wrhn

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Comment · 1 year ago
You are missing the point.

Almost all animals care about their offspring. There are other animals with sharp claws.

But only one animal does this kind of introspective arguing.

Comment · 1 year ago
I think this is not a valid criticism.

By this criteria, you can then say many other non-psych conditions are not disorders.

What classifies as a disorder other than making life worse for someone?

There is no universal book given by a holy entity that we can read to classify something as normal or a disorder.

Why do we have arbitrary cutoffs for cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc?

Comment · 1 year ago
Logically, your example is not contradictory.

  1. We don't know actual prevalence
  2. But believe it is low
  3. Upper bound in some community is 2%
It is not at all contradictory.
Comment · 1 year ago
> Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.

Oh yeah? But which one of those species is writing a book challenging their own exceptionalism.

Comment · 13 years ago
Logic is much more than classical AI. The logic culture in classic AI was very ambitious and that was one of the reasons it crashed and not due to fundamental flaws in logic.

Formal classical logic can represent all kinds of truths and even uncertainty with trivial syntactic mechanisms. E.g., "It is true that statement X holds with probability P." can be a syntactically correct statement representing uncertainty with certainty (there can be levels of statements with varying levels of certainty). Classical logic is extremely good at complex nested representations and the objects represented can be probabilistic statements. See the following paper for a syntactically classic FOL of probability (semantically it is a bit different from the standard model-theoretic approach)

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/halpern/papers/first-order_pr...

Of course, researchers who posit probabilistic models reason mostly in classical logic when they write papers explaining the math (other than for assumptions of course).

Comment · 14 years ago
Can you name one modern rigorous and precise discipline that does not have philosophic roots? We don't know what science today's philosophy might produce in the future.
Comment · 14 years ago
Who will decide what has practical consequences?
Comment · 14 years ago
The obvious question to ask: Why is that part not shown in the video?

Edit: Just watched the video again. The video suspiciously freezes from 11s to 18s. Probably, something inconvenient being edited out amateurishly?

Comment · 14 years ago
Why are those not filmed?
Comment · 14 years ago
Why did you leave out what was stated just before and after what you have quoted from the study? You seem to be misrepresenting what they intended to show with those numbers. The point of that number was not to show a decline, but rather to show stagnation.

"The study found that, for the first time in decades, the growth rate of immigrant-founded companies has stagnated, if not declined. In comparison with previous decades of increasing immigrant-led entrepreneurism, the last seven years has witnessed a flattening out of this trend. The proportion of immigrant-founded companies nationwide has dropped from 25.3 percent to 24.3 percent since 2005. While the margins of error of these numbers overlap, they nonetheless indicate that immigrant-founded companies’ dynamic period of expansion has come to an end.

We also performed a special analysis of Silicon Valley, which is widely known as the international hub for technological development and innovation. The findings indicate that 43.9 percent of Silicon Valley startups founded in the last seven years had at least one key founder who was an immigrant. This represents a notable drop in immigrant-founded companies since 2005, when 52.4 percent of Silicon Valley startups were immigrant-founded."

Also, some people are starting to notice that innovation is slowly stopping: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/04/opinion-fox-net-innovat...

I will also let the Economist argue for me:

http://www.economist.com/node/21564589

Comment · 14 years ago
Sanskrit is quite a unique language and is far from being dead.

Modern linguistics owes quite a lot to Sanskrit, e.g. Chomsky's famous notation, thematic roles in semantics, controlled grammar, compositional semantics etc.

I suggest the following article in the AI magazine which merely touches the surface of what makes Sanskrit stand out.

http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...

Comment · 14 years ago
Why did you leave out Rao's rebuttal to Farmer and friends' unabashed ad-hominmen laced pieces that you have given?

Rao's reply in Computational Linguistics: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusCompLing.pdf

Also other articles at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/IndusResponse.html

Edit 1.

An aside:

Being a logic student who uses probabilistic machine learning, Farmer's use of the words refutation, proof etc. make me despair. This web page is an example:

http://www.safarmer.com/indus/simpleproof.html

Rao is much more careful and nuanced in his methods. Using time-tested logic and math. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rao/ScienceIndus.pdf

" As clearly stated in the last sentence of the paper, our results provide evidence which, given the rich syntactic structure in the script (and other evidence as listed below), increases the probability that the script represents language."

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