[ExI] Translation AI (was dying?)

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Fri May 19 15:12:13 UTC 2017


Adrian wrote:  Who says competition is necessary?  Merge with: let our PCs
handle the
things they are good at while our brains (or emulated versions
thereof) handle the things we are good at, and improve both sides.
-
​--------------​
(Spike - you might want to kick in some things you have learned by
homeschooling your son)
(out of all the hundreds of scifi books I've read I don't know how I missed
radiotelepathy)

I fully agree.  But a lot of people seem to be so impatient to hook
themselves up to PCs and whatnot to improve their abilities, then get
implants, etc.  What for?

Intro courses are for learning basic terminology, facts, and theories.
Some rote memory testing is inevitable, but I say leave that behind as fast
as possible and get to the 'learning to learn' that you mentioned.  Isaac
Asimov knew more things about more things than anyone, some have argued.
Does that make him smart?  It's not what you know, it's what you do with
it.  As far as I know he contributed nothing to science except publicizing
it and writing books.  No discoveries of which I am aware.

People with advanced knowledge look things up in books and so on when they
need to know things.  The trick is that they know what to do with that
knowledge (and where to get it, and how to evaluate it, and how to
synthesize it with what they already know, etc.) and others don't.  The
best scientists aren't necessarily good quiz show contestants.  People with
great rote memories are.

As far as I am concerned, learning to learn is the most important outcome
of a good education.  Then they can learn anything they want to and don't
need teachers anymore.

Unfortunately, a good bit of what is taught in college doesn't endow one
with a great ability to learn.  Learning one thing may not transfer at all
to other areas.  It may even hinder.  I am slightly aware of some
controversy in math education about what to teach first, and some say it
isn't arithmetic.

Bottom line:  we need to know a lot more about learning to learn, perhaps
by studying people who have learned independently.  We are far from knowing
just how to get people to that point.  We throw a lot of very disparate
things at students in college - English, philosophy, chemistry, music,
calculus - and don't really know if that is a good thing.  Maybe some don't
want to be well-rounded.  They want to be obsessed by one thing.  For
those, dropping out may be the best thing they ever did.

The best teacher is the best student.

bill w

On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 12:11 AM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 7:21 AM, William Flynn Wallace
> <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So maybe it's not a very long hop to attaching/implanting/messing with
> the
> > genes, organic radios to/in our brains.  That would give us two parts of
> the
> > electromagnetic spectrum (light of course).  Couple that with an organic
> > radio transmitter and you have unbelievable numbers of applications.
> Plus,
> > you won't have to worry about the interface between organic/neurons/glial
> > cells, and electronics.  bill w
>
> Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy.  It's a long hop to
> doing it via DNA.
>
> That said, extra-bandwidth perception has been contemplated in sci-fi
> for a long tie.
>
> Directly linking brains by radio has been considered so often it even
> has a name: "radiotelepathy".  It was a minor plot element in a RPG I
> ran not too many years ago.
>
> > The plasticity would be great and I am not opposed to faster neurons, but
> > have this question:  how many great ideas, or even very good ones, sprang
> > into our heads like the benzene ring?  I get the idea that great
> discoveries
> > took lots of time, years even, to ferment and find final form, which
> morphed
> > into variations, applications, etc.  I am not so sure that more speed
> would
> > be an advantage in the creative part - maybe in the rote memory part.
> >
> > So I am not sure that faster would be better.  We'll never compete with
> PCs.
>
> Who says competition is necessary?  Merge with: let our PCs handle the
> things they are good at while our brains (or emulated versions
> thereof) handle the things we are good at, and improve both sides.
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