“ideas”
61 posts under this tag.
We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.
With surely hordes of brilliant interaction designers being paid top dog to scour Google’s interface beyond dizziness, it’s truly hard to point something in it that could be outright, unambiguously improved. And it’s a good thing they put so much effort in it—Google has such scale that even the tiniest improvement could, on aggregate, save millions of man hours. (A recent story made the point dramatically by calculating that if Google used a black background it would save some 750 megawatt-hours per year.)
With this frame of mind, it surprised me today to find out what I believe is a clear improvement—a tiny, puny, mini one, but still. You see, when you quote a phrase in Google (and in most any other search engine) you specify that you want results with only that exact phrase. This can easily be too stringent and so Google helpfully suggests you to remove the quotes whenever you get very few (or no) results. The problem is it only suggests with plain text…
...when it could easily suggest with hypertext (linking, of course, to the unquoted search; similar to the way spelling suggestions are linked to the search for the correct spelling).
I wish some Googler sees this…
Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligenceWP:
a native speaker of language X engages in conversation with two other parties, one a native speaker of language X and the other a student of language X as a foreign language; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then (and only then) can the student be said to speak language X.
The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.
It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.
The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?
You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)
Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.
Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.
But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.
Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translationELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue. (Samuel ButlerWP)
(What he actually wrote, in The Note-books of Samuel Butler: Part II - Elementary Morality, is “Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.” but it has been passed along in the shorter folk version above, which, I think, is as elegant a thought as a sentence can fit.)
Techguru Esther DysonWP, EDGE (who, I just learned, is Freeman DysonWP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
Lo! I am weary of my wisdom,
like the bee that hath gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra EEM
As far as blog-intros go, Rondam Ramblings’s is one of my favorites—both because I happen to agree with much of it (and thus, of course, think highly of such a sound writer) and because it honors the blog’s name from digressive paragraph 1. Here four clips:
From the better late than never department…
I have finally gotten around to creating a blog. Where to begin? I bounce back and forth between feeling like I have so much to say, and feeling like everything worth saying has been said a million times already.
The central tenet of science in which I choose to place my faith is that experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth. Any idea that is not consistent with experimental evidence must be wrong.
There are two important limitations to science: it doesn’t tell us which ideas are right, only which ones are wrong. Therefore all knowledge is tentative, all ideas subject to being overturned at any time by new experimental evidence. And it is limited in scope. It applies only to ideas that are testable by experiment. So it can provide no guidance on the question of, say, whether modern art is or isn’t art..
There is a third problem, which is that many different ideas are consistent with our current suite of experimental data. To choose among them I choose to believe in Occam’s razor: all else being equal, a simple idea is more likely to be true than a complicated one. This principle is strictly subservient to the first principle. If experiment rules out all the simple ideas, then the remaining complicated idea must be true. But if experiment is silent, then simpler ideas are preferable to complicated ones.
It is actually very easy to “do experiments” that validate the scientific worldview because we are absolutely surrounded by technology. In fact, it is barely possible to exist in this world without doing so dozens of times a day. Every time we turn on a light switch or start a car or use a computer we personally experience the validity of a huge number of scientific claims. No technology has ever been created by prayer.
Very few people really take seriously the idea that morals come from God. Many people think they take it seriously, but I think they are lying to themselves. To see this, ask yourself: if God said that raping children was OK, would that make it OK? Only the most radical fundamentalist would answer yes. Most people get quite upset if you actually ask them this question because it forces to confront the cognitive dissonance between what they think they believe—that morals come from God—and what they actually believe—that they “just know” what is right and wrong, like that raping children is wrong, even if God says otherwise.
Tiempo de lluvias. Estas en tu camioneta, aburrido, esperando que toque verde, cuando un hombre en un overol rojo brillante con el logo de MerkabastosELZR y una clara leyenda de “servicio de cortesia” se acerca: “Buenas tardes, me permitiria limpiarle su parabrisas? Cortesia de Merkabastos.” Asientes sorprendido y el hombre sonrie, planta enfrente de tu camioneta un tripie que no habias percatado y que sostiene un letrero mediano anunciando que esta noche es la venta nocturna de Merkabastos, con papas y nabos a mitad de precio—y procede a limpiar tu parabrisas religiosamente. El vidrio queda impecable, tu apurado procuras unas monedas y se las ofreces al hombre pero este sonrie: “Gracias, pero este servicio es cortesia de Merkabastos. Que pase usted una buena tarde” te responde—y se marcha.
Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?
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