"Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar;"
Fascinating article, highly recommended.
Not trying to be nitpicky but I'm going to need a citation or few to support some of the claims made about "neuroscientists and psychologists"... just saying.
"If we achieve artificial intelligence without really understanding anything about intelligence itself then we will have no idea how to control it."
Exactly. It's fascinating/scary to me how people still talk about A.I. or machine consciousness when we basically have no idea how consciousness works in general.
People who say things like that don't understand how to reason using limiting cases. We have artificial intelligence right now. Maybe not artificial general intelligence, but plenty of stuff traditionally thought of as being solely the domain of minds, is now performed by software. I'd say we understand it pretty well, and we certainly have the ability to control it.
The one iron-clad rule of artificial intelligence: any successful attempt at implementing it makes it not artificial intelligence, just something that computers are able to do.
(Though I guess there is the second rule of over-optimistic timelines, to be fair.)
Professor Zimbardo created a tyrannical environment and found "proof" that humans were innately tyrannical. Right.
As this article suggests, but doesn't quite state openly: the Stanford Prison Experiment says as much about Zimbardo's psyche as it does about human nature.
"Fun fact! Some of the most commonly prescribed (and profitable!) sleeping pills are as addictive and dangerous as heroin. Meanwhile, the 'War on Drugs' continues."
Ladies and gentlemen: I present to you the U.S. national drug policy.
While there are legitimate critiques of the War on Drugs, this seems to miss all of them: the notional reason that certain drugs are prohibited isn't that they are addictive and dangerous, but that they are addicted and dangerous and lack therapeutic use.
Drugs which are as addictive and dangerous as prohibited drugs but which have therapeutic uses for which there is not a superior substitute are supposed, by the logic of the system, to be legal. This "Fun fact!" neither points to any problem in the overt logic in the system, nor a way in which the effect of the system conflicts with the overt logic (there's plenty of both to be found, just not here.)
Is there "little downside"? Not necessarily. Compared to other drugs, sure. You're not going to become addicted and it's not going to make your teeth fall out. But let's be real. This is the most potent psychoactive substance ever made by many orders of magnitude. It can connect you to parts of yourself that are deeply buried in your subconscious. This is what brings about the blissful feelings of transcendence, wholeness, oneness, etc. It can also be absolutely terrifying to confront your subconscious, especially if 1) you're not in a good place psychologically and 2) you're not in the presence of someone you trust. What happens is you start to experience fear as the scary things come up or as you start to experience ego death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death). You don't realize that the fear is all in your head and you start to project it out onto the external world with paranoid thoughts. Kind of like you're having a nightmare, except that it's happening while you're conscious. This is known as a bad trip. It can leave lasting psychological damage if you don't know how to process the experience.
Another potential downside is that an LSD trip could trigger a midlife (or quarter-life) crisis. You might come back from the transcendental experience and realize that your life is meaningless, that all of your friends are assholes who don't really know you, etc. You might be inspired to make some big changes. From the perspective of your asshole friends, you will have changed "and not in a good way" ;) But this short-term downside is an upside if you take the long view. If you get your midlife crisis out of the way in your twenties, you can spend the rest of your life doing something meaningful.
There's no way to experience the transcendental upside without the potential downside. But if you're willing to face your own demons, and you take precautions by having a trusted + sober guide, you'll be fine.
I played with the Tactics interface for a few minutes. I love the clean design; the interface is delightful; "well done, tactic solved in XX seconds" animation is fun and totally addicting.
One gripe I have is that the quality of the tactics seems to vary widely. I'm not talking about difficulty level; some of them just don't make sense to me.
I'm not sure how this one, for example, qualifies as a tactic: chscd.me/tactics/16685. It's just a pawn capture. The fact that I have "solved" it after recapturing my rook seems arbitrary.
Out of the half dozen tactics I played through in my first visit, I had a couple other questionable ones like this. It made the site lose credibility for me. (note: I am a chess master. But my problem isn't that the tactics are too easy, it's that they are kind of random)
I'm curious, are you generating these tactics by hand or with software?
I understand you probably have a massive database of these. But it might be a good idea to have Andrew or another strong player moderate the tactics to make sure they all meet a certain standard of quality.
In the left sidebar where it has a graph of your recent ratings and tactic #, there should be a small icon on the top right corner of the sidebar. That is the report button. I submitted one on a Tactic and Andrew got back with in a few hours saying the particular tactic had been fixed.
We pulled them from a database of puzzles, so there probably are a few bugged ones here and there. We've pruned the majority of tactics that are simply broken, but I'm sure that a few questionable ones remain.
I'm in the process right now of going through all of the tactics and adding motif tags along with explanations for the solutions. While I'm doing this, I'll be sure to make sure that all the tactics make sense. Thank you for your feedback!
Fascinating article, highly recommended. Not trying to be nitpicky but I'm going to need a citation or few to support some of the claims made about "neuroscientists and psychologists"... just saying.