Are Computers Isomorphic to Humans?

      Let me preface this essay by admitting that artificial intelligence is an old problem, and acknowledging that better minds have attacked the question before me (and certainly better minds will come after). Hence I can in no way expect to resolve the query at hand; only to jot down a few thoughts on the matter, seeking to move myself a bit closer to understanding truths which may ultimately be beyond human reach. Perhaps it is just as well that most “objective truth” is, at the end of the day, of this nature – for it may well be that we find meaning only by searching for it. Since I have probably crushed my own credibility enough on the matter at hand, 'tis high time to move on to actually getting lost in the fog, eh?

      No discussion of artificial intelligence would be complete without mentioning the ill-fated Alan Turing. His test, designed well before the computer era, is nonetheless still one of the most respected processes for determining whether or not a computer has “intelligence.” If you are not familiar with the Turing Test I will try and concisely explain it: Given a judge deciphering typewritten messages from two subjects (one a computer, one a human), have the judge attempt to distinguish which subject is the computer, and which the human. Supposedly, if the judge guesses wrong about half the time or more, we can at that point say that computers have intelligence or are close enough. Now granted, this idea for a test is not particularly novel (when one thinks of proving a thing sentient, what could be more natural than to compare the thing against himself?), but it has served as a good base to build thought experiments from. And, hey, it has become something of a tradition to hold such tests as a sideshow at computer conventions, especially those involving artificial intelligence. Anyway, let us move on to discussing some of the theoretical conclusions arrived at in attempting to build machines that could pass the test, as well as some of the problems inherent to the approach.

      First and foremost, the kind of answers a computer retorts back to user input hypothetically considered by Turing are pretty much as relevant today as they were in Turing's time. Certainly, a subject having the capacity to do arithmetic correctly at lightning speeds would arouse suspicions that said subject was of more metallic origins. Yet, as Turing pointed out, and as anyone who is familiar with programming “easier” settings for video games could tell you: it is quite simple to program a computer to occasionally give wrong answers, and to wait any given amount of time before replying. So clearly, making a computer behave “as poorly” at math as your typical human is not particularly difficult – and in learning this we have largely set such behaviors aside as being irrelevant to determining how intelligent computers really are. Indeed, we were probably barking up the wrong tree from the start by trying to define intelligence as the ability to make mistakes. Or perhaps I should say “appear to make mistakes.” More on that in a bit.

For now, let us consider how a computer might answer a question of aesthetic beauty. Suppose you showed the computer a painting and asked if it were beautiful or not. What kind of answer would give the computer away? To paraphrase the author of the main text we have been reading in this class (Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter), does the computer have a large enough soul to appreciate Bach? We could simply give the computer a learning algorithm (such as a Support Vector Machine or a Neural Network) and a ton of examples of various types of music and artwork, letting it form itself a rough aesthetic scale. The computer could then turn around and spit out an answer about where on the scale a given piece of art fell, and have it be a rough enough consideration to pass muster with our Turing Test judge. (For a rough estimate is all humans really give about such a nebulous thing as “beauty” anyway). What other foils must a computer surmount to pass a Turing Test?

      How about language and communication? Surely a computer that gave responses which sound repetitive or canned would give itself away. Or, alternatively, a computer that could not piece together the intended meaning of a given phrase could never return to the user some useful commentary on the phrase; nevermind a meaningful response to the message. Yet, assuming our judge has an infinite amount of time to keep asking questions (English providing a framework to form an infinite number of different meaningful sentences), it stands to reason that a computer can only have a finite number of potential responses. And, while a meaningful sentence-forming algorithm seems possible hypothetically, humanity has yet to produce one that actually works well enough to imagine it fooling anyone for very long. Likewise, we have yet to perfect a parsing algorithm that can be guaranteed to parse any and every meaningful sentence, which is best illustrated by the fact that we still code in “Do What I Say” mode instead of “Do What I Mean” mode. Which is to say that programming languages are still not in the same category as natural language is.

      Now, one could write really complex code such as what Mr. Hofstadter demonstrated in his dialogue between the MIT graduate student and his pet AI. But, I submit that even such code as that would have problems dealing with an infinite number of different queries from a judge. For a more in-depth example, consider compilers. Compilers require their input to fit specific syntactic rules, along with a small number of semantic constraints. The only way to guarantee a compiler can interpret and take appropriate action on any given string is if the compiler is allowed to “lookahead” towards the next 'symbol' in the given string, an infinite number of times. But computers cannot do this, because all possible implementations will have limited amounts of lookahead possible. At the very least, I cannot say I have seen an algorithm capable of accomplishing either interpretation or generation of an infinite number of different meaningful phrases. Or more simply, there is no algorithm that can keep it up indefinitely. At some point the computer will come up with an unnatural enough sentence or phrase, or will respond in a completely unexpected way to a misinterpreted sentence, that it will be found out by our judge.

      Of course, all this discussion might be quite moot, because much of what we just asked a computer to do, a human may have just as much trouble doing. Does the idiom “lost in translation” ring a bell? Even when two perfectly healthy humans are speaking the same language, with words both know very well, it is not so uncommon to encounter misunderstandings and barriers to communication of meaning and intent over completely human means of discussion. So, if we are trying to make computers human-like, why even bother with considering linguistic operations past some decently approximate level? Perhaps we have lost sight of our goal: To write an artificial intelligence capable of fooling a human into believing that the artificial intelligence is not artificial after all. Well, sure enough, we can imagine a finite set of human-tailored responses the computer could use to fool a human over a short term, and even something more along the lines of a learning program might be used to good effect if the judge queries only within a particular subset of language. But on the other hand, if we remove the constraints upon the judge's time and number of queries, it is virtually impossible to indefinitely fool the judge into believing the computer responses and requests might have arisen from a human.

     So, perhaps you were wondering when and if I would ever pick back up that thread about the “appearance” of a computer making mistakes. Well, I suppose I have kept you waiting long enough. It is my opinion that, while trying to satisfy the Turing test has steered computer science in the direction of building better and better artificial intelligence in the truest sense of artificial, it is quite a pointless venture to begin a journey towards creating intelligence by trying to “fool” a human into thinking a computer is a human. In fact, if our goal is to produce intelligence equivalent to what we have as humans, we should be far more concerned with the implementation than anything it actually does. Who cares if this electrical brain can play checkers; is it self-conscious? Does it make decisions in a non-deterministic way? Does it have a will?

     But here we have encountered a bit of circular logic. For, here we are asking if computers can perform in a way we are not actually sure humans do. We need to ask if thought really is just a higher level representation of neurons firings, and not something more. Without the notion of free will, all behavior is simply a set of programmed responses to the environment, based upon some unique combination of genes and how our learning algorithms adapted themselves to our environments over time. In such a case the Turing test would actually be quite appropriate, because our own sense of ourselves as free-willed and non-deterministic beings would be utterly delusional. If we accept our own sentience in these terms, we can quite easily answer our original query (whether humans and computers are isomorphic) in the affirmative, but can we reason our way to such a conclusion? Perhaps, in the same way Escher's Dragon cannot actually become three-dimensional, and analogous to the way Godel proved any formal system sufficiently strong enough to reason about itself must always be incomplete (“incomplete” meaning there are well-formed propositions the system can make which cannot be decided within the system), we humans cannot find our way to a decision about whether we are sentient using a system of predicate logic. Granted, we cannot even prove that the aforementioned question is undecidable at this juncture, but I could hardly do justice to you the reader if I left us wandering through the fog without expressing any kind of solid ground to stand upon. So humor me in accepting the question as currently undecidable.

     Now we are allowed to do one of three things. We could leave the question as undecidable, and appreciate the zen of it all from a distance. We could accept that humans have sentience in the frame of context we have been discussing (having free will, among other concepts intentionally left somewhat nebulous). Lastly, we could accept the contrary notion, that humans are not sentient. I am going to ignore the first option because taking that route would leave us adrift in the same murky waters we were in before accepting the question was undecidable. Given that the immediate consequences of accepting the notion that humans are not sentient are quite depressing (essentially it would mean accepting a completely deterministic world, where any notions of individuality, achievement, right and wrong, etc are wholly delusional), I think I will hold off on accepting that conclusion. Where does this leave us? Accepting that humans have a brand of intelligence that includes free will. If we accept that, then we have pretty much answered our fundamental query in the negative, because computers and whatever output we get from them are ultimately limited to how we interpret their electrical signals; by definition this puts computers in an entirely different category from humanity.

On Political Jargon: A Somewhat Immodest Proposal

Fellow denizens of the net:

     I move we realign a lot of terminology in our country's political vernacular to be more consistent through history.  Specifically, the following jargon needs to be addressed:

Liberal -- We ought to use this term only in respect to the liberal tradition present in English and American history, typically dated back to Edmund Burke (though really present in society at least as far back as King John was forced to sign the Great Charter).  This consists of a trend towards more freedom of speech and religion.  If any current political movement can be said to express the ideals of this tradition it would be the Libertarian Party.  The term has nothing to do historically with Democratic Socialism, and it would be inadvisable to continue using it in a manner that suggests a relation.

Moonbattery -- This term could potentially refer to a Lunar weapon emplacement, which is far too awesome to leave it as a derogatory term referring to those who believe that criminals follow laws, that government is a wealth creator, and/or those who simply suffer from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome).

Reform -- We ought to only apply this particular term when a plan of action demonstrably improves a specific program, either by decreasing costs or improving efficiency or effectiveness.  Making only cosmetic changes, or making changes which will obviously worsen the situation should not be considered as reform.

The Political Spectrum / The Right-Left Axis -- In regards to this, it really is an overgeneralization, and always has been.  I would recommend dropping it altogether from our vernacular.  If we must continue its use, it should refer to the classic distinction between the party of the court and the party of the country, republicans versus monarchists, or in the US, federalism versus states' rights.  If I were to put this in terms of modern pundits, think Bill O'Reilly as your typical lefty, Rush Limbaugh as probably dead center, and Nick Gillespie as your typical righty.  Such a spectrum would more accurately be in line with our history.

Grassroots/Astroturf -- I'm in favor of throwing both terms out, because while it ought to be seen as pathetic when you have to pay people to agree with you, I think we're intelligent enough to view _any_ idea thrown out in the public venue abstractly (regardless of who/where it came from).  It does not seem useful to make a distinction between opinions based on what occupation the person comes from.  Bad ideas are bad ideas, and good ideas are good ideas no matter who came up with them.

Expert -- There are certain subjects which require such specific layers of knowledge and understanding that I think most people implicitly understand that the person involved really does deserve to be taken credible.  Then there's everything else:  history, sociology, political science, economics, literature, art, psychology, business, marketing, etc.  The only expertise involved in this list of topics is what we all learned in high school -- the ability to analyze information and report on it.  I'm not sure even a differentiation between professional and amateur would be in order for any of the aforementioned "skills."

Welfare -- Basically, this ought to return to referring to infrastructure that maintains, promotes, and/or improves public well-being.  It should not refer to any private goods or services given to a specific individual.

Global Warming -- Either make this term refer only to the kind of pseudo-science Al Gore endorses, or use it only in the sense of a layman's term for the Greenhouse Effect.  I get tired of having to explain that I think AGW is a hoax, not trying to claim the aforementioned scientific phenomena doesn't happen.

And that's it...for now.  I may think of some more later, but readjusting this stuff would make politics a lot clearer and more consistent not only for us now, but in keeping a consistent historical context for progeny's sake.

Are Morals Axiomatic or Can We Reach Them Via Reason Alone?

     Today I should like to explore what I think is a failing of Rational Constructivism (the theorists of which refer to themselves as "anti-moralists); that we ought to only do those things we can reason out an explanation for, and avoid making decisions as to how to act based on base and vulgar superstition.  So what is the failing with this belief?  Well, where do you start reasoning from?  Since the topic is morality, let's take an appropriate question and see how Christian philosophy explains it and then see how Rational Constructivism answers it.

     Is murder wrong?  Why?

     Christian philosophy would answer this in a seemingly simplistic way -- that yes, it's wrong to murder because, essentially, the Bible tells us so.  If we are to take C. S. Lewis' anecdotal "common sense" approach, this is further backed up by nigh-instinctual human feelings, some specific "sense" almost akin to the physical ones, that is consistent and standard across humanity (and 'sense' seems to be a good analogy as some people seem to have relatively strong, weak, or no morality at all, much as each man's quality of sight and sound are rather relative).  More to the point, murder is wrong because the 10 commandments forbid it and Jesus' Golden Rule (under which all actions should be measured) says, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you;" most of us would prefer not to be murdered, so in following this rule we do not in turn murder.

      Rationalists seem to find such an explanation insulting -- they would equate it to submitting oneself to, again, base and vulgar superstition; not doing one's own thinking.  Surely, an intellectual would have a more dignified explanation where belief is not an issue in complying...right?  To paraphrase a response I got from this inquiry, "Yes, because it does harm."

     So apparently, I've been had.  I thought this guy was a rationalist and an atheist, yet here he is, adopting a moral that says "do no harm" as an axiom.  I asked "and why should we do no harm?" but he said he had already answered my question and intimated that further questioning was a sign of obstinacy on my part.

     Must we be left to our own to determine how a true Rational Constructivist would frame his argument?  I suppose we shall have to make as honest an attempt as can be made; and do correct me if the following conjecture mischaracterizes in any way, shape, or form, the philosophies of pure rationalism.

     Plato put forward one tool we might use:  "Act for the greater good."  But then, what is the greater good?  If we deign to turn to the public opinion on the matter -- assuming that surely, the public must know what's in their best interests, right? -- we get an inconsistent set of answers which varies temporally and regionally.  You might think inflicting pain was bad, right?  Not always -- De Sade, Sartre, and any number of ascetics (especially Buddhists) seem to value pain and suffering.  Of course, even had we found a consistent public opinion which held sway, we would then be left with the issue of explaining why the public opinion should form an axiom from which to build our arguments.

     Insomuch as most Rationalists tend to view themselves as men of science, which consists largely of divining how things work by observation and experiment, we ought to expect them to abhor sophistry and relativism since neither mathematics nor science work without some basic qualities of consistency and immutability.  (For example, if we define ourselves some numerical representations for counting in base ten, 1 + 1 should always be 2; it can't sometimes be 3 and sometimes be 0).  But yet, that seems to be what we're left with with a purely Rational approach.  We cannot apparently conclude what is good and what is bad without adopting some axiom on its face value.

Passing Thought: Applying Computer Science Theory to Economic Theory

     So I have been reading The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek Volume 1:  The Fatal Conceit - The Errors of Socialism.  Haven't quite finished the first chapter, even but it brought some interesting thoughts that I wanted to write down before I forgot them.

-- Hayek makes a reference back to Adam Smith's discussion of basic supply and demand, "the invisible hand" and all... I got to thinking, maybe one of the reasons our economy does so well at what it does (with pricing serving as an indicator that serves to automatically adjusts supply and demand to prevent overproduction and overconsumption) is essentially a form of information hiding and modularity.

I suppose I should explain those terms.  Information hiding is best explained in terms of functions and arguments.  For a programmer, when you're making use of another programmer's function, your usual concern is what the function returns and what arguments are required in what order.  If you should decide to tool around with this other programmer's code without understanding how and why he programmed it the way he did, you will almost certainly end up with a function that is less efficient - and worse, you may break the function altogether.  Thus, there is a need to prevent the first programmer from changing the second programmer's code.  I won't bore you with the variety of methods how you might go about this in an object-oriented context, but I think you get the concept.

Modularity fits along the same lines -- basically it's the concept of breaking up a program from one big "main" function into a bunch of smaller ones; each usually accomplishing a very simple, easy-to-define task.  Under these circumstances it is much easier to debug a malfunctioning program because you can usually narrow down the function that is problematic and fix it accordingly.

Now, how does this all fit in with economics?  Well in early times, and even today, the consumer rarely knows how a particular product arrived at a given store.  He usually doesn't know how it was manufactured, sometimes he doesn't even know all the contents!  My thought is this: what if this not knowing is part of why our market system works so well?  And if that is so, isn't it all the more reason command economies (such as Socialism/Fascism/Communism/Mercantilism/Absolutism/etc) rarely if ever produce positive results (nevermind trying to get results better than what the market system provides)?

Let me know in the comments what you think of the idea. -- I'll go back to reading.

Analytical Report on 5 Topics from Speech Class

The following is an analytical report I had to write for my speech class, covering 5 things over 5 pages we studied in class and my opinions/experience with them. Some of it may be kind of common sense stuff and thus rather boring, but lemme know what ye webonauts out there think via comments.

Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs – The Boomerang Effect

Among the more interesting concepts discussed in our Speech class this semester was “The Boomerang Effect.” This is, basically, a turnaround of a person’s opinion after they have given deeper thought to something they were convinced of earlier on a Peripheral basis. (Peripheral referring to quick-response decisions made when offered reciprocation, consistency, social proof, etc). In my own experiences I have seen and heard many such peripheral persuasions, and my own sense of pride makes me prejudice any argument presented this way, especially after I have agreed to do something based on said agreements. For example, whenever my elder sister asks me for some favor or another (such as recently when she got me to drive her dryer down to a shop to get fixed and back up to her apartment) by way of a “guilt trip” (usually suggesting she’d get my father to carry out said errand, even at the risk of possible injury), I usually find myself resenting her for it. So, yes, the boomerang effect is a real psychological aftereffect.









“It’s For The Children!!” And Other Appeals to Emotion – Logical Fallacy?

Prior to presenting persuasive speeches, we went over a variety of logical fallacies to avoid in making arguments, and while “Appeal to Emotion” isn’t technically a logical fallacy per se, I think it fits in a bit with what we were just discussing (Boomerang Effect) and is thus, well, kind of a logical fallacy. While I can not speak for others, when I hear politicians on television or the internet making arguments based around emotionalism (usually accompanied by a little bit of exaggerated hyperbole) I find myself discouraged from listening to whatever otherwise logical arguments they were trying to make to support a given course of action. A good example of this in recent memory is found in the healthcare debate, where many politicians are using an ever-changing number of “millions of people” who are uninsured as a reason to further regulate hospitals, doctors, and related insurance companies. While it is not necessarily a logical fallacy to point out a societal problem and ask for empathy on behalf of the afflicted, it is at the least distasteful to use the existence of said problem as a reason to “do something.” So, again, while appeal to emotion is not a logical fallacy in and of itself, I think it is fair to say that it could cause a boomerang effect in an audience and is inadvisable, or at least merits careful thought before using.






On Powerpoint Usage – Keep It Simple!

When presenting a speech on a given topic we were advised against using very complex and fancy powerpoints; advice which in my experience is right on the money. A recent project I was doing for my Corporate Finance class required a powerpoint to accompany a ten minute presentation on whether or not starting a software development company was a worthwhile investment. How lucky I was to be in Speech class at the same time! Where many of my classmates had used a wide variety of colors in their powerpoints, and images that often obscured the spreadsheets and numerical figures which were supposed to be the meat of the research; my partner and I had a simple, straight-to-the-point set of slides to get across our main points. While the grades have yet to come in I am reasonably confident that we probably scored fairly well overall, and likely got full points for the powerpoint. Therefore, I have to agree with the book and lectures on powerpoint presentations, that conciseness and clarity are far more important than boisterous effects and fashionista design.









Cultivation Theory – How Accurate Are Our “Informed” Perceptions?

Do TV and the Internet present an accurate image of the world around us? Most of us would likely agree that television and movies give people over-exaggerated perceptions of the kinds of physical beauty and intelligence they should expect in potential mates, for starters. Certainly not every guy has as clean a face as Brad Pitt and certainly not all women are as curvaceous as Angelina Jolie, yet I wonder how many marriages have been broken because one spouse or the other thinks not only that they can find someone better, but that they deserve someone better than whomever they are currently paired with? I have personally seen such “entitled” behavior present in my sisters and female cousins (granted, their chosen beaus are often rather unimpressive individuals…perhaps that is only my own twisted perceptions speaking, though), where they always seem to think that “the grass is greener” someplace or with someone else.
Of course, looks are not the only things that are perceived improperly; I doubt you would find it surprising that a number of political positions held by a number of people are often misrepresented on a daily basis. It almost seems that the more fallacious an argument, the more news coverage it gets. As a for instance, a strong memory of mine is scenes of people pulling cots and mattresses into the House of Representatives back in the middle of the nineties, when Clinton, the president at the time, was vetoing and trying to shut out Republicans from important budget votes. I can not tell you how many people I have run into who credit Clinton with the budget and the net surplus that was arrived at as a result of that moment in history. Then again, maybe it is I who have been given “a spin” on that particular bit of history.

Uses and Gratification Theory

How easy is it to close your ears, hum to yourself, and ignore everything you do not want to hear, only paying attention to the sources you want to listen to? Far too easy, according to our Speech textbook. The idea that people in this day and age who use social media on the internet tend to close their circle off to other points of view is certainly easy to imagine. And surely, there is a bubble I could lock myself into on the net. Take twitter, for example, the much-maligned 140-word-limit social media service. There exists a way of “tweeting” to a certain set of individuals and only that certain set, and you can block and ignore anyone who would say something you do not want to hear. In particular, there’s a “channel” of sorts on twitter known as “#p2” which is full of people who generally hold ‘liberal’ points of view… and a channel called “#tcot” typically representing the opposing side. So here we have two bubbles of mutually exclusive groups and a method available to tune out opposing sides. Does this happen in practice? Surprisingly, no. You see, internet communication has a long history of “trolling,” “flame wars,” and “baiting” in which people go online with the sole purpose of debating people on the other side, either to ridicule them by baiting them into an argument where they look foolish, or to ‘win’ an argument, thus showing off supposed intellectual fortitude. All in all, I think this meme-like behavior will prevent social media users to ever completely cordon themselves off (though some certainly give a good effort).

Binary Morality and other Religious Quandaries

So, I had a conversation the other day with one of my classmates about religion and the way we view morality; both of us are in a discrete math class and we came up with a few basic axioms of religion we figured were mutually exclusive (that is, only one can be true):

A) There is one and only one God
B) There are many gods
C) There is no god

Here we would likely define the "kami" of Shintoism and the boddhisatvas of Buddhism as a religion favoring the many gods axiom (as well as similar beliefs).

As much as everyone would like to be accepting or tolerant, this is kind of the way it is: By believing in any particular religion you are accepting the premise that people who don't believe the same way you do about one of the basic axioms are wrong.

Settling that, we started talking about pretty nebulous ideas like justice, mercy, and morality in general. We were mostly talking about Protestantism vs LDS beliefs (since my classmate is LDS and I'm a Protestant with LDS uncles, aunts, and cousins). In talking about the idea of justice, I put forth the idea that justice as we see it is entirely subjective; that is, we see a theft and we judge that a relatively short term of imprisonment is payment enough, but the rape and murder of a child deserves life imprisonment or capital punishment: death.

Now, again this is entirely subjective because, at least in my understanding of the Bible, God sees sin simply as a sin. It has neither a gradient nor is it cumulative. All of that comes down to a premise of mine about the way God looks at things. I think if we think of it in binary terms (1 is clean of sin, 0 is sinful), you can only attain '1' by either accepting Jesus as your savior, or by being Jewish and practicing the cleansing rituals. If we further pontificate on the verses about man being inherently imperfect and the flesh being naturally tempted toward sin, it stands to reason that '0' is the default state; and everyone under completely "fair and just" circumstances deserves to go to Hell (or whatever you wanna call your local burning pit of eternal torment). Me included.

Now when it comes to the idea of justice and mercy, my classmate was saying that you cannot receive mercy from the same entity/being as you would have received justice; that there has to be a third party for God to be "eternally unchanging." And here we went into a friendly debate about the nature of the Trinity (which is one of the main rift points between LDS and other Christians, a big enough point IMO to disinclude LDS as one of the sects of Christianity).

From my interpretation, the trinity is a set of 3 different manifestations of the same being. "The Father" is sort of the general-purpose manifestation that we envision ourselves praying to, that we think of as being on a golden throne in heaven, etc etc yada yada yada. "The Son" is Jesus, the savior, the messiah, the one we think of as lending the merciful hand (some people would even envision him as the defense attorney on our behalf before the Father in some place of ultimate judgement). Last is "The Holy Ghost/Spirit" which is how some envision the conscience, that which nudges us in the right direction when we come to a moral decision (though I think of my own conscience as something separate, and the Holy Ghost is more, God acting as the universal hint system). But anyway, all three manifestations are just our own vision or idea about how things are, like looking at a C++ or Java implementation when what's in Assembly (or even just binary machine language) tells a slightly different story. All 3 are really the same entity.

As for how my classmate interpreted it, it goes back to the argument about God (The Father) being unchanging and incapable of offering Justice and Mercy at the same time; thereby necessitating a third party in the form of Jesus Christ, who under this understanding must be seen as a separate entity than The Father.

Well, if I misunderstood any of that (classmate who may or may not read this) feel free to correct me; and I'd love to hear others' opinions on the matter in the comments.

A Discussion on Labels

So, checking out Gadfly's site and I came across some interesting ideas from Conservative Wahoo about coining "neo-socialism" as a term to describe the Obama administration's leanings.

I think the main problem I have with the phrase is that it's suggesting that A) Obama has really thought out his positions in a meaningful way, and B) this administrations ideas ARE new which is something of a fallacy.

Addressing point A, the impression that I've gotten from Obama, from the very beginning was that he was a political opportunist, above all else. This is perhaps why Edward Kennedy (black spot on the Kennedy name as he is/was) endorsed him, maybe sensing a kinship in the lack of a real philosophical foundation upon which to base his politics. The kind of people he associates/d himself with are not just left-leaning radicals, they are also corrupt in every sense of the word (Blago, Rezko, even the scams that went on where Michelle O worked. I'm not saying he's not pursuing socialist-style philosophies, but rather, it's not clear that he's philosophically motivated in the first place. It is therefore a case of jumping the gun to coin a term to define the philosophy backing his policies.

To address point B, I'll go back to the fallacy we were indoctrinated into believing in high school economics and US history, as well as what I've seen in college economics classes. That is, that Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes presented ideas which were new and untried. If we go back to the "age of enlightenment" in 1700s France we find the same basic ideas from the likes of Rousseau and before that, back to the Greek philosophers you have some branches of stoicism relating much the same ideas. As far as policies based on political philosophies, a lot of the considerations about a federally controlled national bank issuing money and purposefully inflating it have been tried throughout history; by the Khans during their control of China; by the French (again under absolutism in the 1700s) and even a bit of the same under the era of Mercantilism by the British and the Dutch. I could go on but I think you get my drift: Obama's ideas, much the same as Marx's, are not in any sense new. They've been tried by many people in many places in many eras, and have never worked. Period. Constantly trying to reinvent the wheel is not going to lead to major progress (another word relating back to another group of people who tried and failed at centrally planned economies).

To add even more confusion to the mix, the term "liberal" which is now used to generally reference a person with the same ideas as all the bozos I just mentioned, actually used to refer to us; that is, conservatism today is/was also referred to as liberalism at least up until the 1930s or so. In fact, the "movement" of "neoliberalism" is in fact a move towards freeing markets from overactive government regulators. I just wish there was some easy way to wipe all these ideas and policies that have essentially been proven wrong, time and time again, to be thrown off the political map; they don't belong.

Concurrency ~ Starving Philosophers Problem

This site is awesome!

A Beginning ~ Random Meanderings

Hello world.

So, just thought, all the cool kids are writing blogs these days, I should too. I'm thinking I'll write about computer science stuff here, my own personal philosophy, political leanings, and my own game reviews (or at least, partial reviews in that I don't always play a game through to the end).

I'm also going to post some of my essays I think are noteworthy up here for your entertainment, maybe expanding on some of the ideas more later on. I'm also gonna toss up some example programs I write for my own reference (and anyone else who finds them interesting).