Voltaire’s wit was often described as cutting and fast; “rapier-like wit” – he wasn’t a man of violence, but his passions could be ferocious and when he decided that someone’s ideas needed to be attacked, his pen really was as mighty as a sword.
In the last few months we’ve seen attempts by Kurdistan and Catalonia to gain independence. Both attempts were shot down with non-lethal but overwhelming military force. That’s clearly one difference between those break-aways and the more successful on in Crimea. These events ought to force any thinking person to ask “what is a ‘nation’?” and to wonder how nations establish their legitimacy.
It makes a certain inevitable sense that two of our topics: AI, and IQ tests, would collide. Do we have anything left but an epistemological trainwreck?
With Donald Trump’s blathering about his IQ, it’s now a news-worthy topic. Oh, boy – fake news about fake science.
Artificial intelligence programmers are getting good results with self-training neural networks. That’s something I originally thought [stderr] wasn’t going to work, but I revised my opinion when Dota2 champion Dendi got beaten by a neural net that trained to play against a copy of itself. [stderr] [Read more…]
Every national religion has a tendency to make man vain, unsocial, and wicked; the first step toward humanity is to permit each one to follow peacefully the worship and the opinions which suit him.
Your host, Jean Meslier
One of the podcasts I listen to is the Intelligence2,[i2] which is generally OK, though sometimes horrible. The one I listened to most recently was pretty horrible.
Becky N. sent me this:
Miyamoto Musashi (unknown artist)
To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
To take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer.
[Read more…]
I do a lot of public speaking; usually a couple of conference keynotes, and a dozen or more invited talks every year. During conference dinners and meet and greets, there is sometimes alcohol, and it’s hard to pass up a free drink, especially when it’s sometimes quite excellent.