Here's a link to the abstract just to nip all this 3rd and 4th hand speculation about flood myths and Atlantis: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/657397

It's great for bringing public attention but not so great for highlighting the actual science behind the pop sci article.

It was a work of fiction by HP Lovecraft called "The Nameless City"

Cool story - a lot of his stuff can be found fulltext on the internet, but here's the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nameless_City

I woke up this morning and read the news with the blue side of the stereo glasses: "Short-sighted fear-mongering populist pandering pointlessly nationalistic republican running for re-election attempts to derail human progress again."

Then I flipped to the red lens: "National hero fights valiantly to defend capitalism and national security against communist regime seeking to steal American jobs, overthrow American space technology superiority and likely launch weapon of mass destruction into orbit."

After I had my coffee, I took off the goggles and rubbed my eyes.
"The United States has moved forward with its planned defunding of an aging method of launching cargo into space, diverting all available funds to more fruitful robotic missions and more complicated manned spaceflight projects. Meanwhile, other nations and even private enterprises are developing their space programs. NASA is looking to avoid spending more of its limited resources by taking advantage of technology which is already under significant development by other technologically capable societies. With cooperation from every advanced space-faring nation, all of Human civilization stands to benefit from shared scientific developments made by each other's civilian and scientific programs."

I've considered the "you don't understand what the Chinese are capable of!" and the "we're funding an oppressive regime!" and the "you really think they're only using this for civilian technology?" angles, and I remain unconvinced that they carry any real weight. I'm willing to be convinced, but I stopped being mystified by big political words in high school, the Red Scare is a sad chapter of our history, the Russians' and subsequent space-faring nations' contributions to our own space exploration ambitions have been fruital for everyone and from the L2 Legrangian point at >60,000 kilometers, we are all just a single, interdependent colony of ants on the surface of a tiny ball of dirt.

Really? These funds aren't your tax dollars. They are Google's private contribution. If congress had decided to give Khan $2m you would have a real position to debate their judgment.

Research is the expansionist force at the boundaries of science. It's critical to understanding the previously unknown. We're talking about a man making instructional videos about foundational math and science and making it available for free to the world with no strings attached. Your position is that this is somehow /dangerous/.

I should clarify: "in the absence of better methods available to the student."

Less-than optimal teaching methods are nothing new to any form of education. That is hardly justification to discourage their use in the absence of better methods, especially when the less-than-optimal methods are vastly more accessible and largely accurate. Research into the human brain's powers of cognition, learning, intelligence and emotion are likely to be an ongoing research area in science for the breadth of human civilization. I wouldn't advise waiting for their resolution to begin making those fruits available for consumption. Reeducation is a small price to pay for elevating minds out of plain ignorance.

I should add that there is some degree of absurdity in criticizing this material for its inadequacy at teaching people who do not want to learn.

I agree that watching lectures online is not the most effective way to gain a true mastery of knowledge. It's also true that there are some subjects which require access to lab equipment and other physically expensive or rare materials. It's worth looking into ways to make it more effective and it will still be a very long time before people such as hiring managers will be convinced of the credibility of self-taught students. But it IS an excellent way to prime yourself for an upcoming class by seeing some example problems, or simply to gain an introductory level knowledge through recorded survey-type courses requiring little technical background (iTunes U has a lot of this kind of material).

Not all learners are trying to replace a traditional university education with online lectures, or to achieve parity with a graduate student. Some of them are middle-aged, career-laden, family-burdened, cash-strapped people who just want to broaden their horizons or professionals who just want to gain interdisciplinary knowledge. And, of course, some learners live in places and situations where they could not dream of getting a college education. Any effort to get knowledge closer to these people and conditions is to be praised.

There is no harm in a private company making a large donation to one of the most prolific individual contributors to the field. The money is partially going towards translating his content into many languages. If anything, that will allow this material to be used as modern teaching aids in places where no free material is available in the most common languages of the region. Much of the internet's undergraduate-level educational resources are still English-centric.

I applaud Khan, the many YouTube channels dedicated to sharing knowledge, institutuional projets like OpenCourseWare and of course Wikipedia for making free knowledge available online. I can find no good reason not to be glad that Google is making a cash contribution and for maintaining YouTube as a free service, without which, Khan might not have been able to get started with hosting and streaming this much video to as many users.

You make a lot of good points about separating the cold, rational side of science as a discipline from what is not its proper domain. But I must steal back some of the soul you have purged from it by abstracting away the person – science does not happen in the absence of a human actor.

It has not been my experience that science offers none of the pleasures and dilemmas you neatly factor from it. There is something to be said for luminaries whose unique insight would have been ignored if they did not have the venue of science to knock heads against hard facts and force cultural change. Hard work, altruism, empathy, controversy, struggle and desire to touch lives are no less evident in the everlasting life stories of many scientists whose names, long engraved on their tombs, can still be found embedded in research papers for novel cures, in their contributions to institutions for human progress and the countless human generations their work will continue to effect.

As for whether science can tell right from wrong, why you are here, your purpose in life, or push you to become a better human being, I doubt that any of these could so easily be factored from the scientist in the person as from the raw, disembodied notion of science. The pursuit of knowledge is a passion that has led to many deeds of both profound and dubious value, but always by the hand of people.

In the spirit of skepticism, I hope that when you met your example of an evolutionist (and chided him for the mistake of simplifying it down to mere randomness), you gave fair thought to the analogously religious man who defers to supernatural authority when justifying earthly violence. We can both agree that any doctrine will not necessarily impart its wisdom in all fullness, to fallible humans, and that humans need guidance of many kinds to be both rational and emotional beings.

Thank you for this rational perspective, which, for the sake of responding to a central point, I shall crudely boil down into “question everything.” At the heart of science is critical thinking, which, even in the presence of mountains of evidence, cannot be suspended. Knowledge is truly illuminating, but just as we might endeavor to shine a light on a dark spot in our mind, we might then turn away in confidence that we have explored enough of its folded surfaces to explain its true nature.

Science builds our understanding of the universe through rationalizing observations of reality and adhering to logic for arguing our conclusions. We may gain a reasonable confidence that our models fit the reality we observe if our data and logic support those models. But “fit” may be the best that we can do in any case. There is no shame in this – all good science acknowledges falsifiable experimentation. Regardless, that perpetually unresolved mystery is the dynamo that fuels young minds to make their life work out of attacking those shadowy folds. A world without that mystery would be very dull to me.

Science could neither be said to be a purely academic exercise of irresolvable and tenuous conclusions, nor does it typically lead to absolute truths. We make use of those models to explain, predict and improve our world through engineering, medicine, commerce and any number of fields for which their application is, for most purposes, to our great benefit. It is not the fault of science that its students often come away with the belief that there are usually absolute truths (they are indeed rare). Not all minds are prepared for or necessarily benefit from filtering all imparted knowledge through intense critical thought. To ignore that and continue on regarding others crudely for their misunderstandings forces us to behave as pedantic jerks and without regard for the very people our science and teaching actually effects.

It is important to recognize that our experts (good scientists) often regard their conclusions with even more scrutiny than we do, and stake their careers on it. Sometimes their motives, methods or deductive powers are suspect, but our protection from that is built directly into the scientific method, to which they must adhere if they are to be respected. Falsifiable experimentation, well documented, repeatable methods and attainable data, as well as adhering to strong logical arguments and mathematics constitute the language of higher order understanding.

It is a question for philosophers whether it is necessary to strictly rationalize everything. I believe science, through critical thinking, is the way to raise rational humans and that doing so will lead to a better plural civilization, but I will defer to understanding little about raising good people.

http://www.vimeo.com/siai/videos/sort:oldest
http://singinst.org/media/interviews
http://www.youtube.com/user/singularityu

Well, lack of searching is not a lack of material, you can find several hours of Ray's talks on video at Singularity Summit 2007, 2008, 2009, TED.com, Singularity University and just plain independent YouTube videos. He also has two movies out (I haven't seen either), the Transcendent Man criticisng his esoteric side and The Singularity Is Near (based on his book) supporting his ideas.

All of this talk about his figures being wrong is quite far from the point. To say we'll have conversations with virtual humans in 2030 or that we may have to cope with an AI superintelligence by 2050 is quite far from noting that either of these situations are entirely possible extrapolated from trends and the discussion should be had.

As a computer scientist, I can say that it will be hard to do. As a scientist, it's pretty foolish to say that because something is hard that it will never happen (we did and building a human is pretty hard).

You’re right that the 30000:1 error ratio was pulled out of someone’s ass as a dogmatic argument, it’s the ratio of 90 million to 3000, and it was brought up to espouse the unsupported claim (it doesn’t mesh with my beliefs, therefore there must be something positively wrong with it) that radioactive decay is so inaccurate as to be unusable as a scientific tool, often based on willful denial of scientific experimentation (which is the opposite of dogma).

The rate of radioactive decay is measured in decay activity per second (curie) in experimentation but it is usefully indexed for radiometric dating purposes in terms of half life, which is a period of time in which 50% of a sample will decay to its stable isotope. We don’t have to wait for 50% of a sample to decay (although we can in particle colliders to the tune of picoseconds!). Half life is converted up from its much finer measurement in a far shorter time with a much more accurate instrument (using, say, accelerator mass spectrometry). Imagine the absurdity of presuming to date an object millions of years old accurately in terms of seconds it would be like saying I always get 3% of the way to work in 27,128.395 milliseconds when it is far more useful (and for all practical purposes analogous) to say that it usually takes me 15 minutes to get to work. Note that I am being confidently more accurate than “between a fraction of a second and 313 days.”

Far from ignoring cosmic radiation, I’ll cite research, experimentation and data: http://donuts.berkeley.edu/papers/EarthSun.pdf

How wildly different? In science we almost never get the same answer; instead we get a statistical gradient (yet science still works!). I'm prepared to assume +/- 3% is a reasonable error for accuracy in some experiments, while you might require +/- 0.1%. Or an experimenter might draw false conclusions from the data, or the error might be so large as to invalidate the correlation he or she draws, or the method might be entirely discredited. Either way, the results are rarely glaringly obvious (otherwise we wouldn’t need rigorous peer-reviewing processes) and you must qualify your criticism for it to be anything but speculation.

We do not know for certain if a particular strata was exactly 90 million years old, but a possible error rate of 30000:1 is not being passed off as credible research by any scientist in radioactive decay-based dating. For practical purposes, bell curves serve as a useful indicator of probability by showing a gradient of weight around a mean, not to prove that the leftmost infinitesimally improbable armpit of the curve represents any significant doubt to the central argument.

I agree with your assertion that building a brain is nontrivial. The problem with the blog post is that the guy says Kurzweil believes life processes are trivial, which is completely wrong if you open the damn book, flip to the page with this quote and start reading around it. He's (quite explicitly) making a paper napkin estimate of human brainpower in CPU cycles and plotting it on a linear regression curve of historical data.

But I will take your argument one further and say that a blueprint is a bad example for a genome, because a blueprint implies a 1:1 relationship of data to construction, which is not what we see by observation at all (Dawkins has a section on this in his newest book). It's actually closer to a computer program, because nobody could say that what happens at runtime is correlated absolutely to with what is written in the source (there are users, much to the dismay of many programmers). These days, programmers don't understand what goes on in individual blocks of memory or processor registers, they just call their Date library or some GUI code with an API method that was developed long ago to solve a class of problem programmers typically had to deal with all the time. What's going on in memory is some arcane science packed into a compiler or an interpreter somewhere, having been solved long ago by some anonymous programmer whose code worked well enough to have been considered "a good enough solution."

Nevertheless, we understand the mechanisms that drive that code, even if the programmer is long gone and with enough incredibly difficult and soulcrushing effort, one could actually recreate the source with a hex editor, a stack tracer, a means of monitoring memory, etc.