Game theory does have a lot to say about why people hold their noses and vote for X, no doubt. What's more, all those crazy asshole congresspeople Michelle Bachman, Jim Inhofe, are very often representing the actual wishes of their constituents- Congress is divided because, largely the nation is divided.

If you want Congress to act like adults, it's up to YOU to find some way to engage people with opposing viewpoints and convince them or find a compromise on things that are important to you. If 75% of a district is telling Inhofe that global warming is a conspiracy, what do you think he's going to do on the Envrionmental Comittee?

That's in defense of the system. On the other hand...

Any argument that attempts to assert, or steers you to the "reasoned" conclusion, that the system HAS to be as dysfunctional as it is, however dysfunctional THAT is, is totall bogus. It's tantamount to saying "well, whatever goes down, it was inevitable anyway!"

We don't have to fund our elections in a way that gives virtually unlimited power to big political donors. We could set aside an amount, and make all candidates live on that amount and that's that.The SCOTUS decision equating money with free speech was just a symptom of the diseaseand nothing more.

The fact is that heedless, reckless greed can and will destroy the nation. The quintessential example is action on climate change being forestalled merely because Bil Oil and Big Coal control the purse strings Senators need to get elected.

In that scenario, it really doesn't matter how you compromise or connduct yourself because there's a direct line from how elections are financed to legislative outcomes to mass extinction. Try compromising with climate reality- see how far that gets you Barney.

There are other examples where greed and money are clearly the driving force irrespective of "compromise". Eric Holdre very cleary decline to prosecute Wall Street because

a) he's from Wall Steet and those are his bros
(sympathy and identification)

b) The Democratics Party is 100% dependent on Wall Street money, especially if the alternative is that same money switches sides

c) he's cashing in now - to the tune of millions of dollars a year- working for by the same people he should have prosecuted as Attorney General.

What does "compromise" have to do with that kind of sheer in-your-face corruption?

The system can become so diseased that the specifics and overarching context of any negotiations - which is what Frank is talking about- are totally irrelevant to the goodness of legislative outcomes.

That diseased system is in fact what we have. It owes largely to how campaigns are funded and the revoloving door.

It feel shortchanged for having correctly predicted the the abuse of this study, yet only being downgraded in my post !

http://science.slashdot.org/co...

Is there no.... justice... on Slashdot???????!!!!!

Consider that what we are may not remain static; that's where I get my hope from.

Most people are good some of the time, even saintly (secularly considered). We're not just , you know, totally divorced from goodness.

But as we are, we have brains created under evolutionary pressures which are effectively a bunch of hacks, "designed" not for goodness or beneficience but for survival in the near-zero-sum-game we call natural selection.

You have to believe that we can learn enough about ourselves to tweak ourselves, to close the difference between the best person you know and the worst.

Yes, if we just keep on giving ourselves more nad more powerful technology without making our selves the target of that technology in the way I mean, then we're fucked. We're fucked just for the reasons Einstein said:

"Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that âa new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.â(TM) Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking. In light of new knowledgeâ¦an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood, it is necessary for survival. ..Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars."

Just substitute "future brains" for "future thinking"

Soon to be featured in a denier argument near you!

"OK OK so burning fossil fuels DOES cause global warming, but we NEED to burn fossil fuels in order to compensate for the double solar whammy which will otherwise freeze the earth solid!"

It's a nice picture of a possible future, but you have to reserve some skepticism whenever the story starts contradicting what appears to be constants of human interaction.

For instance, look at the online communities which have similar motivational incentives- no money, just "prestige". What is it like to be a member of such communities?

Even in academia, when times are good and the money is available to any credible researcher with a reasonable research project, how do they act to each other and what do they do to each other?

The fact is that "reputation" is a nice word for status which is always shorthand for "relative status" which implies a zero sum game for attention and recognition.

What do people do to each other within that kind of game? Because if you're my competitor and I can ruin you through underhanded means, then I come out on top. Don't kid yourself, making people smarter or richer does not allievate or even abate these dynamics.

How much of the bad things that happen in the world are because the poor are ruining everything for the rest of us? How much are because people with an unthinkable amount of money, post-money people, are behaving in anti-social ways?

Then there's the underlying, ultimate competition - the competition for mates. How is that going to be mitigated
in a post momey world? Do the current crop of post money people behave in a relaxed, egalitarian fashion or are they underhanded, status seeking, manipulative, competitors who stop at nothing to satiate their ever-expanding, ever shifting desires?

The REAL revolution that's so far out there in terms of thinkability is the one where science learns enough about why humans behave they way they do that they can control it and shape it. You know that that is REAL science fiction because whenever you hear someone say something like that, your imagination fills with visions of what a dystopia that would lead to.

The reason we have that reaction is because of the set of facts I was talking about in the beginning of the post- what people are like- post-money or not. The idea that people would naturally and robustly be inclined to act in reliably decent ways such that, say, we would not need a police force to stop criminals and terrorists from doing what it is they want to do, is totally unthinkable science fiction.

Even Gene Roddenberry didn't go there, except in episodes where he wanted to show what a false veneer any such society ultimately was.

That is all we know about humans and what humans are inclined to act like and that's the point. It's not a revolution if it's not revolutionary and making stuff for cheap is not a revolution, it's an evolution.

It's not going to take away the badness of the world or even much mitigate it, at least for people living in developed nations.

For people in developing nations, yes, it will be amaterial godsend and yes, that would be a huge and welcome event.

If you read what you wrote, you're not arguing against the inability to lie, you're arguing against other flaws in investigations. Of course those are going to continue to be problems.

Sorry but I've been hurt too much too many times by too many baldfaced liars not to welcome a chance to watch them go down and disable them before they can strike another blow.

My reply is- if everyone lies then it becomes a non-distinguishing feature, at least as far as the fact that you lie goes.

You're more likely to be fired because someone lied about you or your performance. HR departments are virtual lying machines- their entire purpose is to drum up false performance evaluations so the company can fire the people they just don't like. If the HR representatives had to answer to a lawsuit and they couldn't lie, that would pretty much put an end to their current practices.

"Mr HR representative, is it true that Mr Smith was not performant in his job?"

"Mr HR representative, is it true that Mrs Smith was fired because the CEO thought she was overweight and unattractive ?

"Mr HR representative, is it true that Mr Smith was denied the job because he was married / over 40 / disabled ?

"Mr HR representative, is it true that Mr Smith was not not hired because the candidate was secretly already selected as part of an agreement between your company and company Y to not hire each other's employees?"

The list goes on and on.

What if people really DID have to tell the truth under oath in court? Would we still have testilying? And if we don't , wouldn't that mean that people stopped doing things they would have to lie about if questioned? Wouldn't that give honest people a chance to resist dishonest ones by saying, correctly, that they'll get caught if they do X so thanks, but I don't think I will do X ?

People will adapt to the honest truth about their fellow humans and continuing to cover it up is just creating collateral chaos as people are again and again duped and blind sided.

Given a world in which people can't lie, people will stop doing things they might have to lie about and also deviant but effectively harmless behaviour will not been seen as deviant just the way being gay is no longer seen as a sign of mental illness or deviancy.

When we learn the unvarnished truth about each other, then we will also learn to accept those truths. That's a better more humane world than the one we live in currently.

If people are unable to sustain a lie in the face of specific investigatory efforts, who does that hurt ?

I get similar emails from auto places saying this r that service ws perfgormed or whatever. It appears to me that someone associated my email with a real person who really is doing these things, getting service etc. In my case the person doesn't owe money, so i don't worry about it. If it was an unpaid bill, I still wouldn't worry about it since an email is not an identifier and neither is the fact that someone has your name and email a contract with that person.

There are lots of innocent ways your email and name and even SS can become conected to just random things. Consider that the cable company probably outsources it's processing functions to some 3rd party and that 3rd party has lots of customers including one your email + name combination was or is a legitimate part of. Any mistaken action by this 3rd party could result in cross pollination of internal lists and viola!, you're now a customer of this cable company in the eyes of this 3rd party.

This is just one scenario; there are tons of others but you get the idea- your [name + email + other personal info] makes it's way around the internet of service providers and data brokers which is a part of the internet you are generally unaware of but which is absolutely huge and very active. Your info is a record in a thousand million databases with absolutely zero regulatory oversight. Just one bad SQL statement by one employee once can set off a big or small chain reaction of events in the world of who is who's customer, who has what characteristics, who has been served what ads, who is a "limited income pensioner who still beleives their luck might change" or "unemployed porn-addicted compulsive masterbator" or "father whose daughter was killed in a car crash".

The procedures, policies, and practices of databrokers are effectively the wild west. They're making hay while they can since their actions have real consequences to real people in the real world (if you're friends with someone who gets into debt, your own credit rating goes down now). If all the fallout you're experiencing from this frentic activity is errant emails for phantom services, then consider yourself lucky.

  I lost my driver's license some time ago at a coffeeshop- it was stolen. I am still waiting to picked up for some heinous crime commited in some other state one of these days.

Your point is good but I think it ignores the fact that we have an entire system of law built up to assign culpability to humans, in fact, that is mostly what the law is about- holding humans accountable "as if" they could be held accountable, as if their actions were not compelled , which I also think is in very many cases a fiction.

So we have this body of law and historical precendent worked out in ultra-fine detail and a very very deep seated belief that people ARE responsible for their inattentiveness and mistaken judgement and you're going to throw all that away and where is it going to go? Nowhere? No one, no entity is responsible for that tragic crash of the bride and groom on their honeymoon?

Because if Google is responsible, then Google is going broke. No individual company can bear the costs of being liable for all accidents, however infrequent. Now we solve this problem by distributing it to the drivers involved and, occassionally, the manufacturer.

What you're proposing is a redistribution of liability to a single party or alternatively the absolution of liability. The second one is more in line with reality and morality, perhaps, if gross egligence on Google's part isn't uncovered. The fact is, each one of us has been inattentive enough to have taken the life of an innocent with our driving. It's just there was no one there at the time we were being inattentive. What separates the manslaughterer from the rest of us is nothing more than dumb luck. Nothing.

But try telling that to politicians and vicitims families and see how much buy in you get. Liability WILL be assigned, the only question is to whom?

Sorry, but I see this as an unmitigated good. The times I have been damaged, I have been damaged by liars. Liars telling lies they know I have no way to contradict. In fact, this is basically how the world is run. People receive false evaluations from people in positions of power, they receive false promises from associates, they receive false information about people's intentions and the false factual information about events of the world. If there were some way to take away their power, then that would be a good thing.

If you read the Snowden documents I read, then you know the intelligence techniques they use to discredit our enemies and others all involve the falsification of stories about that person- false accusers, false attribution, false stories.

They do this because they know what everyone else on planet earth discovers over the course of their lives- there is virtually no penalty for lying about the speech and action of 3rd parties. It's just what people do to anyone they don't like for any reason and man, it works. It works so well it appears in top secret how-to manuals.

So taking away this power which si basically used by most people for malignant reasons, where is the bad in that? What if you never had to be worry about malicious exes or lying co workers or HR couldn't lie about your performance or other gate keepers couldn't lie about the relative merits of your performance or attitude or speech or actions? How would your life be different?

Sure, I could not tell Aunt Margey that her pie is wonderful, but by then Aunt Margy would have acclimated her expectations for praise, as would have everyone else. People whould do what I did a long time ago and seek and prefer the unhappy truth to the happy layer of bullshit that just confuses the issues.

A lot of very very bad things in society are undergrided by agreed-upon lies. The motivation to maintain these lies ranges from a desire to comfort, to control, to manipulate, to hurt and to maintain a kind of Victorian veneer over the widespread ugliness of human nature.

But many people who is aware of all those things in all their ugliness and the bottom hasn't fallen out of their psyces. They know why they are being rejected (you're ugly !), they know people are, at some basic level, reliably selfish and just bad, they know their SO lie to them that their inlaws have contempt for them that their boss steals credit for their work, that their preist lost his faith ages ago, and that Facebook is abusing its TOS every chance it gets. Still, they are not running mad into the streets or even giving up on humanity.

Interpersonal relations aside, look you can't fix scietal problems you can't acknowledge and this will force people to, amongst other things, acknowledge reality. When in history has the knowledge of reality ever led to a regression in civilization? As far as I can tell it's led to an increase in the sphere of people society is willing to feel compassion towards.

OK here's the thing with this generation of driverless cars- their motion is governed by neural nets. I am going to assume that everyone here is familiar with this programming paradigm. If not, the Wikipedia entry on it is adequate.

While in the end NN are just another form of Turning machine, currently no one can divine the algorithm of a trained neural net well enough to express it in IF THEN ELSE WHILE form.

That means given a trained NN which is 100% correct 100% of the time , no could write an imperative or procedural (broadly speaking) program which captured the logic (IF THEN ELSE) the neural net is using (defacto using, NN don't have IF THEN ELSE logic except those implicitly embedded in their activation rules) to solve the problem.

That means the algorithm the NN has arrived at is not open to analytical inspection and confirmation, except very indirectly.

This is OK for wide variety of predictive tasks in which human life does not hang in the balance. In medicine, the diagnostic results from NN and even Good Old Fashioned AI expert systems are reality--checked by human doctors.

Neural nets ALWAYS run the risk of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reason enough of the time to fool humans into thinking it "understands" the problem domain in a way that is analogous to a human. A NN so trained will fool or lull human observers into a false sense of security until that BIG ACCIDENT happens then a post mortum reveals the shocking truth about what the NN was focusing in on to make it decisions.

The Big Idea behind NN is that, through a combination of evolutionary forces and billions of iterations the NN will learn using the same Hebbian activation princples the brain appears (now) to use and that with enough training, the exceptional cases that I am describing will be found and rooted out.

But even in nature, this doesn't happen reliably. Take for example the Australian Jewel Beetle. Over perhaps millions of years, it has of course evolved a robust way to recognize desirable mates and procreate. That is as basic an evolutionary task as you can imagine- it has to work or the species is doomed.

However, the male's algorithm for mating is not as robust as you might imagine. It seems that what males rely on to select a mate is a very, very limited set of perceptual cues. As it turns out, it is looking for big glossy brown curved things. When it sights one, it alights and starts humping away.

Well, Austrailian beer bottles fit this description *and fit it better than the female of the species*. People toss empty beer bottles in the outback and the result is the male beetles prefer the beer bottles to such a degree that the beetles were going to go extinct. Austrailia had to pass a law to change the appearance of its beer bottles.

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

This is a cautionary tale to those who think evolutionary forces produce only *robust* algorithms. What evolution actually produces is *good enough so far* algorithms. What well trained NN produce are similarly good enough algorithms. In both cases we have to do science to try to get at what it is they are relying on- what features they are *really* trained on. And we don't know there's a problem until tragedy happens and we don't know how ridiculous the problem is until we do science.

This is different from procedural programming which, the Halting Problem notwithstanding, CAN be analytically examined for correctness. Procedural type programming plus sensors is what runs water stations, trains, planes etc. The military does use NN to try to recognize things but it has humans making the final decision and when the missle gets launched, it's not left to a NN to decide where to finally land.

Moreover, self driving cars under the control of a NN can and will be attacked by the usual miz of 14 y/o kids, pranksters, criminals and terrorists each of whom will look for the hidden fragility , the Black Swan, in those algorithms.

I would not drive my car straight into a bridge abutment full speed without braking because a prankster had taken chalk and marked up that bridge abutment to appear to be a road in some crude way. That is the stuff of Roadrunner cartoons. But with NN, it's entirely possible such a ruse would play beer bottle to the NN Austrailian Jewel Beetle. In fact, a successful hack would even have to resemble in any recognizable way a road; the hacker only has to use their creativity to find them mimic whatever it is the NN is focusing in on.

Think of the liability. You couldn't even create a click-n-fuck-you TOS since innocent bystanders will always be put in peril.

There are lots of alternative ways to achieve the interesting goal of creating robust self driving cars, including using sensors on the road and cheap, defined tracks ala a train or trolley but with alternative technology. Commerical jet planes are essentially self flying owing to a combination of restricting airspace so as not to create random chaos (birds are a problem) and well-defined, predetermined trajectories.

Actually, we've made that move wrt to road transportation once before- when we switched from horses to cars. With a horse, you went anywhere the horse could travel using any trajectory you felt like. The world was your road. Then we traded that freedom (and lots of people didn't like the loss of that freedom) for efficiency, speed and capacity.

We achieved that y doing something which would have been thought logisitcall and financiall impossible, we paved the crap out of the entire land mass.

So too we can rework our existing road system to accept virtual electronic or even physical "tracks" that cars are outfitted to run on. Yes, there is loss of latitudnal freedom implied there, but the recapturing of time and attention we spend on driving will probably be such that most people go along with it.

NN and evolutionary program or genetic programming is having a heyday and lots of researchers and investiment money is captivated by the idea. AI in general is currently going through one of its cyclical periods of hype and wild enthusiasm. People like Kurtzweil declare that "the singularity is near" and every paper and blog declares that soon computers will be smarter than we are, that they are going to take all our jobs |and will they keep us around after they learn to pop the tab on a beer can find the channel the Bachelorette is on and all this kind of talk.

We've been here before, in the 60s then again in the 80s. Since those times we've gotten the electronic calculator, Adobe Photoshop and the Internet. Do you feel obsoleted by any of those?

Self driving cars via NN is, most likely, another interesting experiment from which we'll learn a lot but which will ultimately fail to live up to its hype.

Datamining is just a computation, an arbitrary computation. It has input value(s) and an algorithm which depends on computed intermediate values and finally an output(s). There is nothing special about the data that datamining works on which differentiates it from any other kind of data within that framework I described. This is the wonder of homomorphic encryption. It DOES let you do aribitrary computation without decrypting the data.

That's not the same as doing arbitrary computation on data whose general semantics you are totally ignorant of. Is it numeric data? Is it text processing? What is its format. Sure, you have to know that level of detail but that's like saying "this string is a pssword". Does it get you any closer to knowing what that specific encrypted password is? It does not.

Yeah but your counter argument doesn't account for the sheer scale of what VISA and the banking system do compared to Bitcoin. OK the banking system uses more electricity, but what is the amortized cost on a per transaction basis? That's the question. Accoring to TFA the answer is VISA is HUGELY more environmentally friendly and cost effective than Bitcoin and, and this is the point, always will be because by design Bitcoin makes it harder to obtain coins depending on how much processing power (energy) is being expended to obtain those coins at any given time.

http://motherboard.vice.com/re...

If all bitcoin machines went solar however, then we might have a different outcome. The practicalities of that, given that Bitcoin assumes distribution of computing power, are not in Bitcoin's favor either.