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Very surprised to see F.A Hayek on HN. I would recommend the Road to Serfdom to anyone who is interested in learning more about his viewpoint. Also reading Thomas Sowell wouldn’t hurt either.
I agree that the Road to Serfdom is an interesting read. Even if you don't share the really conservative view of the author (and the Austrian school as a whole), it gives you the ideological background that underlied the dismantling of the western Welfare State (which is what Hayek calls “road to serfdom”) during the 80s and 90s.
> In Raod to Sefdom Hayek acknowledges that basic welfare, health and retirment polices are consistant with a liberal state.
True, and it was actually a surprise to me since this part of the book have completely disappeared from later policymaking. It's not that uncommon though, most people using Adam Smith as a reference tend to forget the part where he goes full socialist and calls landlords parasites… I even saw a reedition of Wealth of Nations (in French, from an independant libertarian publisher) where the said chapters where simply removed from the book!
> idioitc regulatory structures
Oh yeah, and the 2008 crisis was a good illustration of how good of an idea it was to remove those “idiotic” regulations. Oopsie
> What it gave a backround to was dismanteling a lot of the idioitc regulatory structures
Guardrails are so idiotic: people are always bumping into them and getting annoyed. It'd probably be best if we just removed most if not all of them. /s
The thing about regulations is you can always cherry-pick a couple mind-boggling stupid ones. But then there are the ones that look silly, but only if you've never experienced or witnessed the problem they were meant to solve.
These regulations included things like monopoly in many industries, truckig, airlines and so on. There are lots of example like this. I'm just absoulty mindboggled by the current liberal idea of literally and regulation is always great and any removal of any regulation always responsable for the next crisis. Even saying 'deregulation' gets view on basically like saying that you are a neonazi.
Simularly the view that all regulation exist for a good reason is also flat-out false. It flys directly in the face of any serious study of political science and the formation of regulation in the real world.
> I'm just abso[lutely] mindboggled by the current liberal idea of literally an[y] regulation is always great and any removal of any regulation always respons[i]ble for the next crisis.
> ...Sim[i]larly the view that all regulation exist for a good reason is also flat-out false.
You're boggling your own mind, since that's a straw man position. I made it clear I didn't hold it ("the thing about regulations is you can always cherry-pick a couple mind-boggling stupid ones..."), and I don't think "liberals" hold it either.
The position I do hold is that to actually evaluate a particular regulation is difficult and requires a lot of thought; and it's easy to to mislead someone into taking an ignorant, broadly anti-regulation stance by cherry-picking examples of bad ones. I've seen a lot of that, and at one time I even found the cherry-picking persuasive.
Deregulatory zeal has a tendency of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also, some specific cases of deregulation can merely re-introduce negative externalities that some connected group stands to benefit from (to the determent of the public good).
I love Thomas Sowell. It’s extraordinarily impressive that while Dr. Sowell is 90 years old, he’s still sharp as an arrow. As a matter of fact he’s about to release a new book.
Also, from what I could gather from Twitter, it appears that recently more and more people are following his unofficial Twitter account. I’ve counted thousand new followers by the day.
Yeah, Sowell is still writing books like age never impacted him! He's amazing. He's also very careful to stay politically neutral about every issue he touches upon.
His book "Basic Economics" keeps getting updates every 5 years or so, at this stage it's almost an encyclopedia of economic principles.
Surprised me as well. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose (book and tv) remains so much relevant reading in 2020. Hayek was very hard to comprehend because his writing is information dense. You have to read a sentence carefully few times to full comprehend it.
Any sense in which Godel's incompleteness theorem implied that Artificial General Intelligence was impossible would also imply that General Intelligence is impossible; the human brain isn't immune to the laws of logic. The human brain is just a very complex, possibly quantum, computer. Short of believing in some kind of supernatural human soul, there's no reason to expect a sufficiently complex computer couldn't match the human brain (although it's an open question whether we could build a sufficiently complex computer).
I think that there are other mechanisms apart from computation; the question is - are they operant in our universe? The implication of the answer being "no" is that we are automaton, free will does not exist (it isn't even an illusion, you are as much a puppet thinking about it as you are trying to change your fate. Well, moving on from there we can dismantle all of the morality and humanity of our lives and not change one jot becuase we have no choice. I don't believe that any one has observered anything that isn't reducable to computation, but then again, perhaps our cognitive capabilities simply can't do that.
>The implication of the answer being "no" is that we are automaton, free will does not exist (it isn't even an illusion, you are as much a puppet thinking about it as you are trying to change your fate.
This is implied by logic anyway. Why do we make decision X at time T? Because of who we are at time T. Why are we that person at time T? Because of decisions made at time T-1. Why did we make those decision at T-1? Because of who we were then, which was the restult of decisions made at T-2. If we continue this process, we reach T-only-a-baby, when we were incapable of conscious decision making. So causally all our actions can be traced back to something we can't control. Unless, some of our decisions were entirely the result of chance, but in this case we still don't have free will, we just have actions that are random instead of predetermined.
I think that there are a lot of assumptions in that chain. When you or I ask why did we make a decision X we can formulate answers but, for my account, I don't have access to all of the components of my thinking - I cannot articulate what I feel is really going on. I think that randomness in the universe is very hard to account for too - I was impressed by an essay that Scott Aaronson wrote about this : https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf but I have read it several times and I am afraid I don't really understand it.
We have yet to duplicate anything even near human intelligence or introspective abilities with computation. We therefore have no existence proof that human mind is purely computational in nature. I think we can safely say that computation is necessary to produce a mind, but we cannot yet say for certain that it is sufficient.
Mind may require something else that we don't yet understand. (Not necessarily claiming it would have to be supernatural, just not yet understood. Perhaps quantum computation or some other kind of quantum effect?)
Why would it? How do Godel's incompleteness theorems factor in here?
It's a common mistake to think the theorems say more than they really do, or apply in more cases than they really do. AI is simply based on the idea that we can reach at least the level of human intelligence, in artificial software/hardware, which, considering that we ourselves are pure hardware/software and nothing magical, should absolutely be right.
> considering that we ourselves are pure hardware/software
I also supect this, but let's be honest that we as a species are not close to understanding consciousness in it's entirity yet so I'd refrain from making such absolute statements
You're putting too high a bar on what we need to understand. We don't understand physics in its entirety either- we can still say lots of things with confidence.
That we are our physical body is pretty certain. You press a certain part of the brain, and predictably our personality changes. Of course we can't be certain of a lot of things, but I am much more certain of this than I am of of other things, and Godels theorems don't apply.
"Roger Penrose and J.R. Lucas argue that human consciousness transcends Turing machines because human minds, through introspection, can recognize their own inconsistencies, which under Gödel’s theorem is impossible for Turing machines. They argue that this makes it impossible for Turing machines to reproduce traits of human minds, such as mathematical insight."
“Capitalism will solve it” is not at fault here. What you’re describing is crony capitalism. It sounds as if your local politicians are not doing a great job at creating TRUE competition along with a TRUE free market. In other words your local monopoly should not even exist it should be broken up.
