IMO the worst is trying to drag up a fight that was silly 100 years ago. It's ok to think that both Edison and Tesla were great men.....because they were. You don't have to choose sides.

Why would anyone want anything near New Jersey

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about you and your logic-without-knowledge. Smart guy, but you don't know what's going on.

So, let's look at the case of the JWs, since you seem to really like it. What is it about that case that seems shocking to you? Why do you keep bringing it up?

ok, I'm just clarifying what the GGP said

If that's true, then your argument so far has been ill-informed. Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution." (The "scientific revolution" was something basically made up in the 1800s and projected back on the 1600s -- at the time, what Galileo, Newton, et al. were seen as doing was participating in a larger intellectual revolution in "philosophy.")

As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science, and some of their ideas have been influential in changing the way scientists conceive of their methodologies, even in the past century. People around here tend to like Popper, but there were people before him, and generations after him (Kuhn, Lakatos, etc.). The way we teach the "scientific method" in grade school is essentially the distillation of a particular philosophical conception of science developed in the 1800s, perhaps modified by some of the stuff like Popper that was formulated in the first half of the 20th century.

I'm not trying to overstate the influence of philosophy here, but modern science actually did develop out of a branch of philosophy. And it's only in the past 50 years or so that practicing scientists stopped having a detailed acquaintance with ongoing philosophical debates about scientific methodologies.

Science isn't a "junior form of philosophy," and I do think you are right to criticize people who have said so. But science does have particular philosophical assumptions at its core, which were historically developed often by people with more than a passing familiarity with philosophical debates. Modern philosophy is still concerned with underlying assumptions of science that are largely unnoticed by practicing scientists who don't necessarily reflect on problematic elements of their methodology. This is not a criticism of science nor an assertion that it is subservient to anything -- it's just pointing out a different perspective... not unlike the mathematicians who are obsessed with the foundations of analysis and the underlying basis of number systems, which gets into the realm of philosophy. Most of those issues have little bearing on the everyday work of applied mathematicians, but there is a possibility that some research into these assumptions could lead people down a new path.

Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.

Philosophy was the first step in introducing self-reflection, rationality, and logical consistency to the investigation of those questions.

Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science. There's a self-reflective attitude required to begin asking questions about the methodology of observation that led to both philosophical revolutions and ultimately to the scientific revolution (which, depending on whom you ask, happened in either the 12-13th centuries ot the 16th-17th centuries). The scientific revolution did a lot of things, but you're absolutely right that people were already practicing empiricism and a lot of other things we'd associate with the "scientific method." But by 1750 or so, there was a new philosophical conception in place that faciliated the transition to modern science -- basically overturning a lot of the crappy baggage of older philosophy that you seem to be annoyed with, and introducing new philosopical assumptions about what nature might be and what an "explanation" of nature consisted of.

Anyhow, I'll stop here, but my perspective is coming from someone who works on the history of science as part of my research. I've read a lot of the original treatises written by these early "scientists," and they deal with the "philosophical" issues a lot more than you seem to realize. Again, I'm not at all suggesting that science is some sort of "junior" partner to philosophy -- but it did develop out of philosophical debates, and the underlying assumptions are still something to think about.

The fermi paradox, plus the lack of reason to establish a colony in this solar system combined with the difficulty of leaving this solar system. It would be much, much easier to have colonies on the bottom of the ocean than to have them on the moon or Mars (and of course, Venus is brutal).

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see much reason for hope.

He didn't say that (just as the primary purpose of laundry detergent isn't to launder money, it's to wash clothes. LTR). He said the reason Silk Road used it is to launder money. There's a difference.

"Microkernels are still better, you little punk!" With an engraving of a shaking fist.

Money laundering is any use of cash which the government deems in a particular case to be connected with a criminal enterprise. This includes simple possession of cash, independent of its use in any transaction.

Dude. I don't wanna see what happens when one of those guys gets steamrolled by 300 pound refrigerator in a jetpack. Because that's what it's going to be like.

Ok, I lied; I do want to see what happens.

That sounds like a legit point at first, but think about it for a sec. Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy, and many chatbots can already do that. Asking a strong AI "are you a computer?" or "what did you have for breakfast?" would not be useful for evaluating intelligence. Getting the AI to debate an intellectual topic, on the other hand, will be less likely to require deception but would be a better measure of intelligence. That's another fundamental point people miss: The point of the Turing test was to imitate human INTELLIGENCE, NOT to pretend to be a physical human.

A knowledgeable interrogator trying to evaluate intelligence would thus likely be more interested in asking intellectual questions, rather than queries just designed to test whether the computer can make up some nonsense about itself.

Exactly. That's part of my point. A lot of people are acting like the test was "passed" by an AI pretending to be a Ukranian teenager conversing in his non-native language and acting like an evasive weirdo. Turing's standard for "intelligence" was obviously much higher. It sounds like his AI would probably be pitted against an adult human from the top 5-10% of intelligence in his test.

And isn't that a potential standard for evaluating when true AI has arrived? No one would have cared about Deep Blue or Watson if the computer wasn't at least better than most of humans in specific areas. If and when true AI arrives, it will likely have been endowed with superior access to facts, so the question is whether the AI will demonstrate understanding, i.e. ability to put those facts together and express them in a nuanced natural language way. (The point wasn't specific knowledge about sonnets, it was getting the AI to express a detailed understanding of nuanced language.) Giving an AI a bunch of facts about sonnets is easy; getting it to debate creative artistic choices in the way that an intelligent human who knows about sonnets might is a LOT harder.

Because the results are not reproducible. The logical conclusion is that there was some problem with the experiment.

The easy way to resolve the question is to figure out what algorithm the human brain runs. After that, the question of intelligence is trivial.