demagogue

Well, a "quick" clarification (sorry, I try!) ... I think you're interpreting my post the wrong-way-round. "Reason" and "economically rational behavior" is what we may see coming out, and it may be sensitive to such variables, but the system itself can't be these things per se because it's constructing them. I'll have to explain for that to make sense (I hope!). One way to think about my understanding of it is that what we think of as "reason" and "rational behavior" are actually special kinds of emotional states ... so when you say "with reason and unreason sometimes flowing into and informing one another", that's actually an insight into just the way I think about it too. The ground-level mechanism is an emotional one -- neither "reasonable" nor "unreasonable" per se; words that I tend to believe actually depend on the context of the situation; if it's a familiar game the system is playing, then the behavior will tend to be "rational", if it's very unfamiliar, then the behavior can be quite irrational. They use the term "cognitive frame" for a mechanism doing its thing on familiar turf (typical-apeman situations ... trying to win over a mate, running from a wolf), and "cognitive bias" when the very same mechanism does idiotic things in non-apeman-typical situations ... e.g., we have strong emotional urges to hold on to things we have in possession and discount things we don't have yet but could obtain with some work (the entitlement bias). In economic terms this can be irrational in, e.g., investment or credit situations when there are high opportunity costs that the agent isn't taking into account (we'd be much better off dropping our losing project -- investment, education, g/f, spouse, etc -- right away and moving our resources to something more win-able ASAP; the longer we wait the more we lose, but we are often stricken by the deepest emotional ties to such things) ... although you could imagine that on the East African tundra a million years ago by-and-large it would lead to pretty low-cost, efficient outcomes. Another way of explaining it: So the LIP doesn't abstractly inform us of the value of looking at X. We "feel" the irresistable urge at a deep, emotional level to do so. Even many "reflexes" have this aspect at some level. Or like a game (since so much of this is built on game theory), when we are making decisions, we do so like we are playing a game, and we are being pulled into the "flow" of it when we want to make the "right move". We don't play the rules like a cold equation ... we get "immersed" in the game, and the better immersed we are, the better decisions we make. To the extent we try to play by cold calculation, it rips us out of the game and our performance doesn't always benefit (it depends on the game). I guess this point on "it's an emotional state" should have been my second assumption/observation about structure. You've also rightly questioned how this "emotional state" wetware business on which "rational" behavior is constructed connects to culture, personality, and more "deliberative" decisionmaking where we are talking to ourselves and being committed to certain narratives of identity (being the kind of person we want to be). What I described above is more like the underlying structure of our "emotional state of decisionmaking", what you interpreted as I'll have to think about whether that's a good description. To me, it captures one idea that, at the very root of many important decisions, no matter how much you deliberate with yourself or try to justify your answer, it's a "gut feeling" choice at the end of the day ("optimization mode" is maybe a misleading term; maybe better is "decisional-emotional mode", optimization just describes its genesis and maybe 'primeval meaning' to us, the "primeval fear of loss" and "primeval hope for gain"). With such choices, you may think about it for a while, think of different considerations on different sides (each of which has an emotional impact, a pang of fear of real loss or a spark of excitement from the opportunity, etc), and in the end you take a deep breath and the overall emotional-mush hanging in your chest (the pangs and the sparks fighting for control), and the mush is trying to resolve itself (most of what I think "deliberation" is really doing) and you are finally left with this little half-resolved spark of hope that it might really work, I can really do this, and suddenly the spark "blooms" in your limbic system, and you say "so I'll do X! It feels right, even though I know Y (little pang of doubt comes back) but all things considered, there's Z to make it work (doubt re-quelched)". Most of the work here is being done on an emotional level. And sometimes we bury it with rationalizations that don't always capture the real pressures motivating us on that emotional level ("a person always has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.") because of other pressures (which I'll get into next). But even when a decision isn't very well explained by such "pangs and sparks" (and be honest, they often are), there is a clear moment a person has when they can feel they are pushing their instictive emotions to the side to make the decision cold, according to the narrative they've drawn out (or a similar case is unemotional, low-stakes, day-to-day decisions, which are often played out rote to a particular narrative, a "habit of obedience") ... although even these situations have deep emotional root. A businessman follows the rules of business "cold" not really to get the answer right per se, but because it's part of his ethos of being a "respectable" person, someone his father wouldn't be ashamed of, the kind of person he is committed to being on a deep, emotional level. I mean, it gets complicated from this point ... but I think you can see the direction of my thinking. I see your intuition and I think it's on to something that makes sense in the way I think about it, too. I don't trust economic models per se having purchase in explaining why we do what we do, since we aren't following models per se -- as far as we're concerned, we follow our gut, we don't have to reflect on what our gut is actually doing. But I do think that what our "gut" is really after very often has its roots in motivations we can't see but are trying to act in our best interest anyway, which brings the models in through the backdoor more often than we think. If I could sum it up, maybe: Whenever we're playing a "game" in life with real stakes involved, on an emotional level we play to win.

I think you guys are generally on the right track with what the main issues are. I didn't like the trend of some of Orb's previous posts, not because I disagreed -- I think he's generally right -- but because he's focused on the less interesting question IMO. The debate over whether behavior has a "spiritual" or "mechanistic" origin was over a century ago for anyone interested in the right answer. But the most important question, IMO, remains a live one: Does human "freedom" have real content, in the sense of real agency? Saying it's "mechanistic" to me isn't an answer at all. It's the question! We still don't know if our agency has real efficacy in the mechanism.*1 Well, anyway, I think the trend of this discussion has been on the right track. "Agency" seems to work when the whole brain system works like it's supposed to ... and we can see that when the system breaks down, so does its ability to have agency. So the question then is how do all the pieces fit together to make a system that works properly? The sorts of thought experiments you guys are asking are good ones, because they're trying to isolate, well, you need this piece, because if you take it out then the system wouldn't have agency for this reason. From my own studies, the field that's going to ultimately get closest to answering these sorts of questions IMO is called neuroeconomics, the combination of behavioral (evolutionary) economics and neurophysiology/cognitive science: the brain is first an optimization machine that tries to maximize the agent's utility at the least cost to it in an uncertain world full of potential gains and risks. And it's on top of that you add things like "culture" and "personality" that color individual agents, with their individual commitments to this and that. Since armchair science is what we seem to like around here, I'll pompously submit that there are three big pieces to making real agency, or "freedom" in humans (the first two also applying to animals). I think, Nyar, Ish, Max, oDD, Orb, all of the intuitions you guys just made can either find their way some place in this model, or this model is the response to them where I might disagree (e.g., to oDD's apparent suggestion that decisionmaking is never narrative-based, but only either reflexive or by "natural logical" (utility optimizing?), which doesn't mesh with some types of narrative- or identity-reinforcing behavior IMO, at least in the short-run -- it may in the long run and we'd both be right). Ok, here we go: (Assumption) First of all, I should mention that the background observation for these three things to make sense is that the brain is multi-modal in its decisionmaking.*2 There are different functional brain areas that are all working symotaneously with a measure of autonomy, in concert and doing a lot of crosstalk for sure, but making their own original decisions first that are then circled around the system so that other systems can modify it, veto it, trump it with their own (e.g., emergency) strategy, etc. (Minsky's Society of Mind sums it up). (1) The bedrock mechanism is that whatever brain area is active generally wants to find a (Nash) equilibrium strategy to whatever "game" it finds itself playing. (A Nash equilibrium strategy is one that once it is arrived at, if the agent were to do a single thing differently it could only lose utility over time.) A meme is just the symptom of an equilbrium being reached, but it isn't the mechanism really doing the work itself. People don't follow what other people are doing for its own sake, usually, but because to do so usually significantly lowers the cost of transactions. (2) The second key feature is that what counts as "utility" and what "games" are even available is defined by natural selection -- feeding, fighting, fucking, fleeing -- the things that helped the system perpetuate itself in the past which naturally selected the systems' sensitivity to just those things. So these two pieces help explain how the system got designed the way it is, and you could go system by system that has to do with behavior -- vision; hearing; the limbic system and emotions of love, fear, hate; hunger; etc... -- and the parts start to fit together according to these two pieces. That describes how the "decisionmaking" system is put together.*3 (3) The third piece I'd say is (semantic) "adaptability" to environment. A person is sometimes put in novel games the wetware hasn't been rigged to play. This is where culture, language, and frontbrain logic processesing (along with the elusive self-narrative I mentioned in footnote 2) get a lot more involved ... because the rules for getting payoffs are different; the agent has to piece together new rules based on what value even means in the new game. I'll have to save it for another post, though. End of post. --------------------------------------------- ...................

I'm guessing this: http://holophonichaircut.ytmnd.com/ Holophonic is a carefully mastered sound file that sounds 3 dimensional when you listen to it on headphones. Somebody just did it for a haircut. There was a discussion about it at TTLG on that matchbox holophonic file, so that was the link. To me, it sounds a little like what you'd call Max Headroom getting for his hair-style, though.

Actually it's floccinaucinihilipilification, starts with an f. There was a Geico (car insurance) commercial that used this word recently, in something like a mock spelling bee. And ever since that commercial, people have been throwing this word around. I actually looked up the entymology for it because when you see a word like that, you want to know where it comes from. First, you have to know that the word was coined as a joke. It's like 4 separate Latin words strung together that each mean "utterly worthless" in their own colorful way (it's like worthless-useless-nothingness-an abomination), in the form "to make as..." or yeah, probably better: "to categorize as..." or "to deem as...". Apparently, there was some literature club at Oxford in the 1880s that coined it as a joke for their literary journal when they really wanted to pompously insult somebody's work. It was like the motto for the journal, what they liked to do. (Their version had hyphens between each Latin word, as well ... it was more like a phrase than a single word per se.) To me, the story sounds like an example of about the most pretentious a group of humans can possibly get, the kind of prank Frasier Craine might have pulled.

Anyway, Unstoppable's link is great storytelling. I liked it. My friend told me one story, so I'll share it. So she was visiting Ukraine (and she speaks Russian -- maybe Ukranian too? however the story works, I'll pretend it was Russian but it might have been Ukrainian -- in any event she obviously doesn't get to use her foreign language skills much in the US) and going to a market in a village with some local people (with whom she was staying). They saw a crate of apples that were unusually big and my friend picked one up. And one of the old ladies with her looked at it, her eyes getting wide, and said with a really droll voice in Russian: "What the hell are those? Chernobyl apples!? Put that down." And my friend found it really funny ... first because she wasn't expecting it from this kind of lady ... but also (she told me) because she understood just enough Russian to actually understand the lady on her own terms, not thinking about it in English (the point being, she told me, it's sort of cool when you can understand a joke in a foreign language, on its own terms, not translated... and how it sort of summed up people's droll thinking.) Of course reading that Elena site, it sounds like the lady wasn't entirely joking.

To me they just make for interesting stories, sort of like reading novels. I read some equation and what it's supposed to mean, try to do some of the math, smile at how clever it seems to be, and then carry on with the plot. I don't seem any more anxious to memorize or "learn" it than I would Hemingway. But I like pretending I know what they're talking about and that the plot really means something deep down.

I just have an interested layman's understanding of this stuff. So is quintessence an alternative to Einstein's cosmological constant that apparently has had some experimental confirmation, although it's small. Also, I couldn't imagine even beginning to understand any of that without having tried to go through these two books (or ones like them) first: Novaes, Standard Model Introduction Griffiths D. Introduction to elementary particles I've found them online, but not sure if it's kosher to post that here so I'll leave it at that.

Do you mean "target audience"? (The target Thief player wouldn't care about such subtleties). Or do you mean the computers at the time just weren't good at making so many checks in real time?

Well, to be fair, in 999 out of 1000 cases, the part of your brain that's answering the question has some real access to the "conscious choice" part of the brain that made the decision, so knows a lot about what's going on. So it's not so bad to think of it as one system working together, and the "convincing itself it made a real decision" is about on the same level as a govt spokesperson or company PR person annoucning the decision of the President/CEO on behalf of the country/company. We still blame the president/CEO for a bad decision, even if it's the PR guy that announced it ... because the organization is set up that way. The brain is in the same bag, IMO ... it's organized to work together so it's ok to hold it responsible for things. As long as people remember that it's an "organization" that has to work together, but sometimes doesn't. The weirdo cases like this IMO just go to show that the part making the decision (IMO "freely" in the sense it's really making a decision, based on whatever reasons are important to it at the time) and the part explaining why "it" made the decision are different parts of the brain and while they often work very well together, they don't always ... and people can't explain their own decision-making very well. It doesn't mean that some part of them really didn't make a decision (IMO), it just means they aren't very good at understanding their own thinking. But we can still hold them responsible for those decisions, just like we hold a President responsible even if the PR guy inadvertantly messes up (or more likely, intentionally colors to save face or whatever; think Freud) explaining the "real" reasons for the decision. I just want to be sure that people can still be held responsible for things, even admitting the basic jist of your point. People can be said to act "freely" and be "responsible" for their decisions when the system works properly on a day-to-day basis (you can use the word "illusion", but I prefer to think of it as "a system that practically works when it's operating properly"; semantics, maybe, but at the end of the day it "works") ... and when it doesn't, then we lock them up in psychiatric wards, because then it's something like scitzophrenia where one part of the brain thinks of other parts as literally foreign, hostile voices.

It definately tweaks the cost/benefit thinking a player does when deciding how to approach a problem. If you punish a player too much for using tools, then they're just going to stop use those tools much. And maybe that's ok for some tools, but it's a trickier question for the basic ones. I think it's ok for obvious things, like a rope arrow rope hanging from a rafter, or *hearing* a broadhead hit the wall, but the idea that a guard would go on alert for an arrow that was dropped over an hour in the past, and the thief returns to the room to find it in an uproar ... well, just be sure you know what you're getting into before you do something like that, and have play tested it to see if it works or not. My thinking is, aside from changing his environment, there aren't many opportunities for the player to leave his own mark that he was in a place; so mostly a player is thinking about how to leave a place just as he left it. And that seems ok; sort of encourages ghosting. But the more chances he has to leave something behind that (1) he pretty much can't help leaving behind to do his job and (2) there's no easy way to fix (unlike being careful not to change the enviornment) -- e.g., arrows, footprints, a smell -- then it just becomes more and more tedious to deal with just to do the most basic things. Guards seeing misfired arrows also sucks because, their very nature, they end up far away from the player (this is not counting rope arrows or noise arrows); so now he has to stop everything and go to an out-of-the way part of the map just to handle a tedious job. My intuition is leaning against it as a general matter. But anyway, the answer is really in playtesting it and seeing if gameplay is balanced properly and feels better with or without it.

For the record, there actually is a theory of cosmological natural selection where evolutionary processes determine basic properties of the universe, including whether and how stars and planets form, actually the main point of the theory. Basically, the selection mechanism is daughter systems (universes) being created through black hole singularities bouncing into new systems in their own right, but tweaking the basic universal constants. So new systems (or rather, the constants of those systems, like the DNA of a universe) creating more blackholes are going to be selected over time. Blackholes need stars to form. So those systems with universal constants condusive to the creation of matter and stars (and the possibility of life coattailing) are going to be more likely to appear than not over time. If the constants can't create matter as we know it; then they can't create stars; then those constants are selected against because no new blackholes form and the line ends there. It doesn't seem very probable to me, but at least it's a naturalist hypothesis. It's not the stupidist thing once you're already on board with blackholes actually existing and creating singularities and the Big Bang/inflationary theory that our universe comes from a singularity, and some of the math of general relativity which suggests that blackholes really do bounce into new big bangs through 4D tubes (wormholes). And it answers the anthropic principle (and the standard model's arbitrariness problem) in a more scientific way than any other running theory out there. There's just no way to theorize/test it until at the very least they get a working theory for quantum gravity to understand what's really going on inside blackholes ... until then it's just speculation. It's intereting to think about, though.

I'm just happy to see that Kirk Cameron hasn't ruined his career. Man, I loved that guy on Growing Pains.

It was (and still is for very severe cases) used for for severe epilectics, so if they get a seizure it can only spread to half the brain and doesn't spread to the whole brain, meaning the whole thing doesn't shut down. It's not like a lobotomy; no functional area is being taken out ... so a patient or anybody else really can't even tell it's been cut in day-to-day situations (although granted the quirky experiences would start to add up over time). The corpus collosum is a narrow band of wiring that carries relatively little information across hemispheres, most of it which is redundant anyway because most sensory information is spread to both hemispheres at the same time, and internal "brain talk" is pretty much kept in the same hemisphere to do its work. It just smooths out the pretty rare situation (in nature) when one side needs something only the other side has, like if a flash of light only hits one side of the retna (so only goes to one hemisphere, rather than the usual both). The whole point of the study is that because the two hemispheres do so much work independently, and do it so well, there's really not much need for them to be physically connected to do their thing, anyway. If you didn't do these kinds of studies, nobody would even know it's been cut; well, they'd notice weird things happening, but it wouldn't be obvious. What was most surprising was how much *didn't* change by cutting it ... it's like having two brains is basically the norm. And actually, a smaller pecent of the population is even born without a corpus collosum ... and they can go their whole life without them or anybody else ever noticing until its discovered after their death! That doesn't mean I'm going to be jumping to have mine cut, though! First of all, it's too expensive to do for a whim. Sperry the inventor? I don't know. What did he invent?

Sperry the neurologist? He did the famous split-brain studies (people who had their corpus collosum severed, cutting the left hemisphere from the right). I loved researching that in college. You'd show people like a picture or command to the right hemisphere, then they'd be instructed to follow it, e.g.,: "laugh", the person laughs. Then you ask the person why they laughed (effectively asking their left hemisphere; language is dominated by the left side). Of course they (or their left side) seriously has no idea. But they would make up a story and really believe it, "Oh, you guys are just hilarious." And then they'd try to defend the story. It's really sort of chilling if you think about it.

Sounds like something an author would want to do custom for his/her own FM, anyway. I recall one AI in Emilie Victor kept squirming at his post, and finally he would suddenly bolt for the bathroom yelling and close the door, sit on the toilet and do his thing. After a while he would come out swaggering back to his post, a new man. Until about 5 minutes later when he'd start squirming again. If it's possible in dromed to do this kind of stuff, I can only imagine it's all the easier in D3. I'm sure creative builders will be able to do all the sorts of things you were talking about.

Well, it's the Beave, and I guess the others are Wally and the other guy. Or is this just a funny pic thread?

Slow poison. It's like the way Deus Ex handled poison darts. Unlike gas arrows, which would KO an AI right off (so if he's behind other AI they'll never be the wiser), with a posion arrow the AI would be able to run a little to get the attention of nearby AI, and even fight before he goes down. It's a nice compromise arrow, not as powerful as gas arrows, but it lets you take out at least one AI from a distance before you go in, but at a price. I think it's an idea with some good potential.

Ubercool doesn't even begin to describe how that looks. Very impressive.

Jeez, you people and your taking things to their logical conclusions. Orb and Odd, both of your positions smell of dogmatism. There are situations when the government has a reasonable interest in watching over, or at least better informing, the choices of people so they don't make stupid, rash decisions they'll inevitably regret later on; and situations when it should just keep its hands off and let people have what they want, even to their own detriment. There may be problems with who draws the line between the two -- political representatives (possibly too friendly with the industry they want to regulate), technocrat scientists (possibly too focused on the technical trees to see the real-world forest), activist consumer groups (possibly too anal for their own good) ... but those are problems to handle, rather than just throwing out the whole idea that there really is a line. And by the way, smoking and drugs aren't the great test-cases for this idea. Both have their makers actively enhancing their addictive powers to manipulate the self-control abilities of users, which manipulations (and the addictive effects) are not common knowledge to those "choosing" to get started, not knowing entirely what they are choosing. Prostitution and gambling aren't much better (are the girls *really* choosing this freely? should casinos really allow local people to cash their pay-checks in for chips?). I might be more comfortable with these if I were convinced people really understood what they were doing (in the long run) before they did it, and even better if there were a good way to check it (it's not good punishing self-controlled people because of a few uncontrollable addicts need special attention.) On the other hand, I think it's ok to allow people to eat fatty junk food, but it depresses me to see how porky the US has become because people apparently can't even control stuffing their faces with food.

Either that or he was mistaking Komag for the Keeper of Metal and Quartz.

oDDity, nobody has to justify drinking tea when they're European. Although I don't think it's as healthy as they let on, no one can deny it's relaxing. When I was growing up, all tea was iced (and Lipton), and all coffee hot (and black/American). It's a sign of how much the world has "progressed" since then that, after spending significant time living in Japan, Europe, and NYC, all tea is now hot (and everything from Earl Grey to Oolong), and coffee is iced more often than not (and either something with an Italian name or from some third world country). Globalization has turned the world upside down, I guess.

You'll be interested to know (from what I've read, anyway) that diet drinks, non-brews, etc, are actually engineered to taste somewhat bad/watery ... something to do with marketing and dieter's/non-drinker's guilt-psychology. I drink pretty rarely and in moderation. But I enjoy it when I do. I feel like I can really trust a person when they'll go drinking with me ... It tells me they aren't afraid something will slip out about their feelings that they are trying to hide. (And I can tell they have self-control when they know not to go overboard.) Also, I worked for a vineyard for a winery (actually on a kibbutz commune; that ought to make Maximius happy) and my father has recently obtained a wine vineyard ... so of course we have to like wine. I've always liked when a particular drink has a history in a region, like wine or microbrew beers, so there's more to it than "just a buzz". It's a kind of connection to the place that goes back generations, that is sorely lacking in most aspects of life these days.

Happy Birthday, K.O.M.A.G.

(Joke) Yes, he's found the one way to make Deadly Shadows sound even more gay ... put it in French. (/joke) Seriously, though, I always thought it sounded pretty cool, and I love the avatar.

yeah, skybox animated art can look seriously cool. I'd love to see some steampunk elements for some TDM skyboxes ... trailing smoke, maybe a massive dirigible floating by in the distance. Edit: No kidding. Happy Birthday, Komag! Have a good one.