Global Warming: Round 2
It seems that as time goes on, more and more people are believing Al Gore's rendition of global warming. I believe there is a lot of psychology involved in this phenomenon. I say psychology because people's belief aren't grounded on reading actual scientific reports or conducting their own analysis, but on their perception of the people dishing out the information. We know not to trust studies sponsored by the tobacco company on the effects of smoking to lung cancer. We know that we should listen to our doctor when they tell us to eat a healthy diet and exercise. Do we feel the same way when we hear on the news "Researchers discovered..." or "Scientists found ..." on the news? Often times the news media will tell us which scientists are making the claim and how they came about doing it, but would you still believe the report if they didn't?

I'd like to point out the irony of skepticism. When we first heard about global warming we probably had some reservations, but eventually we accepted it because that's what mainstream media has accepted and surely, if most people accept it, then it must be true, right? We didn't really research the data that was out there, we demanded that news media digest it for us and provide us the Cliff's notes. Then when the skeptics voiced their concerns we branded them as heretics. "How dare they challenge mainstream perception!", "The opponents are just spokespersons of big oil". We were immediately skeptical of the skeptics, but we lost all skepticism of the topic at hand.

This brings me to the next point. If only Galileo was here. Galileo was an astronomer in the 1600's who was branded a heretic by the Church because he was a proponent of a solar system where the earth revolves around the sun instead of the sun going around the earth. The church couldn't challenge his theories with science so they would just say that his ideas were absurd and heretical. When people cannot challenge something logically or scientifically, they resort to name calling and non-scientific labellings like "that's stupid" or "only idiot's would believe..." without backing up their argument with any facts. The declaration of stupidity alone seems sufficient for the end of debate. I'm sure all of us are guilty of this phenomena. Haven't you called someone's idea "stupid" and marveled at how they could still keep talking about their idea? You would think to yourself "Why would they keep talking? I told him/her it was a stupid idea to begin with!". We thought the stupidity was so obvious that we did not have to justify that the idea was stupid. This is because we all have an intuitive sense for what is stupid, but our intuition is not always grounded in logical reasoning. Sometimes our intuition comes from what others tell us, like "the 5 second rule" where its okay to eat something that has fallen on the ground for less than 5 seconds. If you're a fan of Mythbusters, you'll know that the number of seconds something is left on the ground has almost no correlation to how many germs it picks up. So if you manage to rescue absorbent $100/lb black truffle mushrooms that fell onto the counter covered with salmonella infested chicken blood within a second, don't let your friends tell you you're stupid for throwing the truffles out. They would be hard pressed to come up with support for their case other than the "5 second rule". This leads me to the point that when people make unsupported claims that something is absurd or stupid, its because they don't really have anything to support their case.

What's my point?
1. Commonly accepted does not mean true.
2. If you have skeptics, be skeptical of what you are supporting. You can only make your case stronger by alleviating their concerns rather than shedding even more skepticism on the skeptics.
3. Challenge those who call you names to support their arguments and avoid the temptation to become a name caller by always supporting your own claims.

We can only progress the discussion on global warming once we can get past the psychology and get to the science of it.

Why Prof. John Searle is Wrong!
In Philosophy we talk about a lot of things like Do we exist? or How do we know that we're alive? At one point, Philosophy and Computer Science met and opened up a whole can of worms. People started asking questions like What is thinking?, Could we tell if our brains really are stuck in a Matrix like in the movie?, and Are we biological machines? The topic that most interested me was Can Machines Ever Think?

The Turing Test
We can't talk about thinking machines without first talking about Alan Turing. Alan Turing was British mathematician often cited as the Father of Computer Science. In fact, the computers we use today are called Turing Machines in computer science lingo. Turing also thought about whether machines would ever think, but before he could do that, he had to answer the question of How can we tell that a machine is thinking? To answer this question, Turing devised a test. Suppose that you had two rooms that you could not look into. In one room there was a person and in another room there was a machine that would try to answer questions like a human would. Then, without know who/what was in each room, another person (the tester) would write some questions on a piece of paper and slide it underneath each door, and whoever/whatever was in the room would try to answer the question in such a way as to seem as human as possible by writing the response on another piece of paper and sliding it back under the door. If the tester was unable to determine which room contained the machine after several rounds of questions then the machine passes the Turing Test and can be deemed intelligent by Turing's standards.

The Chinese Room Argument
John Searle is a Philosophy professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley who came up with a mental experiment to show that even if you could make a program that would pass the Turing Test, it still couldn't be intelligent because the program is mindlessly following instructions. Searle says that the program would lack intentionality and cognitive states which he believes are requirements to demonstrating intelligence. Here is the original text The argument asks you to pretend that there is a non-Chinese speaker in a closed room. Someone can write a Chinese question, slip it under the door and the guy inside will lookup a bunch of rule books on how to process these symbols into Chinese answers and push them back out under the door.
You can read it yourself, but the main point of the argument is suppose the guy in the room becomes so efficient at processing those rules and producing Chinese answers that to people outside the room, he would appear to be a Chinese speaking person. The Chinese room would then pass the Turing Test, but since the person doesn't understand Chinese and rules by themselves cannot think, we must conclude that Strong AI (or machines that can think at the level that we do) cannot exist.

This, however, is a false conclusion. Whether or not the man inside the room understands Chinese has no bearing on whether the program executed by the man can understand Chinese.

Let me elaborate with a more simple example. Hopefully you still know how to do long multiplication. If you remember, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't remember, you stack the two numbers that you want to multiply on top of one another, then you take the right most digit of the bottom number and multiply that with all the digits of the top number whilst doing the appropriate carry over. This partial product is written below the numbers to be multiplied. Once you're done with the bottom right most digit, you repeat the process with the digit next to it, but write down the partial product offset one digit to the left of the previous partial product. Then when all thats done, you add up all the partial products assuming you consider all the offset digits in the partial products are zero. This sum is the product of the two original numbers... whew!!!

Okay, now you know how to do long multiplication, but do you understand long multiplication? Do you know what the partial products are for or why you got to offset them. Do you know why you have to carry over when multiplying by a single digit? If you can't answer these questions, then you don't understand long multiplication, you only know how to follow the instructions. What if you got really good at following those instructions and were able to do long multiplication in your head, would you be any better at understanding long multiplication? No.

Now here's the pseudo-paradox that Searle wants to convince you of. Let me apply Searle's argument to long multiplication: Suppose you could exhibit the same behavior of someone who understands long multiplication by simply showing that you can compute the answer, but although, you appear to understand long mulitplication, you don't actually understand it, therefore the long multiplication process can never understand long multiplication.

Unfortunately, we know that people are able to do long multiplication without understanding it so this cannot be a paradox. If this is not a paradox, we must conclude that the process does understand long multiplication. Thus, Searle's argument proves nothing.

You're probably saying "Huh? That doesn't make sense" right about now, right? Let me explain how I can compare long multiplication to real human thought.

Cult of the Elitist
The other night when I was watching the Colbert Report, he had on the author of the book Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture, Andrew Keen. Usually I like the authors that come on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report but this time I couldn't help getting exceptionally ticked off about this author.
Keen theorizes that because the Internet allows anyone to produce content and anyone to access that content for free, real art is being trivialized. Real artists cant make money so they get wiped out. Objective internet journalism is thrown out the door because of lying, cherry picking facts, and corporate sponsored bloggers. Additionally, pirating over the internet is preventing traditional content creators from making money.
Despite the flaws in his argument, what really annoyed me was that Keen also believes that we need well-educated people to provide us with the content with which to form our culture. Us pig farmers shouldn't be allowed to define our culture. Does Keen suppose that there's a committee out there carefully mitigating the deluge of media that gets into our heads so that minds don't implode and we all de-evolve into a bunch of monkeys, and that the internet is somehow circumventing this process?
Since the beginning of culture, culture has always and will always be built upon the democratization of ideas. Video killed the radio star, not because people were making videos, but because the people were willing to watch it en masse. Thus, the age of video was born. Did our culture die with MTV and America's Funniest Home Video? Some would say yes, but if that were true the internet wouldn't be able to kill a dead culture now, right? Did the automobile kill our horse-drawn carriage culture? Yes, but it didn't destroy our culture. Our culture has always evolved to accommodate the technologies that we embrace. Even today [despite its environmental effects] the American car culture has become one of the defining aspects of life in the US.
To further prove my point, that culture is essentially the democratization of ideas, lets examine the only times when a culture has successfully been killed. Take for example the ancient Mayans and the Incans. Their cultures were not destroyed until the Spanish annihilated the people's of those cultures. When a society is decimated like various the Native American tribes, the ones that are still alive keep their culture going regardless of their social status or education. If they all start running Indian casinos, then casinos will become part of their culture, even at the dismay of their ancestors nonetheless.
Perhaps Keen isn't really saying that the internet is killing our culture. Maybe he's saying that it's killing traditional media. Of course, how are you gonna sell a book entitled How the Internet Killed Traditional Media? Everybody already knows how. No... you'd have to cast a wider net to make book more evocative so somebody will buy it. So let's say that the internet is killing culture, but really write a book about the internet killing traditional media.

BTW, you can buy Keen's book on the culture killing internet from his own very webpage here:
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/10/my_book_now_not.html


See the Colbert Report interview below: