In “Free Will – Even for Robots“, John McCarthy describes what he feels are the minimal criteria for a complex system to be considered as possessing free will, namely the ability to state “I can, but I won’t”.
The decision process of such an entity is divided into two phases, starting with the consideration of all possible actions, i.e. what it can do, and then further searching within that set for what it wants most to do. (more…)
Thanks to some very good points made by wakaba I’ve decided to write a followup post.
More cash is always worth more than less cash. Rationally trading two differing amounts of the same currency is thus impossible. A stock has risk; its future dividend is not guaranteed. Estimating the value of a stock involves constructing a probability distribution for the future stock dividends.
Different people have different information, and may thus infer different distributions. However, even when they have the same beliefs and infer the same distribution, they will still price the stock differently depending on their differing appetites for risk. For example, a grad student would be willing to pay less than a millionaire for the same 50% chance at winning $10,000. See also the St Petersburg Paradox.
A corollary of this line of logic: given that two people infer the same probability distribution A, they will arrive at the same price for the stock as the uncertainty of A becomes smaller and the appetite for risk becomes irrelevant.
I would like to see a comparison one of these days between nations and open source projects in terms of how they are governed. There is much variety amongst open source projects in systems of government, including consensus (subversion), voting (debian), and benevolent dictatorship (python).
The video features lead developers from the subversion project, which has a consensus based community. During the presentation, they state that voting should be a last resort.
“If you find yourself voting on everything all the time then something is wrong, and you need to be more introspective. Voting means there is a winner and a loser … People need to learn how to make compromises, and hopefully you are bringing people into your community who are the kind of people who like to make compromises and are willing to deal with that.”
This is a gem of a comment to me, because it encapsulates so much of what I think is the problem with many communities – the lack of a common desire for sincere consensus. Many other significant points like this one are discussed, and I highly recommend watching the video.
In a two-way barter trade, two people (1 and 2) exchange two objects (A and B). From the voluntary nature of the transaction, we conclude that both people value their new possessions more than their old; to one person A > B while to the other B > A. These two statements contradict each other, but that’s okay because they apply to different people; Person 1 prefers A to B while Person 2 prefers B to A. In fact, this contradiction is what makes trade possible. At this point, there is little temptation to label either person as being wrong.
Now imagine that prior to the trade, the two people had in fact just walked out of the same store, having bought the objects of the trade in the store. At best, if both objects cost the same, the trade seems pointless. In all other cases, one of the people could have done better by just paying less for his post-trade object in the store. This untaken better option prompts us to label the choice as irrational.
I used to complain quite a bit about the lack of introspection in other people. More recently, another possibility has struck me – maybe it was I who was engaging in excessive introspection. Sorta like having a buggy Garbage Collector for cyclic structures.
Of Sex and Marriage – “…it seems to me that we are talking ourselves to death.”
The Pursuit of Happiness – “Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.”
We’re all Big Babies – “The crucial difference is my grandfather’s lack of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness is a hallmark of the perpetual, infantilised adolescents we have all become, monsters of introspection hovering twitchily on the edge of self-obsession, occasionally aware that the life that exists only to be examined is barely manageable; barely, indeed, a life.”
I attended a meeting with a local Taiwanese discussion group the other day. We watched a documentary on the life of three rice farmers in Tainan, Taiwan. This was followed with a discussion on the economic factors leading to the extinction of the occupation in Taiwan. These came up – ideas of economic comparative advantage, realities of sociopolitical structure, and philosophies behind robust personal happiness. It was a good discussion.
People are evidently willing to get together to talk about important issues. In fact, a few hours of dedicated time is easier to get than trying to get people to write to a forum with their ideas. Talking is easier than writing.
The transient nature of the discussion is regrettable though. I’m working on a format for generating web-publishable content from these very meaningful discussions.
“Why understand? What does it mean to understand?”. Two posts ago, I talked about compact expression, and that is part of the answer. Today I try a different angle.
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Certain things “bear thinking about”. Which things those are would depend on who you are. How funny/recursive though, to have thoughts about the utility of further thinking.
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The answer to a “where?” question is the name of a place, while “who?”s are answered by giving the names of people. I was thinking about “why” and “how” when this became apparent:
This post was inspired by “Who Can Name the Bigger Number?“.
“oooooooooooo”, “1100″, “12″ and “1.2e1″ are different ways of representing the same number.
In coming up with a new representation, the first step is to invent a process by which all members of the old representation can be written in the new one. For example, to convert the “ooo” form to “11″ (binary), one would do the following procedure:
1) “ooo” – “”
2) “oo” – “1″
3) “o” – “10″
4) “” – “11″
Addition and Multiplication are defined for the old rep, and to do the same on the new rep, one can convert to the old rep, do the operation, and then convert back. However, most useful reps also have direct ways of doing the same operation. In fact, the usefulness of a rep is often determined by how efficient the operations in it are. (Transforms are used to the same effect.)
Also, in principle the different reps describe the same objects, but this is assuming we have infinite memory and time. For example, to write “1e100″ in the “o”-form is impossible, since that would require more “o”s than there are particles in the universe (~1e79).
Representations neglect information that we do not need. Scientific notation, for example, lists only the leading digits of a number and allows us to discard inaccurate digits early in a computation and thus reap the results of error propagation by compacting the expression.
The equivalence of an operation in a higher and lower rep must be proven using mathematics, and not by going through all possibilities, since the higher rep is capable of expressing values that the lower rep is not.
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In music, (more…)
“What is Privacy?” “What does it mean to take something personally?”
Questions in that vicinity are interesting. I was once able to write as a disembodied voice, convinced that I had possession of THE truth, and that description of personal details was unnecessary and distracting. That writing was only ever read by a very small circle, members of whom knew my language, so communication was smooth, and I was assured of the clarity of my truths.
Now? Things are more complicated. People second-guess, attempt to reconstruct your intentions and often mess up pretty badly. There’s too much behind-the-curtain peeking going on.
But isn’t this intended? Believing everything you hear is incredibly naive and dangerous, isn’t it?
Since when were the only two choices trust and distrust? IMO, the appearance of skepticism is too often used to mask the lack of imagination and intelligence. Remember that both creation and destruction are needed for growth. Ideas diversify, and the tree of possibilities grow. Combined with the trimming of critical insight, the mind then takes form. Both steps are needed, a balance must be sought.
How does this relate to the personal aspects of conversation? I think it is much easier to share the methods with which one trims ideas, especially since such trimming is often done in the name of objectivity. It is the sharing of creativities that is rare and technically more difficult, because of personal differences and even privacy concerns. It is that type of conversation that I seek.
To me there is one important difference between powerful ideas and ideas that are merely correct. Powerful ideas are transferrable. Powerful ideas are usually also correct to a certain degree, but the mindless pursuit of pedantic correctness can often be counterproductive.
Great ideas are great because of their influence on other ideas, and as such are necessarily powerful. In fact, I believe that many great ideas do not even have correct first incarnations. The fact that they are powerful allows the thinker to patch up superficial inconsistencies or realize that another important problem had in fact been solved. I believe great novelty and robustness often exists outside of details.
It is good to have a nose for powerful ideas. I have seen plenty of the opposite: correct solutions that require so much tedious, error-prone, slow, detailed work that they do not empower the reader at all. Worse still, there are those who are oblivious to this kind of failure, and who continue to pour effort into repetitive drudgerous tasks. These tasks are done only once, but are classified as repetitive in my mind because in doing them one does not learn how to do them any faster.
Of course, in completing the same task two people could learn really different lessons, what’s repetitive to one may not be repetitive to another.