I'm a Skeptic and a member of the Board of Consultants of Skeptics Canada. But it's nice to have confirmation ...
| You Are Very Skeptical |
 Your personal motto is: "Prove it." While some ideas, like life after death, may seem nice... You aren't going to believe them simply because it feels good. You let science and facts be your guide... Even if it means you don't share the beliefs of those around you. |
[Hat Tip: GrrlScientist]
7 comments :
Yeah, but ...
A consistent skeptic would be skeptical of skepticism of self-professed skeptics.
hehe
I'm skeptical as well, about the creative power of stochastic processes and natural selection.
Here is the source code for the search engine of my artificial-intelligence program. This is a small sampling of more than 65,000 lines of C and C++ code that make the program do what it does, and this doesn’t include many more lines of code that were required to generate, compress, and access the endgame databases.
You can download a free minimal version of the program at my website (the full version requires 12 gigabytes of disk space and is also free, but not from me).
Of course, this program is trivial child’s play compared to the program that runs even the simplest biological cell. Good luck convincing me that the cell arose by random processes and natural selection. I'm skeptical of this claim.
Have fun getting totally hammered by my artificial-intelligence creation (unless you perform a lobotomy on it, and I give the user that option).
Gil
I'm skeptical as well, about the creative power of stochastic processes and natural selection.
It's easy to be skeptical of that of which you're ignorant. "let science and facts be your guide ..." but you haven't Gil; you have ignored the overwhelming factual evidence of evolution, and have quite unskeptically made an unwarranted inference from the difficulty of writing a program to achieve a preplanned end, ignoring the scope and timescale of evolution and the lack of prespecification.
"Good luck convincing me that the cell arose by random processes and natural selection. I'm skeptical of this claim."
It's also difficult to convince a rock or a microcephalic of anything, but shear imperviousness to reason is not what skepticism is about. No one has any obligation of convincing you of anything, but you have an obligation to educate yourself about the topics on which you comment.
gil:
Ever read this article ?
that sander is an impostor, not me.
Dear Sander,
I am not only familiar with David Fogel and his AI work; I wrote a glowing review of his book at Amazon.
David is a brilliant AI researcher and a very nice and personable guy (and a very talented pianist, I might add). However, his software engineers implemented the tree-search engine, which is the hard part, and which is hopelessly probabilistically beyond the limits of genetic algorithms or other trial-and-error approaches. He used neural nets to devise and refine the evaluation function, which is amenable to some success by trial and error because of the nature of the alpha-beta tree-search algorithm.
David's program was intelligently designed to place provisional success by trial and error within the reach of stochastic processes. My program crushes his without breaking a sweat, because all aspects of it were intelligently designed, and nothing left to chance.
Gil
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