About Me

Name: Jon
Biography
Loading...

Create Your Own Blog Find Other Townhall Blogs

Comments

  • Nice...
    Analogies and Politics
    Intelligencer

Archives

Search

Stimulus and NewSpace

Posted by Jon on Saturday, February 14, 2009 4:31:42 PM
I haven't posted for a while (I started business school and am really drowning in work), but I needed a venue to bail myself out of some cryptic statements on Twitter. Obviously, a recession or depression is a bad thing that no one wants and that no amount of personal benefit from a depression would want someone to root for a depression. But, once one is in a depression, different groups would prefer different solutions.

One of the features of a depression is that investment money is more likely than during a boom to go to radically new, high risk ventures. During a boom, why would you invest in suborbital tourism, which might go totally bust, when you can invest in GE, which makes turbines for new power plants that are needed to finance the boom? But, during a bust when there are no new power plants going up, why would you invest in a company that you know isn't going to do anything rather than suborbital tourism, which might strike it big? This is called the CAPM model of asset pricing. It predicts that, when the market is down, risky ventures are more likely to get investment money.

However, this runs into problems with Keynesian stimulus. Consumers, and in this idea the government is trying to take the place of consumers who are no longer buying, can only spend money on things that exist. By going in the "front door" of the sales department, it won't fund radically new ventures. However, if people keep their money by not spending, what the economic statistics don't capture in the moment is that the banks are really holding the money and they're using it through the "back door" by funding new projects. So, when the money is no longer careening around an over-inflated economy buying sporks with built in radios but rather is sitting in the bank, not only are we funding new ventures 1. at just the time we need to in order to get out of the downturn, but also 2. when we're most likely to fund radically new ventures like NewSpace, leading us to 3. if we come out of the depression in the status quo and anyone (not everyone, anyone) else comes out of it through new innovations, the demand for the status quo will be non-existent anyway and we'll be back where we are now, except as a 3rd world country.

This doesn't even have to assume that Keynesians are wrong that a drop in aggregate demand would not affect the savings rate. But, companies don't save; their cash accounts are only used as working capital. Extra cash is either paid to owners (who may save it), or invested in the company. We wouldn't be in a depression if we wanted existing companies to invest in themselves; we're back to the point that consumers can only invest in things that exist and banks can invest in things that don't exist. And NewSpace doesn't fully exist yet.

So, hence my thoughts that NewSpace is a group that, by rights, should have opposed the stimulus the most, no matter how much was given to NASA. Elon Musk is giving a good try trying to use the stimulus to get COTS-D funded, but in the honesty of the darkest night that's as much about stimulus as the rest of that God-forsaken bill, which is nothing.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Cap-and-Trade

Posted by Jon on Sunday, June 01, 2008 3:25:42 PM
This was originally a response to George Will's column here, but I didn't have the room. Here it is:

I'm sorry if I'm repeating someone, but I don't have time to read 80+ people yelling. Cap-and-trade are property rights. When one company sells their carbon permits to another, where does money go to the government? Money goes from one company to another. There are probably terrible ways to do this, and for all I know the government is doing one of them, but neither this article nor the counter-arguments in it are relevant to the debate.

The problem with a tax is that we don't know how much damage we're doing to the environment, compared to the good done by making a car or a house. If the government puts in a tax, they are incentivized to raise it with every rhetorical victory of the left. They can't fix the price of trading carbon permits once they are in private hands.

If they institute taxes on carbon and then lower them equivalently on something else, what good did that do? What good does it do to give the government a steady income of carbon taxes? What good use could they do with it? It's much better to give them money once to purchase the (extra) permits at auction, because then the price is only used as a rationing system and it doesn't provide the government the capacity to do great harm.

We are not "creating a new market", that's true. But, we are reflecting something that is a cost to society in the monetary system. That's a good thing. While rights are, in fact, something that the government can't take, rather than something the government gives us, we must also address the Tragedy of the Commons. Actually, the granting of the ability to emit some amount of carbon annually in exchange for a one-time registration, they are protecting our ability to do business as usual against being constantly punished by continuous taxes. Property rights allow us to share more efficiently. Just as land is best used because they are private, and the oceans that are public are overfished, the extension of property over the air is a good thing.

Now that I have that off of my chest, the problem is that this is a good solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Cap-and-Trade isn't creating scarcity, it's allowing the scarcity of the the ability of nature to absorb carbon to be considered by business, we don't know how scarce that is and so the cap is too hard to set. We don't know how much our carbon affects the atmosphere, so we don't know if we need to bother with this at all.

My point is that cap-and-trade is a better, more right-wing/conservative/libertarian idea than carbon taxes by long, long ways. But it's a solution to a non-existent problem, and that's a problem by itself.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Best. Political. Ad. Ever.

Posted by Jon on Thursday, May 15, 2008 12:44:22 PM
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Intelligence

Posted by Jon on Tuesday, May 06, 2008 3:55:24 PM
There's an interesting article in the New York Times (HT Instapundit) on intelligence. In essence, it says that intelligence is not an adaptive trait, all the time. Only some environments encourage the adaption of intelligence. That makes sense. Bertrand Russels said, "So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. ", which is, of course, true because the Bible prefers to praise wisdom. And, in looking this up, I came across this from Arthur C. Clarke, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." So, this isn't really news.
 
What I found odd was this quote from the article:

The benefits of learning must have been enormous for evolution to have overcome those costs, Dr. Kawecki argues. For many animals, learning mainly offers a benefit in finding food or a mate. But humans also live in complex societies where learning has benefits, as well.

“If you’re using your intelligence to outsmart your group, then there’s an arms race,” Dr. Kawecki said. “So there’s no absolute optimal level. You just have to be smarter than the others.”
First of all, my IQ is fairly high and I can speak to the fact that intelligence is basically no benefit to natural selection within the species. It's alienating and actually slows down social development except in cities, where the company of compatible people is still a constant, active pursuit. But, the point is that Dr. Kawecki makes the mistake of viewing other species from an external vantage point and his own from an internal vantage point.
 
Humans consume in what computer science calls a "greedy algorithm". By consuming all resources available to us as individuals, but doing so in the company of other humans, we are actually forced to prioritize our consumption in accordance with others. That's what the monetary system is: a way to communicate individual priorities across the wider society. That's why capitalism works in human societies; by competing internally, we make highly efficient choices for the global allocation of resources. As I mention in a previous post, most animals, like wolves, don't do that.
 
This is why I believe that humans are actually a hive species, albeit a complex hive, but not with the negative connotations that normally come with the word "hive" (there's more to this hypothesis; this is only part). On the one hand, the Right often accuses the Left that Socialism turns everyone into faceless drones with no individuality, like a hive. On the other, the Left often accuses the same thing of the Right, for the same reason. The problem is that hives are highly individualistic. In ant colonies, one is the queen (and she isn't in command), some are drones, and some are workers. Some workers will explore the surrounding territory and find new food, laying trails for other workers to follow, and others simply following the trail to collect the food and return it to the colony. The larger point is that there is no central authority, not even the queen. It is the result of what is called manifest behavior, or emergent behavior. The Once and Future King to the contrary, the queen does not telepathically control anyone. This means that the appearance that the ants are force-fit into their roles is incorrect; the ants find their personal role based on what they are; they are not shaped physically by their place in society. This gives the appearance that they were custom made for the role because the role that they made for themselves fits them perfectly.
 
This is the same illusion that plagues the Left when looking at corporations. They assume that it is a sterile place because everyone has their role in the company. But, the role is defined by the people that have filled it, not the other way around. Some are accountants, some engineers, etc. And one of the reasons that Socialism doesn't work is that it does the opposite; it force-fits a person into a predefined role. So, the Right is wrong that Socialism is like a hive; it's like the negative and false vision of a hive. And the Left is wrong that Capitalism is bad; it's like the true vision of a hive, which is pretty good.
 
So, human societies, as a whole, benefit, not from everyone competing to be the most intelligent against other humans without an "absolute optimal level", but rather from the existence of abnormally intelligent humans benefiting the "hive" as a whole (the analog, I should mention, isn't a city or even a state; it's a trading block).
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Iron Man

Posted by Jon on Sunday, May 04, 2008 1:01:16 AM
There is no question - zero - in my mind that Stan Lee is the greatest cultural influence on America other than the Beatles, even if he is less recognized as such. The stylized movies of the last few decades, from Edward Scissorhands to Underworld to 300 (and God bless every one of them) have all come out of the visual traditions of comic books, not old movies, and Stan Lee's Spiderman was the first genuinely empathetic and deep character in comic books, opening the door to graphic novels and a retooling of Batman from DC comics in order to compete. They never did. Stan Lee started with X-Men which a few years ago claimed the top 3 best-selling titles, simultaneously, by recreating them, not just as superpowered good guys, but as characters whose powers reflected their very human dilemmas in larger-than-life fashion. After Spiderman, Stan Lee created Daredevil, a character that epitomized the saying, "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" and, in the same larger-than-life style, gave hope that from tragedy can come goodness.
The project in between, Spiderman, was his first lead effort and the most important to me. The motif of this project, "With great power comes great responsibility" has been my motto for years. The lesson, for me, has not been about responsibility, it's been about power. Peter Parker's conflict with this saying is that, to accept responsibility, one has to acknowledge one's power, embrace and come to terms with having it. C. S. Lewis said that modesty isn't lying about what you've done, but being as proud of it as if it were done by someone else. I can't stick to walls or lift a semi over my head, but let's just say I made Mensa by pretty comfortable margins. And it's caused me no end of trouble. I grew up with no one to talk to, I was far enough out in the country that there were no gifted programs. There weren't any opportunities out there for my talents to be recognized, but there was no way I could hide what I am enough to be socially accepted in a town of less than 1000 people. Oh, it's a tale of woe, I assure you. But getting into Mensa, shortly after graduating college on a disappointingly normal schedule, was a formative moment for me. I'd never really been on the left, but I realized that, if Progressivism had never made sense to me, it probably didn't make sense at all. In recent years, I've been reading more, and recently I've begun to write more, and getting published.
 
Kyle Smith didn't like Iron Man as much as I did. Like him, I loved the first half of the movie. Blow-the-crap-out-of-Al-Queda is a good first act. Yes, Mr. Stark was then motivated by pulling back from arms dealing. But, he never apologized for selling arms to the United States. The problem wasn't the arms, it was always that his company had been selling to the "bad guys" (and I loved that they used that phrase). When I lived in Chicago, I was in favor of the moratorium on the death penalty, not because the death penalty was a problem, but because the courts were too corrupt to handle the responsibility. And I liked that Iron Man asked for help from Pepper Potts, the adorable female lead; he was being clever!
 
It's always been DC that's been more UN-Internationalist-wrath-of-the-self-righteous type; Marvel's heroes have been more about individualism and metaphor. I'd never really known much about Iron Man. Actually, as I was determined to make my own suit like that by the time I grew up, I resented him a little once I discovered that he wasn't a robot. But, as a 27-year-old engineer/businessman comicbook fan, I think you can imagine the appeal of an older engineer/businessman turning superhero. I'm inclined to give anything Stan Lee does the benefit of the doubt and there was plenty of room for it. Conservatives have so much to gripe about when it comes to the movies, but we need to reward the movies that come closer, that are good enough and Iron Man is comfortably where we can see it. My only regret is that I rode my motorcycle to the theatre; I was a little juiced up from the movie; putting on my helmet never felt so good; I can't really swear to the legality or safety of everything I did on the way home; this was a really great movie.
 
There was one early one-night-stand scene that may warrant more than PG-13, but not quite R. Some almost nudity that I, personally, rather liked but parents may want to know about (although the idea that Vanity Fair does investigative war journalism was a bit of news to me; did I miss something?).
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Bush right

Posted by Jon on Thursday, May 01, 2008 4:30:37 AM
I didn't get the story, but one of the headlines on my iGoogle widget this morning was "Economy shows low growth last quarter" or something like that. A recession is defined as "two quarters of negative growth". This means we are not in a "recession", but a "slow-down". Which is exactly what Bush said. Even Greenspan and Bernanke were wrong about this. Now, maybe we'll start shrinking this quarter, which might be the start of a recession, but we weren't in one last month.
 
Sarcasm aside, we're close and it's getting bad, but there's no cause for mass hysteria. I actually read some fool on a lefty site saying that he went through the Great Depression and we're in one just as bad right now. That's so obviously false, he must be in some company town that shut down the factory or something, because that's just absurd. Who knows. But there's more hope out there than we're being shown.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Rev. Wright is our friend

Posted by Jon on Friday, April 25, 2008 7:01:07 PM
In the light of Alicia Keys’ recent statement and persistent rumors, it looks to me that Rev. Wright looks less like a kook and more like a symptom. If blacks believe these things (and my gut says that urban blacks do), we could use this to own the black vote. We need to recognize that, between policies like the minimum wage’s explicitly racist beginnings, the eugenics of the Progressive Movement’s origins, and the KKK’s persecution of Republicans that went shoulder-to-shoulder with their persecution of blacks, I don’t see how their fears of government conspiracies are irrational. After all, the only difference between “the government made it easier to hire whites over blacks” and “the government created AIDS” is that the government could never have kept inventing AIDS a secret; they didn’t even try to cover up the origins of the minimum wage.

Many people believing a thing doesn’t make it True, but it does make it Important. We’ve been better on civil rights than Democrats for 150 years; we were chased out of the South by the KKK, a larger percentage of our party voted for the Civil Rights Act in the ‘60s and a larger percentage of our party voted for the Voting Rights Act in the ‘60s. Rev. Wright is the best opportunity the GOP has had to talk to blacks in decades. Rev. Wright isn’t the problem, he shows us the problem, and Barack Obama isn’t the solution. If blacks fear the government (and who could blame them), we need to tell them that Big Government is a White Government, and a White Government big enough to hurt them.

Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Analogies and Politics

Posted by Jon on Thursday, April 24, 2008 1:38:37 PM
Well, I'm 4 days late and who really cares what Michael Moore thinks? but, he's, well, not correct. Basically, he says that holding him responsible for what his pastor says is like holding him responsible for the the Pope's involvement with the Hitler Youth, because Ted Kennedy is Catholic and endorsed him. This is what we in the writing game call a "bad analogy". (In fairness, I only read the first few paragraphs, got really bored, read the last paragraph where he trots out the 3/5ths canard, and gave up)
In pursuit of my design of being the World's Biggest Dork, I even drew a picture of why it's a bad analogy (although I can't seem to upload pictures to this site. Interesting):
 
Louis Farakahn <-(choice)- Rev. Wright <-(choice)- Barack Obama <-(choice)- Ted Kennedy -(choice)-> Pope Benedict -(mandated)-> Adolph Hitler
 
First, these relationships are directional. It doesn't say much about the Rev. Wright that Obama chooses to go to his church; it says more about Obama that he chooses to go to his church. By the same token, it doesn't say much about Obama that his endorsed by Kennedy. So, is Obama to Farakah as Ted Kennedy to Hitler? That would be better, but there's still a problem. The fact that Pope Benedict was legally required to belong to the Hitler Youth, as every German of a certain age was, is different than the choice shown by Rev. Wright to praise Louis Farakahn.
 
I'll tick some other stuff that irritated me about this column: firstly, Clinton doesn't bring up Farakahn to discourage voters for Obama because he's a bad, black man, but because he's a bad man, period. This is exactly the kind of information that is very relevant. Now, do I think Clinton is as against Farakahn as she's pretending? No, but she should be. Secondly, the 3/5ths thing is, with the minimum wage, one of my biggest pet peeves. Blacks weren't 3/5ths of a human, but slaves were discounted in the census; that's not the same thing. Free blacks were counted in the census, (I think) indentured whites were discounted in the census, and the census only served to allocate congressional districts, not to establish "humanity". Take this scenario: slaves are counted in the census, and every 10,000 people get a congressman in the House of Representatives. Ten slave owners live near each other with big plantations, and they each own 1,000 slaves. THESE 10 SLAVE OWNERS WOULD GET THEIR OWN CONGRESSMAN, BECAUSE SLAVES CAN'T VOTE!!! And, they'd get an extra vote in the Electoral College, so slave states got more say say in the presidential election, too. It was the abolitionists that were against counting the slaves, not the racists, you dummy. Don't be confused by the fact that the Democrats were the ones trying to get the slaves counted; they're the same breed that later paid the KKK because they were attacking Republicans, who couldn't elect an anti-segregationist Adlai Stevenson, and who encourage minority drop-out rates through "affirmative action". They weren't the good guys.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (1) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Ah, geography

Posted by Jon on Thursday, April 24, 2008 1:00:13 PM
By far the funniest line I've read in a while (second page):
Sen. Obama, Canada, the United States and Mexico are contiguous countries. Yet you insist that NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, causes companies to ship jobs overseas. Will you, before the American people, tell us the grade you received in high school geography?
Though, in defense of the reference to Alicia Keys, she's really, really pretty and not running for president. If she ever runs for president, I'll have to come to a decision on which of those is more important.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

What the...

Posted by Jon on Monday, April 21, 2008 10:44:33 AM
Thank God it's gun controlled.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Wow, I haven't posted in a while...

Posted by Jon on Thursday, April 17, 2008 10:17:16 AM
This is worth posting. I came across this on TammyBruce.com, through a really great video.
Tags: humor   ethics  
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Democrat Racists?

Posted by Jon on Monday, February 11, 2008 6:18:00 PM
Susan Estrich wrote an incredibly funny article today. Not intentionally funny, but still...

Who would have thought that the party that inflates minority college drop-out rates through affirmative action, filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 10 years, justified the minimum-wage by claiming that the Chinese, the blacks, the Jews, the deformed, the retarded and other so-called "genetic defectives" wouldn't be able to afford to have children, and donated to the (deadlier) 1880's incarnation of the KKK so that they'd also target southern Republicans could possibly be racist? Democrats are against racism in the same way that they're for the environment: the activists are for Open Space laws for the animals, but the voters really just want to inflate their property values. Some day, they'll figure out that any real racist would prefer to throw money at blacks to go away than to be called a racist for 5 decades for insisting on equality before law.

UPDATE: Peals of ironic laughter subsiding, it should be noted that, Ms. Estrich aside, this isn't actually racism. People aren't voting against him because he's black, they're lying about voting for him because he's black and it's completely aligned with a Democrat's party principles. I imagine the reasoning goes, "Well, I'm not voting for him, but if I say I am, then people who want to vote for him but won't because they don't think a black man can win in America will vote for him, and that will make the actual vote more fair." Except, in the end it's basically lying and throws all the politicians off, misallocating money, changes the length of the campaign and misfocuses the debate. Which is fine, because I don't want them to win. But, I also don't expect anyone on the Left to notice what did them in.

UPDATE AGAIN: Ok, if this is polling affirmative action, then, yes, it is racism, because affirmative action is racism. But, it's not a form of racism that I expect Ms. Estrich to call so. This is starting to hurt my head.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Something to remember

Posted by Jon on Tuesday, January 01, 2008 7:21:41 PM
This is a post to print out and post at the office.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Atonement

Posted by Jon on Sunday, December 09, 2007 8:40:57 PM
I'd originally planned a post on The Golden Compass, which I'd started reading months ago. I didn't want to write about how horrible I thought it was until I'd at least finished the third book, but my travel schedule interrupted my reading after the second and I couldn't bring myself to read it, so I kept putting it off. Fortunately, that was covered by others and it doesn't look like it's doing well.

I'm glad, in some respects, that I didn't. I don't post often, but when I write about movies, I want to write more about movies that Conservatives will like. We don't give enough credit to the (few) movies that we have good reason to appreciate. It's too easy to criticize the vast array of movies we don't like. So, instead of Compass, I went to see Atonement, which stars Keira Knightley and was directed by Joe Wright, the same team that made Pride and Prejudice a few years ago, garnering Knightley an Oscar nomination and three ticket fares from me, the only time I've seen a movie multiple times in the theatres since I was little (all viewings alone, I'll add. Go ahead; you won't be the first to question my masculinity). I'd seen no promotion for it; it was only when I was looking up movie times for another film on Fandango that I saw an ad for it in the banner.

I loved the movie. It feels like a revolutionary concept these days, but honor matters. The movie is about how courage is not just for heroes and warriors, but that cowardice can have terrible consequences between people in all of our lives as well. I'm not saying this is not a Liberal idea, but it is definitely a Conservative one; if Liberals like the movie, great. If they like it for the same reasons, even better.

It also struck a rare balance by depicting war as something dangerous and hard, but not in a way that condemns it solely on the basis of being dangerous and hard. Like Thomas Sowell says, whether or not one supports the current war, nobody is actually "pro-war". War should be a last resort, because it is a horrible thing. Some of us simply think it's not an unthinkable option and that the current situation demanded it. I appreciated what Mr. Wright did here.

It's got some dirty words, not used in dialogue casually, but used as something dirty and vulgar, which is an improvement over, say, Romancing the Stone, for instance. Also, some full-frontal nudity. Well, that may be a slight exaggeration, but a throughly wet slip is not exactly opaque (I think I just sold the film to every 14-year-old boy in the nation) (except they don't read this blog). Also, I wouldn't see it if you have loved ones at war; wait to see it with them when they return.

It's too bad that it doesn't seem to be doing well in the theatres; I wish I'd written this on Friday, except that I don't think it would have done much good. Well, it did get me to finally open and watch my copy of Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End, which I'd bought on Tuesday and haven't had time to watch, and to (finally, again) purchase a copy of Bend It Like Beckham, which I saw in theatres back in 2002 and also loved.

Of course, I already own a copy of Pride and Predjudice.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive

Eliza Gone Wild!

Posted by Jon on Sunday, December 09, 2007 5:48:52 PM
So, in the early days of computing, Alan Turing, one of the most influential Computer Scientists of early computers, proposed the "Turing Test" for AI systems. Basically, it said that, if you are interacting with it and you can't tell whether you're interacting with a computer or a human, that's true "Artificial Intelligence". The problem was, it was beaten pretty quickly by a program called "Eliza", named after Eliza Dolittle from My Fair Lady and Pygmalion because they taught it to talk.

Basically, Eliza assumed the limited social context of a Rogerian psychologist and attempted to imitate the psychologist. You know, you say "I hate books" and they/it responds "Why do you hate books?". Well, if you look, it didn't even change the input very much, it just kicked what you said back to you (think the Lucy Liubot episode of Futurama (3.15)). Eliza licked the Turing Test hollow, but it was the stupidest program you can imagine. A few hundred lines of code and no actual knowledge of psychology and barely any of grammar. Eliza is a very famous program, not because it's AI, but because it showed the Turing Test wasn't much good, not because computers are smart, but because humans can be pretty dumb. It turns out that, if the social forms are rigid enough, it's tough to tell the difference between a smart computer and a dull human. In fact, Eliza was so famous, when I first learned about IMbots (like the WSJ or Moviefone bots), my plan to build one was to filch somebody's Eliza engine and hook it up to an AIM account.

Well, somebody beat me to the punch (HT Instapundit), except they didn't mimic a Rogerian scientist; they mimicked members of a dating chat room and used it to steal personal information. The AI researcher in me (a former life, as computers go; 5 or 6 years at least) is curious to know if the social rules of flirting in a dating chat room (which, given the limitations of text, I assume are pretty rigid) are more or less rigid than a Rogerian psychologist. Did they just change the rules in the ruleset, or did they have to do any actual work?

Then I realized that I don't really care enough to investigate. It's funny enough as it is.
Email ItEmail It | Print ItPrint It | CommentsComments (0) | TrackbacksTrackbacks (0) | Flag as offensiveFlag as Offensive
« Previous123Next »