RealityApologist posted:

RealityApologist posted:

I'm getting bitched at because it's not in 5 paragraph composition format.

Rob Ford posted:

Haha, I actually read some of the OP:


Today is the day you learn that you are literally dumber than a brick of poo poo.

Good Citizen posted:

Yep


I like how he uses the words accounting and bookkeeping several times while bemoaning his perception that no one is recording the value added in these transactions. He's got a point. It's not like there are any major intellectual disciplines or multi billion dollar industries designed to accurately measure and time the value of those transactions from every angle.

So yeah, he does address it but doesn't know a drat thing about what he's trying to address

RealityApologist posted:

Traditional economics is like alchemy, and I'm like one of the early chemists before the periodic table or anything else was developed but who has a pretty good sense that alchemy is just bad methodology and that there's an alternative science just around the corner. And you all are like "but why should I believe in the atom" as if I'm heretical for suggesting alchemy needs some updating, and there's honestly nothing I can say to satisfy the lot of you. The only thing I can do is be earnest and try my best. It's never good enough, but I can't reasonably expect anything more.

FilthyImp posted:

I am having problems solving liquidity issues with CookieCoin. Please advise.

Zombywuf posted:

Who's 'we' yank?

Pesmerga posted:

As an academic, I start rolling my eyes when people start going on about academics not being part of the real world, or just navel-gazing, etc etc, but RA, seriously, do you actually get funded in any way for this? I find the idea mildly disturbing.

quote:

1. Taking autonomous machines seriously

According to the US Department of Defense, as of October 2008 unmanned aircraft have flown over 500,000 hours and unmanned ground vehicles have conducted over 30,000 missions in support of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past few years a number of government and military agencies, professional societies, and ethics boards have released reports suggesting policies and ethical guidelines for designing and employing autonomous war machines. In these reports, the word ‘autonomous’ is used more or less uncritically to refer to a variety of technologies, including automated systems, unmanned teleoperated vehicles, and fully autonomous robots. Describing such artifacts as ‘autonomous’ is meant to highlight a measure of independence from their human designers and operators. However, the very idea of autonomous artifacts is suspiciously paradoxical, and little philosophical work has been done to provide a general account of machine autonomy that is sensitive to both philosophical concerns and the current state of technological development. Without a framework for understanding the role human designers and operators play in the behavior of autonomous machines, the legal, ethical, and metaphysical questions that arise from their use will remain murky.

My project is to lay the groundwork for building an account of autonomous machines that can systematically account for the range of behavior demonstrated by our best machines and their relative dependence on humanity. Pursuing this project requires that we take autonomous machines seriously and not treat them as wide-eyed speculative fictions. As a philosophical project, taking autonomous machines seriously requires an address to the skeptic, who unfortunately occupies the majority position with respect to technology. The skeptic of machine autonomy holds that any technological machine designed, built, and operated by human beings is dependent on its human counterparts in a way that fundamentally constrains its possibilities for freedom and autonomy in all but the most trivial senses of the words.

In this chapter I respond to the skeptic in order to clear the ground for an account of machine autonomy. I will treat the Lovelace objection, cited in Turing’s famous 1950 discussion of thinking machines, as the clearest and strongest statement of machine autonomy skepticism (MAS). I argue that the Lovelace objection is best understood as a version of technological essentialism. Thus, a rejection of technological essentialism entails a rejection of MAS. In section 3 I survey some recent attempts to discuss the problem of autonomy as it arises in the robotics literature, and I argue that these treatments fail to adequately address the essentialism that grounds MAS. In section 4 I argue that the received interpretation of the Lovelace objection, which treats machine autonomy as an epistemological issue, likewise misses the force of her radical skeptical argument. I then argue that Turing’s original response to the Lovelace objection is best understood as an argument against artifact essentialism, and provides a uniquely adequate answer to the challenge. A proper understanding of Turing’s positive account will, I claim, provide a framework for thinking about autonomous machines that may generate practical, empirical methods for productively discussing the machines that inhabit our technological world. I conclude by arguing that developments in machine learning techniques within computer science accords with Turing’s understanding of the social integration of humans and machines.

RealityApologist posted:

In the course of this research I put some significant effort into complexity theory and organization.

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

No wonder he's so unintelligible.

RealityApologist posted:

The hostility in this forum has reached a point to where I'm excluded from commenting on any subject on which I'm not an expert. Unless I've obtained a phd in systems engineering I can't say anything on the organization of technical systems, and unless I have a degree in economics or accounting I can't say anything about currency, and if I'm not a expert in math then I can't talk about network diagrams. I think this is an unreasonable demand on anyone, especially in a public informal setting like the SA forums. I write in an academic style because that's my training and it's all I know how to do, but that doesn't mean that every word out of my mouth must be up to academic standards. I have more than enough knowledge in these areas to talk about something like strangecoin in a public forum, and for that discussion to be interesting and productive without having to lay out my credentials and motivations in every post. Again, these are just unreasonable demands on the conversation; no one could ever live up to them, especially me.

RealityApologist posted:

I've not done any of those things. The strongest argument this thread has right now is that I'm a bad writer, which hardly makes me a crank.

eXXon posted:

Hi, my factory in Taiwan needs 10,000 tons of steel by Monday. Can you spontaneously collect a network of friends to spontaneously facilitate this transaction post-haste?

RealityApologist posted:

I haven't dismissed or ignored any experts. I'm not sure what you are even referring to.

RealityApologist posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CP-5MMgqFc&t=37s

Dusseldorf posted:

If you're flipping out with a little bit of light anonymous internet criticism I have bad news what academia is like.

eXXon posted:

Okay, so I go to the bakery and want to buy a load of bread for one StrangeCoin. I pay one StrangeCoin, but two people are endorsing me for 50% of my expenses, so they also pay the baker an additional ha'coin each, and the baker nets two StrangeCoins.

Why???

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

Why the gently caress is it irrelevant? If Stangecoin doesn't actually have a hope of working in anything resembling a real-world situation, what's the point?

RealityApologist posted:

I take this is an admission that a formalization of Diamond-age economics (or something similar) hasn't yet been done? Again, I've looked pretty hard, but I still find this hard to believe.

RealityApologist posted:

I mean maybe I write like poo poo and I'm out of my depth, and you can laugh at it all you want, but at some point this moves over into a kind of cyberbulling and identity stalking that just isn't cool.

Adar posted:

If you retards hijack this thread away from Eripsa the terrorists will literally have won.

Eripsa: I have considered becoming an architect because I think that triangles are cool. Imagine an upside down triangle house. Wouldn't it be awesome to live in one of those? Let's transfer all of society over to upside down triangle houses ASAP. I may not know anything about engineering or design or urban planning or anything at all, but here's a 5000 word essay on HackerNews about it LOOK AT ME

Forums Barber posted:

I am really amused between the confluence of "social networks will shape how all future society operates" and "hey what the gently caress man, just because i posted all my personal information it isn't cool for you to reference it"

RA, realize that if StrangeCoin existed, you could be trivially trolled by this thread through the guy who made your burger. We could probably keep you from being able to eat dinner. Is that an issue with the proposal?

Install Windows posted:

As if you actually need math in philosophy.

RealityApologist posted:

I completely agree that if I were an economics phd doing academic work in economics, then the OP would be embarrassing. Its not professional quality work. I'm not a phd in economics, though, and I'm not claiming expertise in the area. My academic work is on an entirely different topic, and this material never sees the inside of my classrooms. I'm just a dude who is interested in social organization, and I'm to describe those ideas with the vocabulary and knowledge I have, and I'm trying to learn the vocabulary I don't have so I can better articulate these ideas. I post these threads explicitly asking for help, especially with the math. I state up front that these ideas are incomplete, and that I'm not capable of making good on such an ambitious proposal on my own.

RealityApologist posted:

I feel like the reaction I'm getting to these proposals suggests they are at least somewhat interesting and novel, and deserve further work and refinement.

Badera posted:

In all seriousness, I've been wondering this the whole time.

RealityApologist posted:

2. I'm attracted this philosophical approach. Aristotle is awesome.

These are each distinct and substantive claims. The quote you cite makes these claims reasonably clearly, in prose, without the pedantic formalism above.

RealityApologist posted:

1) Digital philosophy is the network-theoretic approach to philosophical issues. 2) The core idea is that network theory provides a unifying framework for explaining the dynamics of organized systems at both the level of fundamental physics and at the level of human social and political systems. 3) We've never had a scientific framework capable of such a broad scope of treatment, although 4) we've had plenty of philosophical frameworks that do so, grounded in other metaphysical assumptions. 5) Digital philosophy takes the organization of networks as ontologically basic, and 6) is concerned with the implications across the sciences and the humanities.