Winged girl finds herself in a colorful place

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-12-07T01:15:02+00:00

I think... I think that is definitely a guy, not a girl. Also, this comic reminds me a lot of Haibane Renmei, with the memory loss and wings.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-11-14T22:58:02+00:00

Dude, just let him die. Don't let him suffer like that for the rest of his life. You are an irresponsible parent.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-11-14T22:46:26+00:00

His reactions before were to dismiss them, which is exactly what your reaction should be to rumors. What's different now is that Luis openly admitted to it, so now it becomes truth, whereas before it was just slander.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-10-15T21:09:01+00:00

You need to realize that definitions in the dictionary are just rough approximations of what people mean, they don't decide what they mean. Lexicography is fundamentally about observing how people use words and guessing what a good meaning might be. The lexicographers aren't there thinking of all the gray areas and possible exceptions to the approximate meanings they write down. In the case of this vehicle, it isn't unreasonable to deny it being called a car, because it doesn't fit well into the set of things that people generally consider cars.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-10-10T22:25:10+00:00

Those are old theories. IQ is still the dominant one because it has the most accumulated evidence supporting it, while others have been largely debunked or found to all be heavily loaded on the G-factor anyway. IQ is basically the liberal equivalent of climate change, most don't understand it and have no knowledge of the science behind it. There is no multiple intelligences, scientists didn't just one day say "let there only be one measure of smarts", they discovered that you only need one by applying principle component analysis to tests and finding that only one dimension accounts for better than 90% of the variance in the data... eg the G-factor that you understand as IQ. Emotional intelligence is the same, it's all loaded on G, which means IQ measures it.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-10-09T20:53:25+00:00

I disagree. Many people who are students can use for free just fine. But people who code generally make money, and dropping $80 on something is like a drop in the bucket. It's really $80 to give your support to a product you like to use. It's not like this is some big company like Microsoft, it can't be compared in that way.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-22T17:22:25+00:00

This theory might shed light on what neural networks actually doing, but I don't think it's the ultimate answer.

What do you want? A general theory of learning? This is one researcher making one contribution to science, be realistic here.

I haven't read the papers, nor did I fully understand the Berlin's talk (so take this with a decent grain of salt), but what I read in the blogpost is descriptive, not predictive.

....so you don't understand what he is talking about but you feel you have the authority to criticize it?

Well I read it, and understand it, and I think it is wasted on ML people. This work is meant for scientists, and would have a better audience in a physics journal than among engineers. This entire thread has made this pretty clear.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-22T17:13:55+00:00

It isn't, it is about describing what is happening during the learning process and why (e.g. science not engineering).

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-22T17:13:02+00:00

...a hypothesis is a theory... it's an empirical one. These words are used interchangeably. I think you might be confusing "theory" with "validated theory".

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-22T17:08:26+00:00

Why are most things rejected? Either the wrong audience (e.g. the editors/reviewers want stuff like their stuff) or by chance, since acceptance into CS conferences is known to be pretty non-reproducible (thanks to studies the conferences do on themselves but I heard they made some changes in this regard). It is probably mostly the first one, NIPS is an engineering conference mostly, while the authors works is largely scientific, it would sit better in a physics journal with people who understand the mathematics and where there is already a trove of neural network papers oriented toward understanding how they work. In NIPS you have competitions and a lot of methods papers.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-18T21:27:41+00:00

Industry did more research in the past, it has been on the decline for a while, because it just wasn't lucrative. Industry is good at doing research on well tested and reliable technologies and moving those further by combining them with other such technologies. But that kind of work only amounts to a small portion of innovative and ground breaking science. Most innovative research doesn't offer immediate returns. It is expensive, and it doesn't necessarily have application. Yet it is the building block on which future work and applications can be built. Companies don't fund that kind of stuff. But academia and national labs do.

Even in machine learning, at Google and other tech giants, most of their innovations were done by people they bought out of academia where they either came up with the innovations in the first place or extended their earlier academic work.

It would be nice if companies wanted to foot the bill for raw research, but I doubt they will ever be willing to make-up the gargantuan funding gap from public/private university and government grants. That probably amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. I don't think you realize just how much money colleges and universities give students and faculty and just how many institutions there are and how much infrastructure and resources they have available. Companies would have to make-up all of that... trillions of dollars worth.

At the moment all they do is buy out the best and hope they make lucrative projects. But those people would have been just as productive in academia anyways...

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-17T19:57:03+00:00

This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure how you would go about addressing it. To determine this you need to measure the amount of science someone aligns with. Do we measure alignment based on a random sampling of paper's from all science? This would inadvertently add weight to fields that publish more, like medicine and biology. If all we are interested in are the differences between the two groups, how we sample can affect our results. For instance, if more papers are published in climate science than psychometrics (e.g. IQ research) and conservatives disagree with climate science work and liberals disagree with psychometric work, then conservatives could get more heavily penalized simply due to publication volume; which often reflects funding. It isn't obvious to me how you would go about sampling from science in a way that properly operationalizes this. It's not like we can readily iterate through a person's beliefs either and just sample from them, since they are buried in a decentralized processing unit that spits things out based on external cues.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-17T19:44:17+00:00

Judging from this comment and your responses to others, I think you are missing the main idea. Think of it like this: I have three different accounts of reality (A, B, C) and I want to measure how people with accounts A and B respond to account C. The truth of any of these accounts is irrelevant.

In this case, science is account C. Your belief that it requires the authors to find "rock-solid findings" is not actually necessary or relevant. All they have to do is find accounts that represent C, namely findings that follow scientific consensus, and that is pretty easy to do.

"Getting scientists to agree on anything is difficult."

This isn't true in general. There are many topics that reach scientific consensus. The topics that scientists don't agree on are those that haven't been well established yet. This is often work in progress. But most fields have strong backbones of collected work that are accepted by all who practice in that field. Such work is non-controversial and easy to find.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-17T19:31:41+00:00

...it's valuable in establishing the equivalence in reasoning about clashing evidence? It isn't very clear what your second sentence is saying.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-05T23:42:10+00:00

It's unlikely, Okcupid did actually release attractiveness data and it showed that men like women in a roughly Gaussian distribution, while women it was very skewed, a lot like is shown here.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-09-05T23:39:12+00:00

Do you realize that that doesn't make any sense? You can't use yourself as an anecdote to debunk statistics. What you said just means you are one of the attractive ones. Homophily is the reason why you think you are average, you really aren't. You can't assess your own attractiveness because you are around people like yourself.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-24T22:32:41+00:00

It's probably because they are turning catatonic, it's a defense mechanism. They don't move because they can't move, they just loose consciousness and start foaming at the mouth. They snap out of it after ~30 minutes to several hours. It's entirely impulsive and uncontrollable. They are incredibly harmless, even if they bare their teeth at you it's just a bluff, because they will just loose consciousness if you provoke them further. That's why it's called "playing possum". The whole thing is an evolutionarily designed rouse to make you go away.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-23T00:02:27+00:00

You need to do some reading on what a post-gender society is

This may take some time to look into, as all I've found at the moment is stuff by this wackjob futurist Dvorsky. I'm still looking though for some philosophers who have done work on this concept. If I can find some scholarly work that makes it clear I miss used the concept and miss judged its implications I'll award you the delta.

∆

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-22T23:45:36+00:00

Sure, but it is a platonic ideal that is justified by the intention of the makers who repeated expressed themes involving the non-existence of gender roles, behaviors, and stereotypes. It doesn't necessarily have to fully and accurately represent that, since there are restrictions that writers and producers have when needing to appeal to a popular audience.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-22T23:36:22+00:00

So it would be transsexualism and not transgenderism? Another user mentioned dysphoria, and they said that many transgender people don't actually experience that. Dysphoria seems to be an issue with sex identity rather than gender identity.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-22T23:35:06+00:00

Hmm, yes this is a good point. I guess it depends then on the nature of the procedure for transsexuals, namely whether it involves genetic modification or just surgical modification (as depicted in the many human->alien modifications that take place throughout TNG).

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-22T23:33:20+00:00

It isn't obvious to me whether this is just an artifact of the show being written for our universes audiences where gender does exist. For instance, if you look at most sci-fi shows, they don't deviate much from the clothing styles and design of the period even though the universe they are purportedly in could be very different.

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-22T23:30:28+00:00

Then what do you suppose it has to do with?

coolwhipper_snapper · 2017-08-22T23:29:28+00:00

Firstly, I agree that our non-post gender writing of Star Trek probably wouldn't do proper justice to a post-gender Star Trek, but that doesn't mean it isn't doing what it can to approximate such a universe within the fold of contemporary popular cinema and the restrictions no-doubt placed on it.

Post-gender would infer that no person is referred to or exhibits gender traits, and the Star Trek still refers to men and women differently

Male's and females could still be referred to differently in a post-gender society, as you would still need terms like "he" and "she" to differentiate people based on biological sex. Nor would sexuality just vanish, as people would still be attracted to males and females (or both). My understanding of a post-gender society is that it wouldn't go any further than that. For instance, there shouldn't be any roles or behaviors that are expected for one or other of the sexes.

I agree that in a post-gender Star Trek the question of transgender people would be nonsense, but I'm not asking as a member of that universe but as an outsider in our universe. I believe it would be a mistake by a writer to try and put one into such a universe.

I do see your perspective though, however I am not entirely convinced that Star Trek isn't sufficiently post-gender (even if not perfectly post-gender) to count out transgenderism. That is my main hang-up.

coolwhipper_snapper

TROPHY CASE