Interviews: Freeman Dyson Answers Your Questions 141
A while ago you had the chance to ask mathematician and theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson about his work in quantum electrodynamics, nuclear propulsion, and his thoughts on the past, present, and future of science. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.
Why the United States? by eldavojohn
Why did you take a fellowship at Cornell and stay in the United States? There's plenty of world renowned institutions in the United Kingdom and you were a pilot in the RAF -- what appealed to you about the United States? Do you have any comments or opinions on H1-Bs and the United States' current stance on immigration?
Dyson: During world war II I made plans to go to Russia after the war. I had fallen in love with the Russian language, and I knew that physics and mathematics in Russia were first-rate. So I planned to stay several years in Russia to study the Russian culture as well as science. Then soon after the war Stalin made it clear that he did not welcome foreign students. So my second choice was the USA. The main reason was that money was available from the Commonwealth Fund (now the Harkness Fund) for student fellowships in the USA. It was then easier to cross the Atlantic than to cross the Channel. I applied for a Commonwealth Fellowship and got generous support for two years in the USA. I went to Cornell because I happened by chance to meet G.I.Taylor who had been at Los Alamos with the British team during the war. He said, ``Go to Cornell, that is where all the bright people from Los Alamos went after the war.'' He was right. At Cornell I worked with Bethe and Feynman who were at the cutting edge of physics at that time.
I was never a pilot in the RAF, only a humble statistician collecting data about operations. The US is always schizophrenic about immigration. In those days the situation was generally worse than today, with strict immigration quotas. I benefited because I was British and we had the biggest quota. Now the situation is still bad but not so unfair as it was then. The quotas were overtly racist and designed to keep America for the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
Education
by flogger
How has your education helped or hindered you? You are the "ideal" educated man. In our (American) culture, we don;t seem to be producing people devoted to learning, discovering, thinking, inventing, etc. What in your opinion can an educational system do to foster what you've become?
Dyson: I was extremely lucky because I came through the British education system during the war when everything was screwed up. The whole system depended on written examinations and we did not have enough ships to import paper. So there was no paper and no exams. Also there was a high shortage of teachers since all the young people were away fighting the war. As a result, I was in class only seven hours a week. A wonderful time to get an education. We had maximum freedom, and the kids learned more from one another than we would have learned from teachers.
The kids today spend far too much time in class and as a result are turned off from the things they are supposed to be learning. That is true not only in the USA but also in other countries.
Global warming: genetic engineering and coal death
by doom
In your article The Question of Global Warming, you make the point that the Earth's vegetation acts as a big carbon sink, and suggest that genetically engineered plants might do an even better job -- thus becoming the first person in history to make environmentalists angry by suggesting that top soil management is important. I have a few questions about this: (1) you mention the fanciful-sounding notion of "carbon-eating trees", but aren't there technologies that already exist that might do the job? There are claims that "no till" agriculture via the dreaded "roundup ready" plants reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially. (2) A big part of the argument against immediate reductions in CO2 emissions is economic. Do the analyses you've seen really make an effort to capture all the costs and benefits associated with a move like banning coal burning completely? The annual deaths estimated from coal pollution seem big enough to make it worth doing even before you put global warming on the table.
Dyson: This is a complicated subject and I only discuss it in general terms. What you say about carbon-eating trees is true. Trees eat carbon almost as fast as we can burn it. No-till farming also eats carbon. The question I raised is whether we could eat more carbon by genetically engineering trees.I did not answer the question. We cannot answer it until the science of tree genetics is much better understood. The same thing is true of the effects of carbon on climate. We cannot predict the effects of carbon on climate until we understand the science of climate much better than we do now.
The shale-gas revolution has changed the economics of energy production drastically. Shale-gas is a greenhouse gas, but it is otherwise clean, doing far less damage than coal to the environment and to human health. Shale-gas is cheap and well distributed over the planet. The replacement of coal by shale-gas is by far the most practical way to get rid of coal and clean up the planet.
What are your views on the current state of fusion
by smaddox
I am of the opinion that without economical fusion, humanity will not last more than a few thousand years. I am also of the opinion that most fusion research funding is targeted at projects with little or no application to economical fusion (I see no evidence that tokamaks or inertial confinement will ever be economical. In fact, all evidence seems to suggest they will never be economical). What are your views on the current state of fusion research? Is funding misplaced? Disproportionately allocated?
Dyson: I am not an expert on plasma physics. I know only that plasma physics is very difficult and poorly understood. In my opinion the governments of the world, not only the USA, made a wrong choice about forty years ago when they stopped exploring the science of fusion with small-scale experiments and put their money into high engineering projects. The big engineering projects such as ITER are absurdly expensive and can never lead to economic fusion power. I agree with your opinions about this. I consider the funding to be misplaced. The only hope of economically useful fusion power is a radically different design which might emerge from better understanding of the basic science of plasma physics.
I do not agree that humanity needs economical fusion power in order to survive, unless you include the sun as a fusion power source. The sun is a splendid fusion reactor that will continue running for several billion years. All we need is to learn how to use sunlight economically. There are probably many ways to achieve this.
Nuclear Freeze Movement
by rotenberry
Professor Dyson,
I had the pleasure of listening to you speak at Caltech in the 1980s about the Nuclear Freeze Movement. You were a supporter even though you indicated that since the number of nuclear weapons was decreasing (at that time), keeping the current number of nuclear weapons was not desirable. Thirty years have passed. Do you think this movement accomplished any of their goals?
Dyson: The biggest reduction of nuclear weapons was done by George Bush Senior in 1989. He removed all tactical nukes from the US army and the surface navy. This was done quietly and unilaterally without any international negotiations. He got rid of about half of all our nuclear weapons, and these were the most dangerous weapons, deployed all over the world and likely to be involved in local fighting. As a result of his action, the world is much safer.
I believe we could go much further in the same direction. Unilateral action is much quicker and more effective than negotiating treaties. The next obvious step would be to get rid of nuclear bombs on airplanes. After that, land-based nuclear missiles, leaving the nuclear missile submarines till last. I think there is a good chance that the military will support such unilateral moves. The military knows that our nuclear weapons are essentially useless for fighting real wars. The problem is to educate the politicians.
Targets for the Space Industry
by manonthemoon
Given that we finally seem to have a vital and growing private space industry, what do you think the likeliest successful target for long term space industrialization/exploitation/habitation is? The Moon, near earth asteroids, Mars?
Dyson: I think it is absurd and illusory to guess what kind of space activities will be profitable. I think of the Virginia colonists who came to America to mine gold and finally got rich by growing tobacco. This is a situation where the market will decide and the market is unpredictable. They began with about a hundred years of fishing and trading operations off the coast before settlements became profitable. Things may go faster than this in space, or things may go slower. I see no point in guessing.
On the question of near/faster-than-light travel
by SixDimensionalArray
In my understanding, the concepts of nuclear pulse propulsion that were investigated in the Orion Project had the highest real potential for generating enormous energies required for "faster" travel in space than anything we have, even today. I have always felt that it is a tragedy that this research couldn't be taken further into our modern realities of exploration.
Today, we have NASA exploring the potential (on a very small scale) of faster than light (FTL) travel using ideas such as the Alcubierre drive. In common discussion, we now hear about things such as: dark matter, quantum teleportation, FTL particles in the form of cosmic rays, the likely discovery of the Higgs Boson, spacetime, etc. These appear, to the layman like myself, to be serious discussions, with new realities and new possibilities being discovered every day.
The entirety of the NASA space program as we know it has developed within the last 60 years.
Given the advances in technology we have made in such a short time, the laws of physics, and the realities of the politics of our world, do you think it is feasible that we will develop the ability for very fast, near or faster-than-light travel in the next 60 years, and which direction seems the most feasible to you?
Thank you for your contributions to science, I am humbled to be able to ask this question of you!
Dyson: I disagree with almost everything here. There are two NASAs, the real NASA which is intensely conservative and likes to use safe and reliable technology, and the paper NASA which pretends to support radical ideas but never does anything real. The paper NASA will generate a lot of hype but will certainly not lead to anything real. Faster-than-light travel is rubbish. The Orion project was designed to travel only within the solar system and is far too slow for interesting interstellar voyages. In the next 60 years we may see a public highway system started which will bring down the costs of space operations substantially, but it will not be increasing the speed of travel substantially. The important barrier to space operations is cost, not speed.
Mr. Dyson. Is AI more important than space travel?
by gestalt_n_pepper
While space travel is important for human survival in the long term, the more I think about it, the more it seems that developing a human style, scalable, artificial intelligence has for more potential to provide humans with rapid access to a much larger set of useful answers in the general domain of practical, solvable problems.
The investment should be, relatively speaking, trivial, and we already have 7 billion or so working models, so I think it's fairly certain that this can be done. Given a choice, would you advocate more resources be allocated to space travel, or AI?
Dyson: You ask whether, given a choice, I would put more resources into space or AI. My answer is that either choice would be stupid. Politicians always want to make such choices too soon, because they imagine they can pick winners. Usually they pick losers. The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all. That is particularly true for space and AI, which are not really competing with each other. They are done by different kinds of people in different kinds of enterprise. Both can and should be supported. It would be totally stupid to starve one and over-feed the other.
My own opinion is that AI has failed to fulfill its promise because we are using the wrong kind of computers. We are using digital computers, and the human brain is probably analog rather than digital. So my guess is that AI will succeed only after we move from digital to analog computing. This is a tough intellectual problem that cannot be solved just by spending a lot of money.
Transhumanism, Moore's Law, etc...
by BorisSkratchunkov
Perhaps this has been asked already (throughout the various interviews, engagements, etc that you have had hitherto), but what are your general thoughts on the Singularity movement, transhumanism, and Ray Kurzweil's overall philosophy on human progress? Are these folks realistic, optimistic, or pessimistic? What are your beliefs about the current state of human advancement, and what we must work on as we careen toward the future?
Dyson: I do not believe in any kind of ism. I believe we understand very little about human nature, about psychology or about economics. I do not take seriously any of the people who claim to predict the future. I believe them even less when they claim to be accurate predictors.
The Future of Physicists
by werepants
The early to mid 20th century was one of the most dynamic times to ever happen in physics, with massive shifts in thinking and incredible applications of science that led to some of the greatest achievements of mankind. For a variety of reasons, it seems as though progress recently has been more incremental, collective, and focused on confirming the big ideas of previous thinkers. What attribute do you think is most needed in the upcoming generation of physicists to usher in the next era of scientific progress?
Dyson: Scientific progress happens in two ways, either driven by new ideas or by new tools. The first half of the twentieth century was the time of new ideas, the second half was the time of new tools.New ideas are more exciting but new tools are often more important. For the twenty-first century, it seems that the most important contribution of physicists is to build new tools for other sciences. Examples, chemistry and biology and astronomy and computer-technology, all driven by new tools supplied by physics. This is not so exciting as discovering the Dirac equation, but probably more useful. There is plenty of good stuff for physicists to do.
Fewer Polymaths in the Modern World?
by eldavojohn
When weighted against population, it appears that there are fewer "Renaissance men/women" than there have been historically. I've heard many regular people opine about how fields require more depth and learning to make progress in them but, as a polymath yourself, what is your opinion on it?
Dyson: It is undoubtedly true that we are today drowning in information. Each of us knows a smaller fraction of the total information than earlier generations knew. Our skills have become more specialized. But I do not see any decrease in breadth of interest. The young people today are still interested in as wide a variety of subjects as we old ones were. Tools of knowledge such as the internet and Wikipedia make it easier for young people today to spread their minds over many subjects.
Parenting Esther Dyson
by ideonexus
You're daughter Esther is one of the most incredibly inspiring women role models alive today. Do you have any parenting advice for those of out here with kids of our own who would like them to become similarly active, positive, and brilliant adults?
Dyson: Thank you for your compliment to Esther and to her parents. We do not claim credit for her achievements. She was lucky to be the oldest of six, so we had little time for her and gave her little of our attention. She befitted from our benign neglect. She learned from a young age to choose her own path through life. She chose for her motto: "Always make new mistakes." I believe that is the key to her happy and productive life.
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You don't want to know.. it sucks.
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You just weren't looking closely enough at how Dyson addressed this question within his other answers:
Scientific progress happens in two ways, either driven by new ideas or by new tools. The first half of the twentieth century was the time of new ideas, the second half was the time of new tools.New ideas are more exciting but new tools are often more important.
The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.
There are two NASAs, the real NASA which is intensely conservative and likes to use safe and reliable technology, and the paper NASA which pretends to support radical ideas but never does anything real.
Providing conservative but reliable tools like vacuum cleaners is clearly critical to the progress of science and technology, rather than chasing after wacky Sci-Fi goals like FTL travel.
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Learn to Google it! James Dyson is the 'inventor' of the cyclone vacuum cleaner. Nothing to do with Freeman Dyson.
to much time in class that is what is bad about co (Score:1)
to much time in class that is what is bad about collage now days to much class room and a big gap in the hands on parts of learning. Trades got this right with apprenticeships.
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I can't tell if you're trying to be ironic or if you really could use another English class or three.
But hey, the classes I had to take in microbiology, astronomy and Western History Up To AD 1400 were certainly vital to my degree in IT.
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As poorly written as GP's post was, it zeroed in on the most interesting thing that, at least for me, was said in the interview. When someone is as accomplished in so many areas as Mr Dyson is, it stands to reason that he'd have at least some insight into the educational process. And in both his response on his own education and in the one where he talked about his daughter's education, he indicated that he thought the success of both educational processes was due to a "benign neglect" which allowed the chi
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I'm betting that this is true for a certain type of child...one who is curious and driven to learn and that many students don't fit into that category.
I'd bet it would be true for lots of children, given a perspective on education at an early age that would shape them toward benefitting from this model.
If you've ever worked with toddlers, you know that the vast majority of them are eager to explore and learn. This sticks with most kids through the early years of primary school.
At some point, though, school becomes a "chore." Social attitudes about "nerds" and "geeks" take over at most schools, kids who don't succeed on particular benchmarks are alie
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MOOCs without the "honor code", which censors students helping each other.
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To much time, in class that is, what is bad about collage now? Days, to much class, room --- and a big gap! In the hands, on parts of learning. Trades got this, right with apprenticeships.
^^ I hope I interpreted your missing implicit punctuation correctly in parsing this sentence? I'm afraid your sophisticated abstract poetry is a bit beyond my level of comprehension.
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I really hope you're not a college student.
Because if you are, you're confirming my worst fears about the next generation.
On the other hand, if you're a college graduate, it's even worse.
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Clearly, he's a collage student, complaining about the current state of the field by pasting together random cut-out scraps of sentences in a confusing jumble.
I'm skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
"The same thing is true of the effects of carbon on climate. We cannot predict the effects of carbon on climate until we understand the science of climate much better than we do now. "
The thing is, Dr Dyson, that this is one of the few predictions that those who study climate for a living have made, and so far have been fairly accurate about. I agree that climatology is in its infancy, but that doesn't mean it can't accurately predict things on the level of "whatever goes up at a velocity we can manage to launch it right now always comes down again".
Well, yes. Of course. (Score:1)
"The only accurate predictions I've seen climate science made are the predictions they've made about the recent past."
Yes, because you don't know that they've come true until shortly after they occur.
Unless you're a psychic.
James Hansen's 1988 model gave predictions for the next 30 years that turned out to be almost spot on. He'd gotten absolutely right if he'd had a sensitivity of 3.4C per doubling rather than 3.2C per doubling.
However, you hear from WTFUWT that the models don't work (because some barnpot
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What's with the charts that we are doing even better than his best and most optimistic case scenario? There seems to be a lot of misinformation about what he predicted. What's your source?
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It's been over a century since the El Nino/La Nina effect was found and there was a bit of climatology before that. A huge pile of the experiments in Antarctica in the first couple of decades of the 1900s were to fill a hole in the understanding of global climate at the time.
Looks like it's time for you to find a more accurate insult for a group you don't like for some petty political reason. It's also depressing that you've got a chance to communicate with one of
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Right, climatology has been around for 100 years-ish. By contrast, physics has been around for about 2700 years, give or take, and astronomy for almost as long. That makes climatology in its relative infancy.
My point is that even though we don't know everything about climate, we can still use what we do know to make useful and accurate predictions. Dyson was arguing, in a nutshell, that we don't understand climatology, and therefor AGW theory is hokum. I'm arguing that we may not understand everything about
*cough* (Score:1)
Ugh, I need a glass of water while I read this he's so dry.
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In my opinion, that sphere seemed way too small.
Wires (Score:2)
Thank you! Been saying this for 10 damned years.
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He might be a bright guy but AI definitely isn't his field, so just because he's said this doesn't in any way mean it's true.
I'm not saying he's wrong, but if he genuinely lives by his comments on prediction then he's not saying he's right either, he's just taking a guess.
But for what it's worth I don't think AI has failed to fulfil it's promise, I really don't get that attitude at all and a physicist should know better. AI as a topic is less then 70 years old and saying it's failed to achieve strong AI is
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This sounds a lot like super audio cd. Rather than use a given number of bits to encode a number that represents the height of the sound wave at a point in time, and then use a sequence of numbers to approximate a sound wave, the signal is represented as a continuous stream of individual bits. When you want to know the height of the sound wave at a point in time, you take an average of the bit stream centered around the point you are interested in.
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I don't get this. Any analog system can be modelled to arbitrary precision by a digital system.
I don't think he's talking specifically about digital per say, rather it's been proven that some problems can't be solved by Turing machines. It is unknown if another design could produce better results, but some people theorize that our brain is a machine that is superior to computers, and can solve problems that computers never can.
I personally disagree with this theory, but admit it is still in the realm of unknown.
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> I don't think he's talking specifically about digital per say, rather it's been proven that some problems can't be solved by Turing machines.
Are you talking about interaction machines? I heard about those recently, but I haven't had the chance to follow up to see what they can do that a turing machine can't. But on the surface it doesn't make sense. An interaction machine is a network of communicating turing machines. Why couldn't this network be simulated on a turing machine and get the same resul
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This is all computer theory, if you take a computer science class about computational theory it should cover it.
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I learned a bit about the Chomsky language hierarchy in the undergrad theory class. Stuff like context free grammars and pushdown automatas.
I don't think our course covered any languages beyond the scope of a turing machine, but that sounds interesting. Intuitively it seems possible that we could define a language that a turing machine can't recognize, but aside from possibly the human brain, are there any known machines that CAN recognize those languages? Or is this just a way of saying that some proble
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are there any known machines that CAN recognize those languages?
No.
Regarding poetry, I don't understand how this is a valid example. First of all, can humans even agree on what constitutes poetry?
I haven't read the proof, but all you need to do is find some examples of poetry that a human can parse into components but a computer cannot. You don't need to prove that all poetry is unrecognizeable by a computer, just some.
A more formal example is a language called ALAN, which is easily proved to not be recognized by computers. Whether any machine could be invented to recognize it is still an open question.
Thank you (Score:2)
Thank you Dr Dyson for sharing your views on the world with us!
Wise comments on FTL and space travel (Score:4, Insightful)
I think his comments on FTL and all the hype about interstellar space exploration are totally spot-on. All the Alcubierre drive news that had NASA's name attached to it was traceable to one guy there who doesn't even really understand general relativity. What you have to understand about NASA is that they tend to write blank checks as far as exaggerations in press releases go; so while the work actually being done (building an interferometer) is valid, the hype attached to it about this and that could be extremely overblown (interferometer will be used to test FTL travel). The end result is "NASA working on warp drive" headlines where the real headline should be something much more humble and limited.
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Is not a Dyson Sphere also grandiose hype?
If NASA is guilty of pandering, the media and public are as guilty of demanding it. Star Trek is science fantasy, in that everything depends on FTL travel, which as far as we know is impossible. It is actually very pedestrian that a show like Star Trek would be an American Manifest Destiny fantasy projected into space. Our heroes dash about the galaxy, in a ridiculously physical, hands on style of exploration that is just like the exploration of the New World a
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I don't think many people set out with the idea of being evil for evil's sake. If we become the compliant automatons that the world's governments demand, we'll be much more like the Borg.
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"Is not a Dyson Sphere also grandiose hype?" I can't tell if you know what a Dyson sphere is. The idea is that civilizations may tend to evolve to the point where they need to capture all the output from their sun-- and presumably they would do this with layers of orbiting collectors, not literally a solid "sphere". This would imply that SETI efforts should look for radiation shifted down into the infrared. (Dyson credits Olaf Stapledon with the original notion, by the way.)
If you're looking for vis
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Why not a solid sphere? It doesn't have to be rigid. It could be a big balloon that the solar wind and light keeps inflated.
As depicted in STNG, the Dyson Sphere Scotty was trapped in was solid and rigid. Niven's Ringworld is also a solid, rigid structure. That's the kind I was thinking of. Seems we go for the massive construction of solid, hard, rigid materials. Almost all our buildings are like this, with exceptions such as the Metrodome's roof being notable because they are so unusual.
Mr. Dyson. Thank you for answering my question. (Score:4, Insightful)
Though your response intimated that my basic assumptions about resource allocation by governments and industry were wrong, that too is useful insight. I'm not sure it's entirely correct, however.
Both private industry and goverments are littered with failed ideas, and I am skeptical that one really does better or worse than another at picking winners and losers. Private industry, I think, simply has more active public relations machinery.
Capitalist societies seem to act more like a bacteria colonies, successfully reacting to resource availibility and strategies with immediate results while ignoring long-term consequences of their actions. Capitalism, it might be said, doesn't think ahead. That's what governments should be for, although in a democracy with a 4-year cycle, this view is often too limited for useful long-term action on matters like hydrocarbon energy depletion and global warming.
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I thought your question was pretty goofy, and he skewered it pretty well. Your strawman interpretation of his response is as goofy as the original question. You babble on about private industry versus government and the merits of capitalism. His answer and your original question had nothing to do with that. Here's his answer again for clarity:
"You ask whether, given a choice, I would put more resources into space or AI. My answer is that either choice would be stupid. Politicians always want to make such ch
Not understanding AI. That's fine. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think Dyson is a bit too pessimistic about AI. AI hasn't fulfilled the promises of human-level conversational intellect, but those promises were unrealistic. I think the problem is that people want computers to emulate human minds and human souls, when we don't even know how humans work. The solution is that computers are their own type of device, with a so-far unconscious intelligence that far exceeds human intelligence. There's even a Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] about the challenge in the perception of AI.
For exa
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I once heard it said that AI is defined as any task that a computer can't yet do. Once we learn how to write a program to perform that task, it is no longer considered AI. Chess is a good example. We once thought that it required intelligence to beat a grandmaster at chess. Now we know it just requires an algorithm, no intelligence required. If AI is defined this way, then we will indeed never achieve it.
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That's exactly it. For some reason people like to look for magic, and they see AI in that way - they want it to provide them with magic, but once you understand how magic tricks are done they're not actually very magical or very much fun.
So the question is, if we do ever figure out how the human brain works, then what then? Where is the magic? Do we become uninterested in ourselves as a species recognising each other as being just a bunch of then known and re-creatable algorithms with no real value rather t
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"Isn't the brain just a whole bunch of neural networks?"
We don't know for sure right now, that's really the problem. There's a lot of suspicion that this might be the case and given that we can interface digital computers to mammal brains and issue commands there's every possibility that our brains are in fact, at least to some degree digital and we just need more power to replicate that artificially in computers.
There are a lot of reasons to think that the idea of ANNs isn't actually too far off reality to
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Yeah, his answer seemed to be "we can't do human AI with our digital computers, maybe the problem is the tool and we need different computers". That seems premature to me since we understand higher level consciousness and the brain so poorly, the problem isn't so much the tool as the fact we're not even really sure what the problem is.
So Dyson's a big fan of PV? (Score:2)
. . . who could have imagined that?
Faster-than-light travel is rubbish (Score:1)
Misunderstanding of "no till" (Score:2)
This is a conflation of two different motivations. "No Till" agricultural techniques were promoted in the 1970s (and I was taught about them in my Soil Science classes in the 1980s ; not that I ever used it seriously) for improving and preventing damage to soil meso-structure (between the scale of the sand grain and the several metres of a well-developed soil profile),
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Mass deforestation.
Even though the lumber industry is slowing down the areas that were once dense forests are more likely to be re-purposed for agricultural (or other) use.
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Not only that, vast swaths of forest are planted as pulpwood, which requires huge energy inputs to convert to paper --- the manufacture of one hardcover book uses enough energy to put roughly 8.85 pounds of CO_2 into the atmosphere.
Re:He'd fail my class. (Score:5, Informative)
"almost"
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you are a bad teacher, quit immediately.
The truth is that the forests of the United States alone soak up more than 25% of human produced carbon each year.
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You fail as a teacher. The GP's post does not have to be factually wrong. If you magically remove all fauna, including "animal" bacteria, all flora outside of the USA and all oceans. You would see the CO2 levels dropping rapidly. The amount CO2 that plants "eat up" is huge, that is a fact. (I don't know about that 25% though.) The problem is that pesky fauna that oxidizes complex carbon molecules. So as for the equilibrium, reforestation is one of the options available. Though the USA is in a better shape t
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25% is just for U.S.A. trees (got that stat from U.S. Forest Service, agency of Dept. of Ag), I've heard rumors there are also trees elsewhere in the world
Re:He'd fail my class. (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be true in an idealized sense. As in, if we took all the money we're about to put into carbon capture and alternative energy and instead put it into planting millions of acres of trees, we might be able to maintain atmospheric CO2 at current levels... for a while. Until we ran out of space, or had a drought and large scale fires, or until the trees started dying of old age and rotting on the ground. Unless you're gonna cut down the trees and sink them to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean... but really, any plan that relies on ongoing expenditure of effort and money is doomed to fail in the long run. Our only realistic plan is to bring the cost of clean energy sources down to the point where the dirty ones aren't economical anymore.
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Parent is right (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad this is getting downvoted as it is correct. Trees consume very little of the CO2 we produce from fossil fuels, in part because trees themselves produce enormous amounts of CO2 every night, which they then re-absorb during the day.
The vast majority of CO2 fixing occurs in the ocean, not the forest.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/earth-from-space.html [pbs.org]
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"Trees eat carbon almost as fast as we can burn it."
*For sufficiently high values of "trees".
Re:Is this guy a conservative? (Score:5, Insightful)
He said that Bush senior removed all the tactical nukes which made the world safer. This is true regardless of what you think of the Bush's other actions.
I'm not sure that Dyson can easily be pigeonholed into a broad political definition. He's a very smart man who says what he thinks and doesn't really give a crap about anyone elses opinion of him. I don't always agree with him but he's generally worth listening too.
Neither one [Re:Is this guy a conservative?] (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure that Dyson can easily be pigeonholed into a broad political definition. He's a very smart man who says what he thinks and doesn't really give a crap about anyone elses opinion of him. I don't always agree with him but he's generally worth listening too.
Exactly. I find him worth listening to precisely because he is identifiable neither strictly as a liberal nor a conservative.
And, indeed, "worth listening to" does not equate to "I agree with him." It means "his analyses are interesting, and often present a viewpoint that gives an unusual insight."
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Re:Is this guy a conservative? (Score:5, Informative)
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Is this guy a conservative? If so, what is he even doing here?
Because the sub title of this site is news for nerds not news for liberals to jerk off to.
Re:Is this guy a conservative? (Score:5, Insightful)
I about coughed in my coffee when he praised a Bush for making the world safer. Is this guy a conservative?
The elder Bush gets quite a bit of praise from present-day liberals for his foreign policy. (Even my brother, who is ideologically closer to the Green Party than the Democrats, agreed with me that Bush was one of the best presidents of his lifetime.) Part of this is just nostalgia influenced by the experience of his son's foreign policy, but even from an unbiased standpoint Bush I did very well. The part that gets the most credit isn't the Persian Gulf War, but the fact that the Cold War sputtered to a halt without anything blowing up. I've always thought that Bush's chief accomplishment here was having the good sense not to do anything crazy (rather than any overt acts), but in my opinion that's one of the most underrated qualities a president can have. It has nothing to do with being "liberal" or "conservative" in the sense these words are used in American political discourse.
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Re:Is this guy a conservative? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always thought that Bush's chief accomplishment here was having the good sense not to do anything crazy (rather than any overt acts), but in my opinion that's one of the most underrated qualities a president can have. It has nothing to do with being "liberal" or "conservative" in the sense these words are used in American political discourse.
Away from politics, most people would associate "slow to do anything crazy" with "conservative". All good engineers are conservative engineers.
In politics, it always amazes me when people who would not be cool with trusting everything to an untested new bridge/building/airplane engine design are all for trusting everything to an untested new social design.
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Away from politics, most people would associate "slow to do anything crazy" with "conservative".
Well, sure, but that's why I qualified my statement - within the bounds of US politics, self-proclaimed "conservatives" tend to leap at the chance to do something radical and crazy. (And of course self-proclaimed "liberals" are often anything but, although the resurrection of the term "progressive" has helped distinguish the more dogmatic lefty types from the rest of us.)
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Yeah, those terms "liberal" and "conservative" and "libertarian" now "progressive" are all lost to reasonable discussion I fear. At least we have "classic liberal" now returning to mean "pro- individual liberty".
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At least we have "classic liberal" now returning to mean "pro- individual liberty".
Yeah, but I've also seen plenty of people claim this mantle for themselves while espousing completely contradictory positions, e.g. supporting the criminalization of sodomy. As is too often the case, they support individual liberty only so far as it aligns with their own lifestyle and economic choices. (This too is not just a conservative failing, but they tend to be the ones talking the loudest about the broad concepts of
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know, right? Free the slaves? Hold up a second, buddy! My projections indicate that would cause a fourth-quarter downturn in cotton revenues. Let's not go nuts here.
While that was just silly flamebait, it was also wrong: slaves had largely stopped being profitable in the South when the Civil War began (thanks to automation - which works cheaper than slaves) - the issue at hand was exporting slaves to the west, which would have been a fresh revenue source for slaveholders.
It was also not an untested new idea at the time. Slavery was hardly new on this Earth, and freeing slaves in large numbers had been done many times throughout history.
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You only remember the successes. 90% of new ideas are really bad. Every vanished cult and commune, every 19th century "utopia", all were based on ideas that failed, but really looked good to somebody.
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The part that gets the most credit isn't the Persian Gulf War, but the fact that the Cold War sputtered to a halt without anything blowing up.
The less said about the gulf war the better, especially for Bush. The cold war would have sputtered to what it became which was not a halt eventually, which is what happened. What, if not a halt? A below-cost weapons sale which has led to massive violence in a number of countries since, as the cold-war stockpile has been sold off.
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Do you have any facts that prove him wrong? Post them.
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Number of nuclear warheads x average warhead yield has gone up because average yield has gone up faster than number of warheads have gone down.
Except it hasn't.
The multi-megaton bombs were a thing of the '50s, when accuracies were terrible, and the solution was "just get the bomb near, and make it big."
The modern thinking on nuclear weapons is to make them small, but extremely accurately targetted. You don't need a 50-megaton Tsar-bomb if you are able to put a smaller yield weapon exactly where you want it.
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Bush Sr. did a few good things, probably by mistake. Even a broken clock...
It is right to praise that policy even if they guy may have been against it or an unwitting party to it. Jr on the other hand was trying to UNDO his father's decision and bring back tactical mini nukes etc.
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How right your are! No True Climate Scientist would ever question the consensus! The one true measure of truth is that it's spoken by "earned authority" after all. </sarcasm>
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You have a better way to arrive at knowledge about reality other than the scientific method . It seems to involve romantic notions about mavericks and strong individuals speaking truth against power.
Perhaps we should refer to the Sara Palins of the world in matters involving the nature of reality.
Please, feel free to improve on the process of how science is conducted. I'm sure you're sure you're qualified. Of course the fact that practicing scientists would reject your notions as more or less insane wou
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Most science is conducted by making falsifiable predictions about future measurements. Confirmed (or falsified) predictions speak for themselves, the "authority" of the scientists is irrelevant. Also, it doesn't take an "authority" to call BS - the burden is on the scientist making the claims to answer skeptics. If skeptics keep asking the same dumb questions, you make a FAQ [talkorigins.org]. Saying "I'm right because shut up" is not science.
Dyson is rightly pointing out that this is a new area without much track record
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The whole point is that scientists have been making models and predicting changes derived them form them for decades now and the observed changes in the climate do indeed line up with the predictions
The fact that you can say they do not is just a testament to how profoundly people can kid themselves.
Dyson' play is a pure "argument from authority" play. As I said in the original post, he is not doing science, he's attempting to leverage his authority in one domain into authority in another.
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Dyson' play is a pure "argument from authority" play. As I said in the original post, he is not doing science, he's attempting to leverage his authority in one domain into authority in another.
Except, it's not true. He proposed a long scientifically-sound solution to carbon fixing if it is needed And he spent years developing methods to measure heat in-flow and heat out-flow of forests to study effects of deforestation. His arguments are within his area of expertise. He is NOT a blowhard.
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Freeman Dyson's scientific knowledge in this area is exactly nil.
The bottom line is this Dyson, like a lot of academics from his time, is an attention seeking machine who longs to be relevant and see his name in print once again; thus his trolling of slashdot (!!!) for some love and attention. He's going to be long dead by the time the full gravity of his malfeasance becomes manifest to those that follow him - a fact he's very acutely of.
Excerpted without comment from
http://thinkprogress.org/cli [thinkprogress.org]
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Let's review how this thread has gone, shall we?
First, I pointed out that Dyson has no scientific training in the highly technical subject matter from which he dramatically differs from consensus scientific view.
Then you claimed my rejection of Dyson's opinions and embrace of mainstream scientific opinion represented an argument from authority. You then proffered one of his more fanciful notions of how to mitigate carbon pollution, if that turned out to be necessary , something Dyson counts as unlikely.
I r
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First, I pointed out that Dyson has no scientific training in the highly technical subject matter from which he dramatically differs from consensus scientific view.
I didn't even realize you made a claim so absurd. But ok. That's absurd. His "training" is irrelevant. The matter at hand is the area of his expertise. In active research area of expertise is usually significantly different from ones training. Training is learning of the basics. It is the learning of what is already known. Area of expertise is generally what one knows that few others (if any) know as well. It's why it's called "expertise."
Now that we have addressed the absurdity, let's go for cont
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>>First, I pointed out that Dyson has no scientific training in the highly technical subject matter from which he dramatically differs from consensus scientific view.
>. That's absurd. His "training" is irrelevant. The matter at hand is the area of his expertise.
Yeah you're playing word games. Expertise and training and mastery of a domain and ability to do productive research in a field and a million other noun phrases are all the same thing- do you comprehend the technical matter and the work of t
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Freeman Dyson's scientific knowledge in this area is exactly nil.
Dyson on Dyson, from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [nytimes.com]
"It's always possible Hansen could turn out to be right," he says of the climate scientist. "If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn't have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He's a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don't have a P
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- the burden is on the scientist making the claims to answer skeptics
Hey Dyson, your sphere isn't stable and your gravity generators are imaginary, prove me wrong. How much time do you think he'd put into that question? I'm pretty willing to bet none.
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> The one true measure of truth is that it's spoken by "earned authority" after all.
So you think people who know nothing but have a hunch are just as likely to be right as someone who has spent years studying and learning?
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I think it's irrelevant - a hypothesis worthy of consideration makes falsifiable predictions, and those prove true or otherwise. If we're talking about the maturity of a discipline as a whole, I'd give credence to a scientist, sure (though someone outside the discipline in question might be more objective), and I think Freeman Dyson has the background to comment intelligently
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Meanwhile, Dyson's counter-factual meanderings about climate change only serve to buttress and legitimize the deniers and their talking points at the end of which process lies a lot of real destruction and death of innocent people.
Reality. It's not just what you think.
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Unless you're an entangled boson.