals can no doubt recognize shapes, but they cannot recognize them as shapes.
In other words, they cannot conceive of the category of shape.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/young-chimp-throws-rocks-at-tourists-at-zoo-gets-hit-with-stick-by-elder/ar-AAVk7mB
Incidentally, some years ago I taught part-time in a university - not Economics - and once used a photocopier directly after an Economics faculty member. He had left what he had been copying behind and I glanced at it. It was basically a memo to some other staff members saying that the students were of very low quality and "didn`t even believe in the theory of comparative advantage", which I found quite amusing.
Heresy! I trust the offending students were burnt at the stake.Replies: @Nodwink, @Paul Jolliffe, @TG, @The Germ Theory of Disease
I just paid some pajeet in Bangalore thirty-five cents to defend the theory of comparative advantage, instead of paying some tenured economics professor six figures and a house in Brookline MA to do the same, so I guess I just proved something or other, not sure what though.
Isn't there at least an extra $25 for international shipping tacked on?Replies: @James Forrestal
From the article:
Well, yes, there is something more fundamental that demarcates humans from other animals: and that thing is rationality. And the most basic power of rationality is the ability to grasp abstract concepts. This non-human animals cannot do.
Language is the most basic manifestation of rationality, which is why it is taken as a proxy for rationality.
Of course, many non-human animals can signal to one another, or ‘vocalize’ expressively (we might be able to tell when a dog is in pain by its whimpering), but non-human animals cannot use language in its descriptive sense, to convey semantic meaning.
By WWI, GB was wholly dependent upon imported food to feed itself, thanks to “comparative advantage.”
The Chinese have no use for “comparative advantage”, and their economy is doing just fine. As the factory floor of the world, they will rule us all in a generation.
Only in “elite” business schools in America is “comparative advantage” taught as both true and universally good.
Where something is made, however, matters enormously - why even a “moron” like Donald Trump could see that!Replies: @ThreeCranes
Agree.
Comparative advantage almost always distills down to an absolute advantage in labor costs.
Krugman uses the absurd example of one nation (A) being able to build passenger autos more cheaply than another (B) while the other (B) can build buses if not absolutely more cheaply than (A), at least, somewhat less so. In other words, (B) is somewhat less inefficient at building buses than autos compared to (A). (A) then should concentrate on building autos and (B) on buses. (B) trades buses for (A’s) autos. It’s a related rates problem. At some point the lines cross and that’s the sweet spot.
What? Both processes utilize the same technology and skills. It’s hard to believe that (B) would be less inefficient in anything related to machine technology. The only factor missing is the price of labor. Maybe, somehow, someway, building buses require more unskilled labor (upholstering and bolting down seats?) than does building autos and therefore, (B) has an edge.
Hence my lead statement.
Why does dropping food the dog won’t eat indicate altruism?
Couldn’t the bird be mischievous, if not malevolent?
For some reason we love to identify “virtous” traits in our sub human friends when a cursory look at nature strongly suggests the opposite.
Bees construct hexagons without tools.
You can’t construct a regular heptagon with compass and straightedge, but the teenage Gauss made a heptadecagon with those tools, and it forms the part of his monument in Brunswick.
Seventeen appears in the animal kingdom as well. Locusts come around every seventeenth year. Some other cicadas choose another prime, thirteen, for their life cycle. Prime numbers of years work due to their indivisibility– predator species can’t adjust their life cycles to match.
If it works with time, perhaps it works for space as well. There might be heptadecagons, dihectopentacontaheptagons (257 sides), or hexamyriapentachiliapentahectatriacontaheptagons (65,537) to be found in nature.
Here is a Numberphile video about the Gaussian pests:
Plato also anticipated Rousseau’s social contract theory by a couple millennia, and made short work of it.
one
one + one
two
What enables you to add one to one? What gives you the right and ability to strip a thing which is standing directly in front of you in its immediately present isness, of its uniqueness and then to abstract its essence and label that as being one instance of some more general thing?
one is always one of something, something that your mind has levered away from the flux of perceptions and isolated. One of this or that. One is the original abstraction. It both posits this one here and its universal, simultaneously.
You say, “Here’s one!” You’re really saying, “Here’s one of something!”
And lo and behold…”Hey, here’s another! I have found one and one of the same thing!”
I now have two of them.
“Here’s another! I have three of them!”
And so on.
You have identified something unique in the things you lumped together, some characteristic defining feature that constitutes an essential difference between what you include in your set and what you exclude.
The first Law of Identity. A thing cannot be itself and its opposite at the same time. The foundation of all Greek Logic. For a thing to be numbered among the things you included in your sum, it must be of the same essential nature as its classmates.
JackD says, “Put two Jews in a room and you’ll hear three opinions.”
Not about Jewishness you won’t. Because if they defined Jewishness–that which makes a Jew a Jew–differently, then they wouldn’t all be Jews. They cannot both be Jews and non-Jews at the same time.
So Jews say, “No matter what else, what happens to me in life, where I end up, at bottom, in the final analysis, I am and always will be Jewish.” Now we’re getting somewhere.
The Catholic Church has always recognized the truth of this sentiment. All believers are one in the body of Christ, the Church. The Church is One. The people are One. It is The Church, not churches. All are of one extended body. So it is with the Jew. There is no such thing as “Jewish”. One is either a Jew or one is not. One cannot be Jewish any more than one can be Americanish. To be “ish” is to be an approximation.To be a Jew is to be The Jew. All are of one body, one essence. It is to be one in the summation of ones which constitute the members of the set.
Now, what is the precise essence of the Jew? What is Jewishness?
Again, JackD says there is nonesuch. Some Jews do this, some do that. You can’t judge them all by one standard. Therefore, you can’t say anything about them at all.
But as we’ve seen from the above, this is nonsense. Nonthinking nonsense. We can’t think with this kind of mush in our brains. If we don’t insist upon clear categories, differentiated by clearly defined essences, we can’t think at all. And that’s exactly what JackD–and his like-minded comrades–are aiming for. They don’t want to be pinned down. They want to fly under the radar.
(Right JackD? Isn’t that why you’re always grousing about the alleged “racism” and “antiSemitism” on this site?
Tell me. Am I an antiSemite for applying the same Western Logic to you as I (and we, all of us who inherited the Logos of the Greeks) do to the world at large?)
“We are Mercurial”, they say. Mercury is known for having the property of conforming to whatever shaped container it finds itself in. “We have no fixed essence.” “If Jewishness can be said to be anything, it is our adaptability, our ability to recast ourselves, our fluidity and resilience. Our Form is Formlessness.”
Really??? So the members of the set of Jew have no fixed essence? no Jewishness?
Then you can’t lay claim to any group identity whatsoever. If there is no “Jewishness” then the mind cannot add one + one + one + one, because such an one does not exist. The category and the notion of “one” define each other.
one is both the simplest and the most profound notion.
Obviously, Jews exist. So there must be–and is–an essential Jewishness. What is it? Anyone care to offer up their wisdom? JackD?
Couldn't the bird be mischievous, if not malevolent?
For some reason we love to identify "virtous" traits in our sub human friends when a cursory look at nature strongly suggests the opposite.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Veteran Aryan
The bird liked lettuce. I doubt if he understood that the dog didn’t. He had just a bird brain.
Back to anthropologist Leslie A. White at the top of his form. Humans can symbol – arbitrarily create tokens to stand for something. Red does not have to mean danger; we could pick another color. Symbols are not natural signs, which other animals too can identify.
Check out his The Evolution of Culture. The study of cultures is the study of that which depends on the activity of symboling.
Using geometry may be related to navigation using maps, not following paths.
Nonetheless, Anon is correct that "some kind of formal realism must be true if anything is intelligible at all." Plato's Theory of Forms was the first major metaphysical breakthrough in Western philosophy: it was a giant step toward a synthesis of the One and the Many (i.e., the perennial problem of universals) that had bedeviled everyone before him. Aristotle modified Plato's theory by immanentizing the forms, which resolved the Third Man problem, but seems to me to have introduced a new problem (how are the forms that exist in things caused if there are no universal Forms that exist independently of the forms in concrete things?).
Later thinkers especially in the Christian tradition synthesized the Platonic and Aristotelean views into a theory that avoided both problems by identifying Plato's transcendent Forms with Divine Ideas in the Mind of God. Neoplatonism achieved a similar synthesis.Replies: @John Pepple
We don’t know if Plato’s first major critic was Plato himself, though many scholars assume this. But we don’t know who invented the Third Man argument. The fact that the character Parmenides presents it (in the dialogue bearing his name) suggests it may have been invented by one of his followers. (Parmenides himself couldn’t have invented it because he was dead long before the theory of forms was invented). Another possibility is Plato’s nephew Speusippus. Unfortunately, we don’t have as much information on this subject as we’d like.
How did Matthew McConaughey get away with it?
Matthew’s Malibu Airstream:
http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/matthew-mcconaughey-airstream-article
So, some of our cousins survived basically untouched – at least visually …
As a member of the Sailer family, he was probably a very smart bird.
Still, I agree with one commenter that he was probably imitating behavior he had witnessed on your family’s part.
My dog then, or shortly thereafter in the 1970s-early 80s (and both since) never, ever, ever begged at the table. He and they never tried to sit on the furniture either.
He wouldn’t even step on a newspaper spread out on the living room floor when I was reading it. (I don’t know how he figured that out except to say he was extremely deferential and loyal to me. He wouldn’t even relieve himself on our property. (He/we were always blessed with land around.) I never had to teach him any of these things. He just knew. Amazing really, but I doubt he or the two since could ever have done geometry.
How do you pay someone in Bangalore only 35 cents for anything?
Isn’t there at least an extra $25 for international shipping tacked on?
https://gigworker.com/work-online/
https://www.onlinewritingjobs.com/
Econ profs, what do they know?
I took Econ 101 at a major university in the Midwest region. This was in the 1970s. The professor expressed the opinion that there was a lower cost way to control air pollution from automobiles than government regulations mandating the automobile “smog controls”, which back then made automobiles expensive and also robbed them of performance and fuel economy.
He explained to the class that one could “put a rubber cup around the filler nozzle of the gas pump, and this cup would prevent the gasoline vapors in your partly empty gas tank from getting into the air.” I guess this Midwestern academic did not have direct, personal experience wrestling with the “gas nozzle condom”, the use of which became commonplace in California and other “air pollution non-attainment areas.” The gas nozzle device was just one component of a Gasoline Vapor Recovery System that may have been a more complicated contraption involving vapor pumps and charcoal filters built into the gasoline pump unit.
Some people would wonder “why does my car have to have expensive pollution controls when most of the pollution comes from backyard cookouts, leaf blowers and drying paint?” Don’t give anyone on the CARB (iSteve knows about CARB) any ideas before cookouts, gasoline lawnmowers and leaf blowers along with paint become as expensive and regulated as cars.
I saw a video of Milton Friedman, may the Lord bless him and keep him, explaining there was a lot lower cost solution to heart disease than bypass surgery. He claimed that if everyone took a daily aspirin, this would prevent heart attacks.
The Medical Establishment used to recommend a daily aspirin for everyone, but now this is only recommended for people who have had a heart attack or otherwise have evidence of coronary artery disease. Aspirin, over time, has become regarded as not just some harmless over-the-counter medicine that lacks any serious side effects, especially when you are giving it on a regular basis to vast numbers of people. In the case of aspirin, these include bleeding, which I guess studies shows does as much harm as it prevents heart attacks, especially if you are giving it to large numbers of people who will never have a heart attack in the first place?
Did someone else on iSteve bring up Ulam’s Wager on whether an economist has ever predicted any non-trivial https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-g-factor-and-ulams-challenge-to/?
This is a case of the ‘infinite monkey theorem’. That is what is the probability (one or more) of an infinite number of monkeys creating a Shakespeare sonnet on a computer tablet, for example.
Plato would agree as he pointed out, using an analogy, that though the Sun allows for sight - is indeed the cause of our seeing - it is not itself sight.
The Über-Forms - the Good, the True and the Beautiful - are not themselves good, true and beautiful events, statements or objects. The Form of the Beautiful, say, is what we encounter when we're hit by that je ne sais quoi radiance of a natural beauty.Replies: @John Pepple
Well, I think your analogy is bad, but it’s too complicated to get into. But let me point out that the Third Man depends on the premise that Largeness is large. Also, it is agreed at Protagoras 330 that Justice is just.
Holy crap, man! Why didn’t you call the cops or something? From your account, I’m pretty sure that was a human being who’d been put under a spell, like the guy in Monty Python having been turned into a newt. He was trying to tell you something with those bubbles. I take it you didn’t know Morse Code at the time?
Hopefully, he got better.
Seriously finally, thanks for that story.
… he committed seppuku when the ladies rejected him?
Heretic!!
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vN8oiRy1E0E/maxresdefault.jpgReplies: @Mike Tre
Cats seem to understand geometry better than dogs do.
Dogs attached to ropes often get themselves wrapped up.
Perhaps someone could do a Thorndike style puzzle box experiment for cats where being able to tell a pentagon from a hexagon helps the cat get a reward.
?
Please do. I only saw it when it originally aired.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vN8oiRy1E0E/maxresdefault.jpgReplies: @Mike Tre
The video screen has sort of replaced the alter for congregating people, and revealing that is like pulling back the curtain on Oz, or something. Not my finest association. I’ll do better next time.
LOL and Thank You.
You have done well. Don’t worry. Just click your heels together and say, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home…”
LOL and Thank You.
You see, its spores infect the neural ganglia of ants, takeover the ganglia and change the ants' behavior, forcing the ant to climb up a tall stalk and dig its mandibles into the top of the stalk, and remain there. The spore uses the ants' flesh as food, and produces another fruiting body, which sprouts out from the husk of the dead ant. In time, the fruiting body produces spores, which infect other ants, and so ad infinitum.
Strangely enough, Cordyceps is a sought after and traditional Chinese medicine.Replies: @Veteran Aryan
Check this out: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/secret-mind-of-slime/
But in all of these cases, the "intelligence" displayed by these networks is pretty clearly an epiphenomenon -- a purely emergent result of lower level processes. There's no evidence of self-awareness/ abstract thinking/ "mental models" behind it. Termites don't "plan" to build a mound; your T-lymphocytes don't get together in a conference room and map out their attack on a virus using a flow chart on a white board.
But yeah, they're still pretty cool though.
*And can generate something like 10^15 unique antibodies.
Couldn't the bird be mischievous, if not malevolent?
For some reason we love to identify "virtous" traits in our sub human friends when a cursory look at nature strongly suggests the opposite.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Veteran Aryan
My neighbor used to keep a dog on a chain in his back yard. There was a very evident circular pattern of exactly how far the dog could reach on his chain. Our cat would wait until the dog wasn’t looking, then he would sneak out to the dog’s bowl and steal a piece of food. The dog would hear this and come charging. The cat would run just a little bit farther than the dog could reach. The dog would hit the end of the leash and get spun around every single time. The cat would then drop the piece of dog food and walk away.
Ug.
Looks like it will have serious consequences:Yep, there are plans to create scientists and engineers who are innumerate. If so, I hope the plan stays only in U.S. so that at least other countries can produce real scientists and engineers.Replies: @Che Guava, @Che Guava
Thank you.
Looks like it will have serious consequences:Yep, there are plans to create scientists and engineers who are innumerate. If so, I hope the plan stays only in U.S. so that at least other countries can produce real scientists and engineers.Replies: @Che Guava, @Che Guava
It is sad for your country.
I think that Japan, with the blind following of OECD bullshit about tertiary education percentages, must be having the lowest level of graduates ever, but it seems mainly to be in commerce, economics, ‘humanities’ and c.
I understand that the U.S.A. has particular problems with stupid people feeling entitled to university degrees, but the OECD ranking system just makes it worse, everywhere. Many places changed their teacher and nurse training, art school, etc., colleges into universities overniight.
An enormous gravy train for the, respectively from above, maniacs, drones, and bufoons suddenly elevated to ‘professor’.
People should be able, as in the past, to leave the school system at twelve, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, and have a meaningful path ahead.
My father, a very intelligent man, left school at twelve. My mother, also smart, at fifteen or sixteen.
Both had meaningful paths to employment, although after my and my younger sibling’s appearance, my mother devoted most of her time, at times to beimg our mother, for over ten years.
Today’s system of subsidized compulsory education to tertiary level, even for the dimmest bulbs on the planet, is just a system to encourage bullying and boredom.
Govt. child minding and brainwashing centres for 12 to 24?
GTFO.
No, that is exactly what you have in the U.S.A., and most ‘allied’ places, I am sad to say that Japan is not as different as should be.
Isn't there at least an extra $25 for international shipping tacked on?Replies: @James Forrestal
It’s pretty cheap to “ship” stuff over the interwebz:
https://gigworker.com/work-online/
https://www.onlinewritingjobs.com/
Good work by the Japanese Puffer Fish, but it is a little tendentious of the narrator to say, “In his head, a plan of mathematical perfection.”
Yeah, that seems like more of a rhetorical flourish than an evidenced-based description of what’s going on. Complex results of relatively simple emergent processes are widespread in nature — does a coral polyp have a “mental model” of a reef? On the other hand…
Chimps:
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29509302
Wild chimps upgrade termite-fishing tool
Sure, it could be pure trial and error, advancing and disseminating via a sort of Lamarckian “cultural” evolution, though this anthropologist thinks otherwise:
Termite-fishing chimpanzees provide clues to the evolution of technology
“They have a mental template of the right tool for the job, and there’s no mistaking the different tool types,” Musgrave said. “Puncturing tools are made from a species of tree that’s very durable and resistant, while fishing probes are made from smooth, pliable stems of vegetation.”
And this New Caledonian crow sure looks like it’s going through a process which could be described as:
1. Recognizing the need for a hooked tool
2. Modifying the end of the wire in accordance with its mental template for an appropriately sized and shaped hook
3. Deploying the newly-created tool to retrieve the bucket of food
In relatively short order.
See also:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33143583/
New Caledonian crows plan for specific future tool use
Slime molds are fascinating, but they’re pretty clearly an example of the type of “intelligence” seen in Hofstader’s ant colony analogy — just with simpler individual components and a larger-scale network. A more complex example would be the human (or other mammalian) immune system — it recognizes literally millions* of different 3 dimensional shapes (antigens), constantly surveils for “wrong” shapes, generates tailored responses when they are found, and “remembers” specific responses for decades.
But in all of these cases, the “intelligence” displayed by these networks is pretty clearly an epiphenomenon — a purely emergent result of lower level processes. There’s no evidence of self-awareness/ abstract thinking/ “mental models” behind it. Termites don’t “plan” to build a mound; your T-lymphocytes don’t get together in a conference room and map out their attack on a virus using a flow chart on a white board.
But yeah, they’re still pretty cool though.
*And can generate something like 10^15 unique antibodies.