Metal vs. Straw

/ commented on getting computers to identify common e.g. strawman fallacies /

Couple of things to remember when you're aiming to build a logical model of meat people:

1. humans are illogical until they learn to be logical ... natural language is not designed to be leak-proof, which is why we don't bother to try and fix natural language, instead we just start working from the other end and invent formal languages which are leak-proof. Opposingly, arising as a direct consequence from the formal language project, computers are logical until they learn how to be illogical. You may literally program random errors into systems to help them pass Turing Tests.

2. Specific to the issue of logical fallacies in natural language ... trying to correct someone's logic, if they are not trying to be logical, may be a waste of time. The reason is that the subsystems motivating most conversations are based on lower inputs, conveniently labeled the four Fs, feeding, fight, flight, and foobar. So achieving logical proofs is the wrong strategy if the system you are trying to hack is invulnerable to logic. To get a hungry person to agree with you, you pay them with food, not proofs.

3. Finally on the naive answer: other people here have already addressed it ... the project of delineating natural language (fundamentally of illogical origin) requires a lot of data ... for complete understanding, your system needs to have a physical and aesthetic (sense data structured) model of each word and sentence it is parsing, and a cultural model of the statistical variance between semantic referents and words (example, system needs to know what balls are, what things look like balls, what things feel like balls, where balls are manufactured, the history of balls, when a ball is just a ball, and when a ball refers to a dance, and when baller means good, and when baller means a person who balls, and when balls just means bullshit, etc.) because this is what a meat person computes in their head when they see "ball". To (user)'s point ... it doesn't need a huge storage network, if you have the right data structure. It fits instead the ball thing on top of our torsos ...

Good luck ... :)

I actually don't know how many content-warnings to slap on this one

CW: death and taxes

Ok, I just observed another ABC drama in that very dramatic entrepreneurial group. So you have a community builder (CB), and an antagonist (A), where A is going and making long complex arguments that CB is a waste of space.

So it was a bit of a challenge to figure out how to tactfully tell A, "OMG, stop doing that!" If the CBs stop working, there will be no communities left, and when there are no communities, then there will be no cannon fodder left for entrepreneurs to innovate on!

It's a bit awkward living in Malaysia, not really knowing how to carry myself without offending people because you know, it's not exactly a grade-A market for ... various things, GDP, innovation, deep tech, and all that. You don't want people running around saying "don't listen to X, he's a B-grader" because a B player in a C market is doing ... pretty good, and you don't want the C players focusing on the Ds, and the Fs. Bs are good. It's kinda relative. At the same time you have to keep people conscious of this fact without saying too often "oh har har, glass ceiling, bitch, your ecosystem is cratered no matter what you do, hur hur hur". 

Later on in my reflections I was just thinking about how I'm supposed to think about all this. High-risk startups are like restaurants - they are individually expected to fail; anyone who gets excited about the individual companies is a moron; you have to bet on the asset as a class - and you do NOT spend your time trying to convince these morons to believe other than how they believe, because, then you would have no one left to run these companies ... cannon fodder is essential, precisely because no one knows where the cannonballs will land.

Onward, in war ... and love, I suppose, FWIW. 

Intermediate thoughts: It's better to focus on a B player in a C market, than on a con. // In a C market, it's better for C players to focus on B players, than on a con.

Analogously: children should be encouraged to play - it is more important to play by children's rules than to play by no rules at all.

Traditionally: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Tips: logically modelling meat people

/ commented on getting computers to identify common e.g. strawman fallacies /

Couple of things to remember when you're aiming to build a logical model of meat people:

1. humans are illogical until they learn to be logical ... natural language is not designed to be leak-proof, which is why we don't bother to try and fix natural language, instead we just start working from the other end and invent formal languages which are leak-proof. Opposingly, arising as a direct consequence from the formal language project, computers are logical until they learn how to be illogical. You may literally program random errors into systems to help them pass Turing Tests.

2. Specific to the issue of logical fallacies in natural language ... trying to correct someone's logic, if they are not trying to be logical, may be a waste of time. The reason is that the subsystems motivating most conversations are based on lower inputs, conveniently labeled the four Fs, feeding, fight, flight, and foobar. So achieving logical proofs is the wrong strategy if the system you are trying to hack is invulnerable to logic. To get a hungry person to agree with you, you pay them with food, not proofs.

3. Finally on the naive answer: other people here have already addressed it ... the project of delineating natural language (fundamentally of illogical origin) requires a lot of data ... for complete understanding, your system needs to have a physical and aesthetic (sense data structured) model of each word and sentence it is parsing, and a cultural model of the statistical variance between semantic referents and words (example, system needs to know what balls are, what things look like balls, what things feel like balls, where balls are manufactured, the history of balls, when a ball is just a ball, and when a ball refers to a dance, and when baller means good, and when baller means a person who balls, and when balls just means bullshit, etc.) because this is what a meat person computes in their head when they see "ball". To (user)'s point ... it doesn't need a huge storage network, if you have the right data structure. It fits instead the ball thing on top of our torsos ...

Good luck ... :)