Why is it so difficult for nerds to relate to most people?
Just recently, some seriously misguided EU advertising fellows attempted to lure girls into science, and in the eyes of many (especially female) scientists, they failed spectacularly.
Look at one of the answers:
In the eyes of the response vid, being successful in science is perhaps not negatively correlated with cuteness, but definitely correlated with nerdyness. The science girl is portrayed as a social outcast. What is this thing about nerds?
The dear, famous, Yoda like and sadly late Joseph Weizenbaum (the very guy we have to thank for the mother of all chat bots: Eliza) spent quite a bit of his time complaining about humanities overreaching optimism when it comes to the realization of Artificial Intelligence (see his: "Computer Power and Human Reason", for instance).
The charming, but totally misguided Weizenbaum documentary "Plug and Pray" cherishes that same popular thesis. It is hard to see how somebody could see any justification for it, though. Contemporary AI research is a very humble affair, occupied with obscure exercises in applied mathematics, boring standardization of protocol languages or tinkering with soccer playing or car driving robots. Any vision for generally intelligent artificial minds plays an extremely marginal role at best. At the same time, AI research has always been extremely productive: most of the stuff in computer science, from speech recognition to computer vision, from planning to data base systems, from data compression to data mining, has been concocted in some AI lab or other.
So what's the reason for the popular hostility towards Artificial Intelligence? Hmm, hmm: these guys are saying that the mind is a computer!
Why is that such a blasphemy?
Der WDR schreibt grade, wie die Enkelin Karl Valentins die Blogger, die ihn zitieren, mit Abmahnungen überzieht. Auch vor diesem Hintergrund lohnt es sich, über den Schutzfristenunsinn nachzudenken.
Der ganz überwiegende Anteil aller Schriftwerke generiert nur im Zeitraum direkt nach der Veröffentlichung Einnahmen und ist danach ökonomisch für den Autor irrelevant.
Hier behauptet Andreas Moser, dass man die Verkürzung von Schutzfristen auf literarische Werke etc., nicht fordern darf, ohne gleichzeitig eine Abschaffung des Erbrechts insgesamt zu verlangen. Das leuchtet mir nicht ein.
soeben habe ich Ihr Positionspapier erhalten und gelesen. Als Wissenschaftler, Autor und Leser bin ich empört über Ihren Widerstand gegen jegliche Verkürzung der Schutzfristen, insbesondere gegen die freche Behauptung, sie hätte keinerlei Vorteil für die Allgemeinheit.
If there is one highly underrated concept in philosophy today, it is computation. Why is it so important? Because computationalism is the new mechanism. For millennia, philosophers have struggled when they wanted to express or doubt that the universe can be explained in a mechanical way, because it is so difficult to explain what a machine is, and what it is not. The term computation does just this: it defines exactly what machines can do, and what not. If the universe/the mind/the brain/bunnies/God is explicable in a mechanical way, then it is a computer, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, most people outside of programming and computer science don't know exactly what computation means. Many may have heard of Turing Machines, but these things tend to do more harm than good, because they leave strong intuitions of moving wheels and tapes, instead of what it really does: embodying the nature of computation.
(A Turing Machine, doing more harm than good. But very cool, nonetheless!)
The Lambda Calculus does exactly the same thing, but without wheels to cloud your vision. It might look frighteningly mathematical from a distance (it has a greek letter in it, after all!), so nobody outside of academic computer science tends to look at it, but it is unbelievably easy to understand. And if you understood it, you might end up with a much better intuition of computation.
Das Handelsblatt bringt es an den Tag: das Geistesleben in Deutschland ist am Boden. Was mehr als hundert Vertreter aus Kunst, Medien, Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft unter der Überschrift "Mein Kopf gehört mir" zum Thema "Urheberrecht" an wildgewordenen Metaphern und wirren Stilblüten zusammenschwurbeln, spottet jeder Beschreibung. Vielleicht liegt das daran, dass "Kreativität dort entsteht, wo der Verstand aufhört, das Denken zu behindern" (Stephan A. Jansen). Oder auch für unsere "Kreativen" gilt: In ihrer Naivität bedenken sie nicht, dass sie einfach nur die gezielt gestreuten Parolen einer Lobby nachplappern. (Antje Langer) Liebe Vertreter, bitte fordert Eure Köpfe schnell wieder zurück, und guckt, ob ihr noch was Verwertbares darin findet!
