[FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

[Roger Critchlow]

Harking back to an earlier complaint from Marcus about blatant and lazy
appeals to authority, which may have been in another thread altogether, this


http://andrewgelman.com/2017/05/07/discussion-lee-jussim-simine-vazire-eminence-junk-science-blind-reviewing/

introduced me to the formulation "eminence based reasoning".  There's also
a bit in there about the existential terror of blind reviewing.

But it also recalls my earlier life as a random tenant in a house of
Harvard seniors living off campus in 1969, the first year Harvard
undergraduates were allowed to live off campus.  They were mostly members
of the Students for a Democratic Society, but they thought the Weatherman
faction was a joke.  So they made up their own faction of SDS, Juiced In
It, from the immortal Dylan lyric "Sure you went to the finest schools all
right but all you ever used to do was get juiced in it."  Which has forever
since echoed in my mind when I find myself scanning for eminent scholarly
affiliations.

-- rec --


On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 10:55 AM, ┣glen┫ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Coincidentally, given the topic of [SG]AI and the semantic grounding of
> rhetorical terms:
>
> The meaning of life in a world without work
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/
> virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book?utm_
> source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+
> Collections+2017&utm_term=225051&subid=22800997&CMP=GT_US_collection
>
> > What is a religion if not a big virtual reality game played by millions
> of people together? Religions like Islam and Christianity invent imaginary
> laws, such as “don’t eat pork”, “repeat the same prayers a set number of
> times each day”, “don’t have sex with somebody from your own gender”, and
> so forth. These laws exist only in the human imagination.
>
> I've had several friends suggest they'd like to start their own cult.  I
> even inducted 2 of them into my Discordian charter.  That wasn't good
> enough, though, because as Episkopos, I don't care what my priests do.  It
> also happens that these friends are programmers, even if not
> professionally.  So, there's more to Harari's analogy than meets the eye, I
> think.
>
> I've long believed, when managing people, the single critical attribute is
> "tolerance of ambiguity".  Those of us who get too hung up on definite
> axiomatic approaches are, I think, at the most risk of losing their jobs to
> an SAI.  Those of us who tolerate (especially drastic) semantic shifts, on
> the fly, may survive through any Singularity.
>
> --
> ␦glen?
>
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