Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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From Russia with Love
Today, Americans are too misguided to understand that even if hundreds of billions of dollars disappear in the credit crisis, or the American banking system collapses, or they and hundreds of thousands of American families lose their homes to the waves of foreclosures--that these are not necessarily bad things. It's like ripping off a bandage, I like to say. So if you lose your house, your job, your kids, your future, it's actually just like ripping off a bandage. How hard is it to understand that?(From the eXile, in case you hadn't guessed.)
Hard, apparently. That is why I believe that the world's Ascending Powers (APs), namely China, Russia, and India, should demand that the United States halt its state intervention into its failed banks and let the market sort it out.
Bon mot du jour
"I love the smell of market corrections in the morning. It smells like victory."
In that post's comments, a link to an interview with a hedge funds manager:
HFM: You build the models and the computer does the trading. You actually do all the analysis. But it’s too many stocks for a human brain to handle, so it’s really just guys with a lot of physics and hardcore statistics backgrounds who come up with ideas about models that might lead to excess return and then they test them and then basically all these models get incorporated into a bigger system that trades stocks in an automated way.
n+1: So the computers are running the…
HFM: Yeah, the computer is sending out the orders and doing the trading.
n+1: It’s just a couple steps from that to the computers enslaving—
HFM: Yes, but I for one welcome our computer trading masters.
People actually call it “black box trading,” because sometimes you don’t even know why the black box is doing what it’s doing, because the whole idea is that if you could, you should be doing it yourself. But it’s something that’s done on such a big scale, a universe of several thousand stocks, that a human brain can’t do it in real time. The problem is that the DNA of a lot of these models is very, very similar, it’s like an ecosystem with no biodiversity because most of the people who do stat-arb can trace their lineage, their intellectual lineage, back to four or five guys who really started the whole black box trading discipline in the ’70s and ’80s. And what happened is, in August, a few of these funds that have big black box trading books suffered losses in other businesses and they decided to reduce risk, so they basically dialed down the black box system. So the black box system started unwinding its positions, and every black box is so similar that everybody was kind of long the same stocks and short the same stocks. So when one fund starts selling off its longs and buying back its shorts, that causes losses for the next black box and the people who run that black box say, “Oh gosh! I’m losing a lot more money than I thought I could. My risk model is no longer relevant; let me turn down my black box.” And basically what you had was an avalanche where everybody’s black box is being shut off, causing incredibly bizarre behavior in the market.
I love the smell of brains exploding in the morning. It smells like victory.
Useful IDiot
Fuller, at least from these samples, seems to be pulling a bait-and-switch: he accuses evolutionary scientists of unfairly conflating ID with 'six-day creationism', while himself conflating the actual ID movement - a cynical, conscious cover for creationism (including, but not confined to, six-days-six-thousand-years-ago creationism) - with the theism or deism that (of course) inspired almost all scientists before Darwin, and which continues to inspire some leading evolutionary scientists (Francis
Look on the bright side ...
Coming right at ya!
Another libertarian writer who I (at least) have always enjoyed reading is David Ramsay Steele, who has a book coming out on atheism.
Happy fun links
And speaking of scary predictions, the Onion is widely hailed as having got the Bush presidency right at the very beginning. Let's hope they are less prophetic about its final year.
An AI skeptic writes
You have done the SF world a great service by posting that article about AI. I hope that many people will read it, since it precisely echos my thoughts on the subject. I've had similar views since I started watching the "development" of AI in 1977. It's an example of what Lakatos called a "degenerating research program."
I became interested in technical psychology in 1969, when a colleague told me that neurons work "by FM, not AM." I started reading physiology and psychology and have not yet stopped. As a teacher of mathematical logic I had to learn the foundations of computation, which lie quite deep indeed. All this gave me the tools for evaluating the claims of the AI people since my first exposure to them while at work at the Technische Hogeschool Delft, here in the Netherlands.
The claims and their intellectual back-up, first in programming and now in neuroscience, never convinced me. I saw and see no conclusive reason to assimilate the brain with any kind of computer or connectionist device. Briefly, there are too many disanalogies (and other difficulties). My skepticism was not well-received in some philosophical quarters. It was dismaying to see how many of my colleagues adopted various philosophical notions (they're no more than that) directly or indirectly based on the "computer metaphor." Most of these people were unequipped to understand the necessary logic and maths, so their dogmatism amazed me.
The scientific literature I have read was all too often equally dogmatic. The popular stuff contained all sorts of unfounded, optimistic claims, All of which turned out to be mere hype. In this way I've seen one project, idea, and theory after the other fail. I've seen little else. We are no closer to creating "Strong AI" than we were when the field was started in the 50s. A good number of neuroscientists are at least as sceptical as I am.
To me the issues are largely empirical. I am equally unconvinced by supposedly principled arguments against strong AI (e.g. those of Searle, other analytical philosophers, and some phenomenologists). Only technical developments will decide this, unless someone comes up with a convincing in-principle argument against Strong AI. So I hope that your post will start more people thinking. I won't decry for one picosecond the many fine SF stories that are predicated on the success of the AI programs. I read them with pleasure. All I can say is that my scientific training and reading gives me no reason to accept the claims of the AI proponents. I can go on and on about this, with documentation, but I won't do so now. Do keep up the good work.
Things I should have known
OK, I left just before the revolution (lots of new fossils; cladism). But one thing I should have known just from basic biology, as well as from common experience, was that when Hans Moravec wrote
Two of history's skiffy moments
The second, on the same blog, is the tale of the city burners, the only people to have set out to bring down civilization over the entire then-known world and actually succeed.
Well, that's my next American trip in the can
News from Ne'erday
My resolutions are to write faster and blog more.
Happy New Year!