Hi David,
I was jumping all over you when I say that. Well, I was jumping all over your jumping all over him, not jumping all over you. Ireland just became the first country to have a referendum where the people decided that marriage is something any two people can do (I'm still recovering from sharing in a twelve hour party on Saturday with all my friends who took part in that). I was almost sure we'd lose that because, during the debate in the last few months, our "yes" side often responded to many legitimate questions about the rights of children to have their biological parents present with the slur that the questioner was a "homophobe" instead of addressing the question. I was mistaken (about our losing), and very proud of everyone who chose to restrict their thinking to the question at hand, this enlarging the rights of people whose orientation they didn't understand. But I could have been right, and the name-calling could have led to a regression in my country and a lot of needless suffering. It's always good to separate information from emotion. We're all really bad at it but this is both a reason to practise and improve that in ourselves, and to build machines which don't have this flaw. Having re-heard about half this interview, I think Jeff is clearly doing this. We all have a desire to be agreed with, but the best way to do this is to find ways to include people currently in disagreement with us, and let reality and logic decide who's right. Gandhi's almost superhuman ability in this regard is an inspiration to all of us, but he was also just a man, and died regarding himself a failure. He was wrong, but at least he knew he was really comparing himself against an impossible standard. So, I'm not attacking you for attacking this guy. I'm just saying we need to always try to be better than we ever can be, and refuse to be anything less. Cheers Fergal -- Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT Author, Real Machine Intelligence with Clortex and NuPIC https://leanpub.com/realsmartmachines Speaking on Clortex and HTM/CLA at euroClojure Krakow, June 2014: http://euroclojure.com/2014/ and at LambdaJam Chicago, July 2014: http://www.lambdajam.com http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology http://ie.linkedin.com/in/fergbyrne/ - https://github.com/fergalbyrne e:[email protected] t:+353 83 4214179 Join the quest for Machine Intelligence at http://numenta.org Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 5:04 PM, cogmission (David Ray) <[email protected]> wrote: > This was someone's response to Jeff's interview (see here: > https://www.facebook.com/fareedzakaria/posts/10152703985901330) > Please read and comment if you feel the need... > Cheers, > David > -- > *With kind regards,* > David Ray > Java Solutions Architect > *Cortical.io <http://cortical.io/>* > Sponsor of: HTM.java <https://github.com/numenta/htm.java> > [email protected] > http://cortical.io
