If you are sympathetic, or even curious, about the advantages of commercial society Deirdre Mccloskey's bourgeoise trilogy is an excellent place to begin.

"“I remove a glove with my teeth, reach down and feel the aluminum side cover of the engine. The temperature is fine. Too warm to leave my hand there, not so hot I get a burn. Nothing wrong there.

On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a “seizure.” This machine has had one-in fact, three of them. I check it from time to time the same way I would check a patient who has had a heart attack, even though it seems cured.”

"When Europeans began to draw on ancient precedents in the Renaissance, they did so loosely and freely, and each country did so in its own way, such that French, German, Spanish and Italian Renaissance styles are highly distinct from each other. These national renaissance traditions continued in various forms for over three centuries. There was then a brief period of international neoclassicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, after which European architects mostly returned to their national idioms. "

1. Renaissance architecture began in Italy, and was copied internationally, with variations, but it still forms a single international style, as did the Gothic and Baroque. 2. This account leaves out the Baroque completely, another international style with high unity and some level of difference. 3. Some damage gets done with these crude reductions; we lose sight of our cultural heritage and replace it with a crude inaccuracy.

This is a grotesque misrepresentation of European history! By 1660, universities had existed for more than a half millenia, had redeveloped lost roman engineering capacities and invented world-shattering new technologies.

Oy!

Here is the core argument: "an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: 1. Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. 2. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945517

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42440127

Points: 1

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