Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged reality →  View Popular

Like the emergent statement regarding truth in the world from Rashomon, in the hands of a careful author of an expressive computational system, the use of "meaningful difference" between instances of output to allow a global meaning to emerge from repeated execution of the system can be a hallmark of the phantasmal media forms.

Through no fault of his own, Obama presides over a massive war-making state that spends on its military close to what the rest of the world spends combined.

Apparently -- just like Chris Matthews taught Democrats back then and some Obama supporters are insisting today -- Presidents are entitled to certain Special Days where citizens are obligated to cheer for the leader and refrain from expressing criticisms.   Similarly, it's excessively negative and disrespectful to point out the glaring inconsistency between (a) escalating a war, killing civilians with air raids and imprisoning people with no charges and (b) receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

But let’s consider whether there might be a reason for doing this before we scorn him for it. Perhaps Moore is trying to emphasize the fact that he’s been doing this for twenty years now, not just because he’s too lazy to film new kinds of scenes, but because there is a certain cumulative power to memories of Moore, Working-class Man, making endless trips up steps to formidable buildings trying to get an accounting from CEOs of their ruinous practices. He STILL can’t get one, and he’s now rich and famous for trying. No one can get one. The president can’t get one. When are we going to demand they come out of those fortress-buildings and face us?

When short-time workers and non-registered unemployed are included in the jobless figure, the rate rises dramatically. In Germany, those officially counted as unemployed rose by 52,000 in June to total 3,460,000. When one includes the jobless who are not counted and the underemployed, the figures rises to nearly 6 million.

What's more complex, a cucumber or a Boeing 747? The answer is unknown. We have no way to measure the difference in order and organization between the two and don't have good working definition of complexity to even frame the question. Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, has counted 42 different mathematical definitions of complexity.

We all know and most of us probably understand that the major power of today’s world is the media. Whoever controls the media controls everything. And since the media is not nature but culture – Western culture that is - it is always owned by somebody.

It’s quite rude to call groups of obviously intelligent and freethinking people a cult, when we have 1) a commitment to rationalism and changing our minds, 2) a naturalistic worldview, 3) substantial uncertainty about many of the nodes in our probabilistic model, 4) are willing to put forth the work to actually develop AGI, no matter how long it takes, 5) operate on the expectation of human-derived causes rather than “the great thrust of history”-type nebulous causes, 6) see the positive/negative outcome as contingent on human action, 7) have no expectation of or desire for in-group perks if we do successfully build superintelligence, 8) absence of religious trappings, 9) no revenge fantasies, a la true Rapturists, and 10) have no overblown anthropomorphism for the technological agents we are creating.