Everyday Junglist
Bio
About me. You know how everyone says to be a successful writer you should focus in one or two areas. I continue to prove them correct.
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Please Don’t Call Your Jobs (Or Side Jobs) Hustles
If I may put on my grumpy old man hat for a moment we need to have a talk. I appreciate the ever evolving nature of our language as much as anyone. In fact I have written frequently about language including not one but two articles specifically on the topic of precision in language, and why it is so important. In those articles I go out of my way to note that language is not some static affair and that meanings of words do shift and change with time. I understand that the word hustle has somewhat recently come to be applied to just about anything someone does to make money. On the one hand I can appreciate the association of the word with work. It suggest an aggressive attitude, a let’s get it done quickly approach, etc. On the other hand it brings a lot of negative baggage along for the ride. First, it suggests a lack of seriousness about whatever endeavor it is being applied to describe. A hustle is more like a hobby that makes money then a job. Thus, like a hobby, one’s dedication to it might change in intensity over time. It is transient or temporary. As an example, just like collecting baseball cards used to be your passionate hobby, writing is your hobby now, but who knows what it might be next week? Why would I want to pay someone money if that is the attitude they take toward the job I am paying them to do? Even if writing really is a hobby for you, and you don’t really take it all that seriously, yet you have the temerity to expect people to pay you for it, why rub it in their face? A great question I surely would have no idea about.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Journal
What if My AI is Manic Depressive
My AI Build Project Gets Me Worried In addition to a lot of the stuff I have been working on as I continue my at home AI build I have been doing a lot of worrying. The number of things that could go horribly wrong seem to be staggeringly high and there is no historical data on which to judge the probabilities of such things happening, nor are there even any really solid theoretical underpinnings on which to hang my hat so to speak. As I worked through my list of concerns in my mind I started to feel a bit depressed. As I started to feel depressed I started to think about another interesting and potentially terrifying possibility for my AI, What if it is “born” or later becomes “mentally” ill?
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Futurism
The Smallest Kindness Redeems
It had been a long day already. A drive that Google maps had said would take six hours in total was already at hour six and we were barely half way to our destination. We had left the geothermal pools of the calcium carbonate mountain Pamukkale in Turkey that morning and I was very irritated. The afternoon before we had a fairly disturbing hotel experience which was scary enough to cause us to leave the hotel immediately after check in and to not return for checkout. The place we found as a replacement was only slightly better and I felt discriminated against and uneasy there as well. Overall the past day and a half had been full of mini-frustrations, mostly due to my own ignorance of the Turkish language. A lack of quality sleep was aggravating the situation badly. I was in a foul mood and was lashing out at even the smallest of perceived injustices. In truth nothing bad had happened, we were never in even the slightest of jeopardy, and nobody had said or done anything of real significance in any way negative to us since we had entered the country two days prior. However, to me it felt as if the whole country was against me. I was being targeted as an American and treated poorly as a result.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Wander
Would an AI Have Any Interest in Using VR?
A while ago I posted a stupid ‘humor’ piece recently in which I tried to illustrate some of the similarities and differences between artificial intelligence and virtual reality (note: normally I would provide a link to said stupid piece but since it is <600 words I cannot publish it on Vocal and as my account with Medium remains suspended I cannot link to it there.) As I neared the end of the post I started wondering what an AI would actually make of virtual reality. Specifically what an embodied artificial intelligence with sensory apparatus of some kind would think about virtual reality and its potential usefulness to itself. Incidentally, an embodied AI with one or more sensory modalities is the only format I believe possible for one to achieve actual human level ‘intelligence’. Whether or not that position is correct it is still interesting to consider what might happen if an embodied AI ever were ‘created/born/made’, after it was exposed to the idea of virtual reality.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Futurism
How To Build an AI
First Comes the Background and Introduction Part I don’t spend nearly as much time as I probably should reading people’s comments. To be honest it is mostly because I have a very fragile ego. The slightest criticism can ruin my night and possibly my entire week if it hits the mark a little too close for comfort. When I do work up the nerve to have a peek I am usually rewarded as mostly the people who do take the time to read and comment are thoughtful and intelligent and often make some really brilliant points, sometimes this happens even after they lay into me for wasting five minutes of their life with a post or two or three they found most definitely not to their liking. Holy run-on batman! Is that really a grammatically sound sentence? I mean look how long it is, try and diagram that sucker, I dare you.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Futurism
Thinking About Nash’s Equilibrium
Maybe somebody out there can help me understand something I never understood about the prisoners dilemma. Why exactly is confess and betray considered a bad (the worst) decision for the collective? Neither member is stuck with a year in jail. Sure it’s not the best outcome of just 1 month but 3 months is a hell of a lot better than a year.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Futurism
The End of Biology
The power, influence, and perceived importance of the three horsemen (ML, DS, and AI) has continued to grow apace. This, despite the fact that machines can’t learn, data science is not science, and artificial intelligence (still) does not yet actually exist, and may never. The ascendance of these three technologies, I argue, has come at a cost. Part of this cost, has been the diminishing of the importance of biology. By that I do no mean to say the importance of the biological sciences or interest in biology even, but rather its uniqueness or, to make up a word, its differentness.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Futurism
Three Reasons Research Scientists Should Avoid Programming and Data Analytics
Intro and caveats I recently read an article in which and engineer extolled the virtues of learning to program, and the value of advanced data analytics to his career. The article was persuasive and I have little doubt the advantages he mentioned were real. However, he was an engineer, not a scientist and what holds true for the one does not hold true for the other in this case. In fact I argue that learning to program or spending your valuable time building expertise in advanced data analytics is to the overall detriment of your career in research science. Obviously what I am about to say here will not apply in 100% of cases. No doubt there will be some exceptions, particularly in the “hard sciences” [e.g. experimental or theoretical physics (programming and data analytics)] or even the social “sciences” [e.g. psychology or behavioral science (data analytics)] there may be advantages or even a need for said skill sets, but I would suggest the standard training provided in the curriculum for those fields would already provide to the extent needed and therefore these comments would not apply. Therefore I will restrict my comments to research in the sciences in fields where the standard education/training programs would not normally include programming or advanced data analytics (except in a few special cases). Mainly of course I am thinking of the biological/life sciences though there are certainly others. With those caveats in mind, there are three reasons why I believe this is the case.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Education
The Man Who Never Fell
There did once live a man who never fell. When I say he never fell I do not mean that in a metaphorical sense, as in he never failed or screwed up. He definitely did plenty of that, but he never actually fell, as in he never once fell down physically so that both his knees and both his hands touched the ground against his will. Perhaps you suspect that this man must have been wheelchair bound his entire life or maybe he was a super star athlete with incredible balance. Actually he had no physical handicaps to speak of, nor did he have any great physical abilities. Just like everything else about the man, his motor skills were average. It was purely circumstance, luck, fate, whatever you want to call it that set things up for him so he never fell. He was in fact very average in all respects physically including in the looks department which (partly) explains why he only married once, and it lasted only two years. She left him shortly after cheating on him with his best friend. Not too surprising as reportedly she often denigrated the man to her friends calling him "boring" "slow" and "a nobody who would never amount to anything." Mentally he was much the same, average. Not too smart but not exactly dumb either. He lived for 82 years in various location around the United States and even spent 1 year ‘living’ abroad after he graduated from college with his degree in sociology. Remember what I said about him not being too smart. He worked four different full time (forty hour per week) jobs over the course of his career until he retired at age sixty two and a half. None were particularly interesting, or made him very much money, but none were terrible either. It would be fair to say that much like everything else in the mans life they were average. In any case this man who was average in every way that matters was well, well above average in one unusual area. He never once fell down. Not one time in his entire average life from when he first mastered how to walk at age three until the day he died. In case you were wondering he died in his sleep, laying down, of a heart attack, so he did not even fall then. It is believed that this man was the only man or woman in the history of the human race to have accomplished this particular feat, and most experts predict there will never be another.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Fiction
Patience is For Suckers and Fools
Who hasn’t heard the long cliched aphorisms that “patience is a virtue” and “good things come to those who wait.” The (supposed) fact that patience is a virtue, a good thing, something to be cultivated, and strived for is one of the few things that both eastern and western religious traditions agree on. That should be a warning sign in and of itself. Anything so obviously agreed upon without hesitation by religions as diverse as Christianity and Judaism to Buddhism and Islam suggests the highest skepticism is in order. That said, at one time I happen to think the major religions, and just about everybody else, was correct in their position on the general goodness of patience. However, that time has passed and patience today has evolved into an escape hatch for the lazy, a way to avoid doing anything, and an easy excuse for absolving oneself and everyone else of any responsibility for the way things are. Let me be the first to say it, what was once a virtue is now a vice. And rather than a lack of patience I contend that we have become too patient as a society. We have become complacent, always thinking that someone else will fix our problems if we just wait long enough. Someone or something, other than ourselves of course, will come and rescue us. If we only wait a little bit longer, have a little more patience.
By Everyday Junglist4 years ago in Motivation
