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TuringAI

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Everything posted by TuringAI

  1. Kolker, you're missing the point. In emergency situations we have to throw conventional ethics out the window. This means we may have to manipulate other countries into being on our side. If this means choosing the more accepted amongst two otherwise equal (in essential terms) choices to have the appearance of being less ruthless, so be it. For deploying that much damage in a single unit of time, modern conventional weapons are fully capable of having the same kind of impact as WMDs.
  2. I am guessing we'll have a revolution, John Galt style. Other than that, the only blood on the streets will be rioting, with the fall of the dollar. As for the money, we'll have hella debt, pun intended.
  3. Because, if we nuke Mecca, it's inevitable that later on someone else will nuke Washington D.C. and most of the world will support the retaliation, including much of the U.S.A. itself. It may not be right that we have to consider our 'international standing', but considering that warfare creates a short term emergency, our main purpose is to stay alive, and our international standing helps that. Why should we destroy such an asset? Without that part of ethics which comes with living in a social context, how can you refute this argument? After all, the only exceptions to the social context rule are emergencies. An emergency cannot have a long term solution, because such a situation as the rule rather than an exception is a contradiction. Not only that but it would psyche them out more to treat them with disdain, since being seen as a major threat to the U.S. as opposed to a minor one is part of what encourages them to attack. How can we do this if we nuke them, elevating them in the eyes of other enemies to the status of major world powers? All in all it's a bad idea. Only if there's a war that, even IF we fought it properly we would be under attack on multiple occasions, with an opponent that has the capacity to sustain such attacks, is a nuke or another weapon of mass destruction even justified. And the WMDs we use need to be specifically tailored to the situation, including the location of the enemy and things which give them the ability to commit warfare.
  4. Honestly, it's not the fault of capitalism that some people cheat their way to the top, but with stories like the following one could easily get confused. http://news.deviantart.com/article/108901/ I hope America and Australia soon decide it's time to settle on a treaty. They should reciprocate international fraud cases and encourage censorship free internet access. Oh, and anyone who wants to talk about the specific happenings is free to do so. I will happily engage in such a conversation.
  5. Why do we need five? This argument should suffice: Using nuclear weapons is only a deterrent to those countries who believe their interests lie in the real world. In a nation of 'martyrs' it would actually encourage retaliation rather than discourage it. Our enemy has an identity and refusing to accept that it has one not only compromises victory, but makes it impossible.
  6. I only wish you weren't being sarcastic. The only philosophical problem here is an inability to translate all known principles from a fictional Pandora to a nonfictional Earth. There is literally a world of difference between Pandora and Earth and certain specific principles that apply to the one do not apply to the other. Epistemology is contingent upon the nature of what exists that can be reduced to entities that can be sensed. Think of the Pandoran's extra hair-tentacle thingy as another sense organ, for mental entities perhaps but definitely a genuine objective sense organ. We don't have the same kind of life here and we don't have that 6th sense the do there. So while there are probably similar principles you cannot go straight into the conclusion that somehow this movie perpetrates some great sin against humanity and Objectivism. I thought Avatar was great, and the ability to conceive of worlds totally unlike our own is not the bane of SciFi but its most potent benefit.
  7. That's a situation that exists sometimes, and thus is not impossible to prove. Anything that exists on this Earth is provable. Otherwise you're contradicting Objectivism.
  8. What about a form of English that has no English words? http://bakadesuyo.com/what-english-sounds-like-to-foreigners It's a song. Enjoy!
  9. Except for the fact that those of us who are truly against patents would never use the requirement for novelty as a basis for a patent in the first place, because we don't believe in patents. Arguing about how a patent should be and that they shouldn't exist is a contradiction, in the very same way that arguing against god but arguing his qualities is a contradiction. Also, "I've never heard that song before" typically is supposed to work, since if it were true it proves that your song is not a copy. What intellectual property should protect is works generated by means of copying. Copying is as much a physical act as an intellectual act, as it involves duplication of information, something that can be judged much easier than the opponents of this POV would like to think.
  10. If this was true, then what's your objection to basing patent law on copyright that applies to inventions/technology and other things? Current law forbids someone to create twice whether it was copied or not. If what you say is true why do you still support such a flawed system as exists today?
  11. I guess my main question is why patents and trademarks exist and we don't handle everything by a combination of trade secret, copyright, fraud prohibitions and privacy legislation (where there exists both personal and economic versions of privacy) or however well they combine, since some are essentially equivalent to others. In all truth, the only difference between current IP and ideal IP is that current IP punishes simultaneous creation as well as other forms of original creation, and ideal IP would only punish those who use other people's works as their own. The way IP works now is to push people to think of the short term benefits at the possible expense of long term benefits. The issue shouldn't be whether we can get some universal right to a type of thing, but whether we've got all bases protected for our ideas and our implementation of our ideas. If you want to know WHAT it is I am arguing for, then read on. I have been stewing over this situation and I can give two extreme examples where people still have the ability to function, but only if the government recognizes their rights. Suppose I exist in a society where copying isn't prohibited. Now I invent something. It is mine, and the easiest way to keep it mine is to not let anybody else know. Now suppose I realize there are other people as intelligent as I am and they might be doing the same thing. I have no way of knowing, since they won't even let me know whether or not they're being secretive. I make a deal with them: They are not to expose any inventions which I share with them, as long as I don't expose any inventions which they share with me. We have created a contract and the combination of my privacy with theirs makes an entangled privacy right situation. Now the only way a person can copy me or this other person is to violate our rights first, and thus anything gained, regardless of its form, is in violation of our privacy along with our subsequent loss of potential for US to reveal what we want of OURS. So long as it is within our privacy zone it is no different than what is IN OUR OWN HEADS. Suppose now someone else exists in a society where copying is prohibited. This means if you so much as see or hear a work of art you cannot create your own based on that. That someone else has it in their best interest not to see or hear anything new, unless they choose to do so in advance based on information which they know the originator has decided to allow to see or hear, and whether it is worth it to give up unrestricted creation to somewhat restricted creation. Nobody should be able to make them see or hear anything, though they end up at least seeing and hearing banal, though unprotected, things in the course of living their lives. The reason is because their unrestricted potential should be theirs alone, and nobody has a right to claim what ultimately ends up IN THEIR OWN HEAD as if it was owned by a person who doesn't own their mind. It would of course make it easier if we could just erase what's in our heads that we don't want, but that's something else altogether. So both of these examples are examples of our right to our mind. With no IP protection for anything or with IP protection for everything our rights are in jeopardy. This is undesirable. But rather than trying to balance the two against each other, there is a common principle that if exercised resolves the situation.
  12. Sure, if you limit this discussion to a mathematical definition of what is fair. But this is the real world and math is restricted to using the axioms given forth. Something more abstract and based on actual values must be used if we are people who value our own lives. Most important to the model is that it only models one election. It does not take into account human psychological motivations for propping up and keeping two false choices for candidates. So the model, even given that it correctly identifies one election, does not take into account multiple elections. When somebody comes up with a theory that deals with relations between past and future elections, then you can tell me about it. Until then, just stick to claims that are put in the correct context.
  13. Well if you invent something and I invent something, and they happen to be the same by some coincidence, that's 1. Yet under current IP laws it's illegal. Just because two things, when compared, turn out to have no essential differences, doesn't mean one was copied from the other. The problem I have is when item 1 happens but people treat it as item 3. The argument "Well it wasn't in existence before but now it is when I did it, but when you did it it was already in existence" ignores the context of the invention. Anything brought into being is brought into being sometime and somewhere. While the fact of the invention happens to be true, a person would not know that fact and should not be treated like a criminal for it. All you're doing is inventing on your own and not using another person. Also, you forgot option 4: They give it to you. It could be either on purpose because they want to or expect something from you, or by accident, through carelessness or a belief that they haven't really done so. Saying there's three options without proving those are the only three options is sloppy. For example, you could be giving it out to all takers. How are they supposed to know you're retaining the rights to it before they took it? What if they wouldn't have taken it if they'd known it would make it so they can't build off of it? I mean, take software for example. A person might not want to use software that they know they won't be able to use in their projects so why force it upon them, even if they are choosing specifically not to copy it but to recreate what they need themselves, even if their product's essentially similar to others?
  14. The main problem I have here is that there is no aspect of reality that corresponds to market saturation other than the fact that there are people who will potentially pay you money or a product you are willing to sell to them who wouldn't if someone sells them a competing product. Saying that you own the potential for people to pay you money for your product is ludicrous, but that's what people who support IP believe, at least according to your argument. Furthermore, the key to property is that it cannot be taken by force. Substituting "without earning it or through exchange" for "by force" is invalid, since the two are not equivalent. Regardless of how this affects the IP situation, this is an invalid way of approaching the situation.
  15. Okay, what's essential about the difference between knowing "rubbing two solid objects together causes friction, tree branches are solid objects, friction causes heat, heat applied to a flammable substance causes fire, and tree branches are flammable substances" and knowing "If I rub these two tree branches together I can create fire"? The former is considered knowledge about the laws of nature and the latter is considered knowledge of a process. Yet if one applies deductive reasoning one follows from the other in a precise and certain manner. Except nobody's creating new laws of nature. They're rearranging knowledge of laws of nature in such a manner that it becomes knowledge of a useful process. Now it's clear that rearranging something existing into something that hasn't existed before in a given context is creation, but here's the million dollar question: Why isn't knowledge of the laws of nature simply the rearrangement of already existing knowledge, say knowledge of phenomena that can be sensed, and thus creation? People have manipulated elements of nature in ways that are unique, and created algorithms that are simply one manipulation after another to cause a desired result, and yet sometimes it's called a law of nature and sometimes it isn't. This is directly related to liberty. The difference I see is that one refers to the part of the process involving human action and one refers to the part of the process that does not involve human action. So in essence, when one owns intellectual property, one is owning the way humans may operate. So intellectual property is homesteading human action, specifically the actions that any person may take or not. Then perhaps I may chime in with my own insights. I've debated this issue before and have new angles that other people have not tried, or at least compilations of angles that have been tried but which have not been tried in succession.
  16. Gavagai, you've made an extraordinary leap in the understanding of Rand's argument for/against IP rights to certain things. I will repeat it here: While I don't denigrate Ayn Rand's talent for philosophy, it seems that there is a bit of an oversight here.
  17. Didn't Ayn Rand once say that in the future, someone could expand upon ideas in Objectivism by applying her methods to the philosophy of mathematics?
  18. Well my main point is that if there was no 'first come first serve' basis for patents, people would opt for competition, which means even IF someone tried to price gouge or act authoritarian, the competing providers would jump in and provide a better product for a decreased price. The issue is that coercive monopolies are immoral, and that if patents worked on the basis that refusing to be a consumer of the information makes you a valid re-inventor, there would be sufficient competition to offset whatever problems might arise if such claims are unlimited. Furthermore, there would be a jury trial just like in regular theft cases, with presumed innocent until proven guilt. Of course, this all relies on the premise that privacy is the intellectual property analog to possession in physical property. So rather than having a hundred different claims out there out of which the public is there to sort, they will all be private. So you couldn't violate a 'patent' by inventing the same thing on your own.
  19. I think that there are a few things to consider. Ayn Rand probably considered these things and dismissed them as irrelevant to her point about inventions. I consider them relevant because, despite history being one way and not another, it COULD HAVE BEEN another way. This is because we have free will. We're not talking about planetary formation. We're talking about series upon series of human created events. Anyway, here are the things to consider. 1. The kind of individuals CAPABLE of inventing anything is severely low. So were electricity not discovered, and the light bulb not invented, historical conditions might not have allowed a nation such as America to exist long enough for another individual with the same virtues to discover and invent those things, at least until another free nation were created, which itself isn't a guarantee. This is because free will allows people to invent or even to NOT invent these things. 2. Were there more inventive individuals there's nothing in this universe or in human history or anything anywhere that stops people from accidentally inventing the same thing more than once. So under those conditions, in the alternate world where inventors are plentiful, we may very well see multiple invention as a serious issue. Laws may have to change to consider co-invention, or re-invention in the face of deficient prior knowledge. Free will is the reason here too. 3. More important, then, than the issue of whether or not an invention would have existed otherwise - it always COULD have, but there is a subtle but important distinction between would and could, especially in this situation - is how to increase the proportion of inventors. It happens quite a bit in history where only a minimal amount of people can claim ownership of something, then something happens and ownership is abundant. Education reform might accomplish this goal. On that note, something could be said for people's views of limited ownership time. Think about how invention might be different if there were unlimited ownership time for all inventions. Maybe that would be enough to make inventors out of non inventors, provided that rules be lenient enough to allow someone to shun specific knowledge of an invention and rediscover it themselves so there are more factors out there than simply if it could be invented by multiple different people.
  20. I found a page called "Battleground God" and I found it interesting. The link is right beneath this line if you want to go there. http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/god.htm Apparently I did fairly well on this test, but I wonder, do you think it is a good quiz? Do you think we, as Objectivists, could come up with something like this, except for Objectivism as a whole?
  21. So what are the mathematical parameters? How do you determine that this scale independent fractal pattern actually results in a power law? I am studying math and this is interesting to me. Most important though is context. You can't just say EVERY fundamental aspect of nature has this law. There needs to be a set of assumptions for which your theory is true. The normal distribution is created by taking the limit of the sampling distribution of events which follow the binomial distribution as the sample size approaches infinity. (Okay, that example may not be a good one, but it's based on my current understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong.) For example, say you have a set of random forces. To which constraints must those forces be subject before things start to follow your distribution? For example, in gambling, there is a distribution which results from certain conditions. Everybody starts with the same amount of money. They each then bet in proportion to their wealth against another who is also able to bet the same amount, they flip a coin, and depending on which is heads and which is tails, one wins and the other loses. Eventually the process is repeated for a set number of iterations. That would create a certain kind of distribution. Kind of like how a random walk approaches the normal distribution through a limit over time and for certain conditions. So what's the verdict? Do you get what I'm saying? I know I talked a lot, and might be babbling a bit, but we're all guilty of doing it for one time or another.
  22. What about war? In war, you never attain victory by attacking the victims of an enemy government as if they were the target. You attack the enemy government itself. Yet if the victims die along the way it's not detrimental to victory.
  23. Yes, so long as there is a law prohibiting transfer of stolen property to others, and it is within the timeframe of the law wrt statutes of limitation. In a perfectly Objectivist society there would be no statute of limitation but nevertheless there would also not be things like ex post facto laws, IE laws that go into effect retroactively.
  24. What of those objects out of which the entity is composed?
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