https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg

--
https://groups.google.com/g/human-evolution
human-evolution@googlegroups.com

On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg

Math is only a small part of this video. The "unsolvable" question which it seems to be mainly about requires knowledge about Chinese licenses for ship captains and the weight of an average goat and sheep, and other arcane data. It certainly didn't belong in a test for 5th graders -- more like a radio contest where the first caller to the station that gets it right wins a prize.

I stopped watching at the point where it said that Sherlock Holmes stories entertain people with casual
observations by Holmes in which he solves equally impossible-sounding "riddles." But unlike the main
mystery, which readers do have a ghost of a chance to solve sometimes, these casual observations
are of no real importance to the plot and are strictly for entertainment value.

All of which makes me wonder: was there actually an evolutionary point made further on in the video?

Or did you post it just to reassure us that you are still around?

Peter Nyikos

On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg

OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school students cannot recognize that there is not enough
information in a math problem to answer it.

Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures" they have for teachers that they cannot
bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem.

Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right answer" could be found by adding
or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in simple ways. And so that was
what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an actual answer and didn't
care whether it really had anything logically to do with the problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.

There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
more time trying to figure it out.

Peter Nyikos

PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way, a comment on all of the above.

On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>
> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school students cannot recognize that there is not enough
> information in a math problem to answer it.
>
> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures" they have for teachers that they cannot
> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem.
>
> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right answer" could be found by adding
> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in simple ways. And so that was
> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an actual answer and didn't
> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>
> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
> more time trying to figure it out.
>
>
> Peter Nyikos
>
> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way, a comment on all of the above.

Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
from seeing the answer.
But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats. From my life
experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to figure
out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
they don't get it.
People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.

--
https://groups.google.com/g/human-evolution
human-evolution@googlegroups.com

On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> >> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
> >
> > OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
> > is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school students cannot recognize that there is not enough
> > information in a math problem to answer it.
> >
> > Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures" they have for teachers that they cannot
> > bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem.
> >
> > Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right answer" could be found by adding
> > or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in simple ways. And so that was
> > what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an actual answer and didn't
> > care whether it really had anything logically to do with the problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
> >
> > There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
> > more time trying to figure it out.
> >
> >
> > Peter Nyikos
> >
> > PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way, a comment on all of the above.

> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
> from seeing the answer.

> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.

On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
the minimum age that the captain could be?

> From my life
> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to figure
> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
> they don't get it.

However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so careless about defining problems
that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way it is worded,
it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the box" answer the students
were expected to come up with.

The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test named after a world-renowned
code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be a test that, if it is successful,
can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"

There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having nothing
to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want anyone to think that my
contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.

Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation game." This game involves
two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an "interrogator" (C) who
communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you and I are doing now.
(C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by asking questions of each of them.

After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes the game by saying,
"What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer] takes the part of (A) in the game?"

When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is changed; for instance, (C) is still
told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And so the only way the machine could FAIL
the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the test, and says something like what
a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or write:

"You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"

After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the interrogator IS told that one participant
is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about the two things he had written
about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man." But this too has nothing to do
with my low opinion of Turing's essay.

Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word "Most" at the beginning of the following sentence:

> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.

No, it also requires a certain amount of backbone to stand up to a teacher and tell her/him that her/his
question is unanswerable as stated.

Peter Nyikos

On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>
>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>
>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures" they have for teachers that they cannot
>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem.
>>>
>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right answer" could be found by adding
>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in simple ways. And so that was
>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an actual answer and didn't
>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>
>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>
>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way, a comment on all of the above.
>
>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
>> from seeing the answer.
>
>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>
> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
> the minimum age that the captain could be?

Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
Also, the test was clear, it *didn't* ask for the minimum age, it
asked for the exact age.
I mean, that way I can solve any equation. I just say that the result
is between minus infinity and plus infinity, and it is the problem of
the test that it didn't ask for margins, ;) .

>> From my life
>> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to figure
>> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
>> they don't get it.
>
> However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so careless about defining problems
> that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way it is worded,
> it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the box" answer the students
> were expected to come up with.
>
> The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test named after a world-renowned
> code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be a test that, if it is successful,
> can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"
>
> There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having nothing
> to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want anyone to think that my
> contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.
>
> Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation game." This game involves
> two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an "interrogator" (C) who
> communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you and I are doing now.
> (C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by asking questions of each of them.
>
> After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes the game by saying,
> "What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer] takes the part of (A) in the game?"
>
> When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is changed; for instance, (C) is still
> told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And so the only way the machine could FAIL
> the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the test, and says something like what
> a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or write:
>
> "You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"
>
>
> After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the interrogator IS told that one participant
> is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about the two things he had written
> about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man." But this too has nothing to do
> with my low opinion of Turing's essay.

Well, your low opinion on this essay matches exactly my low opinion on
human ability to make artificial intelligence.

> Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word "Most" at the beginning of the following sentence:
>
>> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
>> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.

"People" is a generalization, and it means "most people". Although, of
course, it can be interpreted as the ultimate disability of every human,
it can also be interpreted as the general disability of most humans.
Both versions are valid.

> No, it also requires a certain amount of backbone to stand up to a teacher and tell her/him that her/his
> question is unanswerable as stated.

Actually, it is answerable, and the answer is clear. It cannot be any
other way, whichever way you put it, and it is simple and clear right away.
Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something after
5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes. Applying it
on real world problems do need some intelligence. This equation above
showed that "intelligence" in real light.

--
https://groups.google.com/g/human-evolution
human-evolution@googlegroups.com

I hope you are still around, Mario, even though more than a month has
elapsed. I have had my hands full both here and in talk.origins, especially the latter.

Here is a serious matter that concerns only s.b.p. [1] :
Harshman and Simpson are both acting as though they want sci.bio.paleontology to
become extinct, and their close ally Hemidactylus acted just last week in talk.origins
as though it were already dead, with no correction from Harshman, whom he
was backing to the hilt on the same thread.

[1] talk.origins, for all its faults [and they are SERIOUS] is still going very strong.

On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> >> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> >>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
> >>>
> >>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
> >>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school students cannot recognize that there is not enough
> >>> information in a math problem to answer it.
> >>>
> >>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures" they have for teachers that they cannot
> >>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem.
> >>>
> >>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right answer" could be found by adding
> >>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in simple ways. And so that was
> >>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an actual answer and didn't
> >>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
> >>>
> >>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
> >>> more time trying to figure it out.
> >>>
> >>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way, a comment on all of the above.
> >
> >> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
> >> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
> >> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
> >> from seeing the answer.
> >
> >> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
> >> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
> >> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
> >
> > On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
> > the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
> > the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
> > the minimum age that the captain could be?

> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.

Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge, such as a vocabulary beyond
what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an intelligence test that shows this:

ocean : littoral : : river : _________________

Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the vocabulary of
maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography on an advanced level.

> Also, the test was clear, it *didn't* ask for the minimum age, it
> asked for the exact age.

Like I said, that is the only criticism that can be leveled at the test
if the students were tested to help identify the most widely read of them.

> I mean, that way I can solve any equation. I just say that the result
> is between minus infinity and plus infinity, and it is the problem of
> the test that it didn't ask for margins, ;) .

Not necessarily. Don't forget, there are lots of tests where the
subjects being tested are actually misled about the purpose of the test.
See my preceding comment.

> >> From my life
> >> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to figure
> >> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
> >> they don't get it.
> >
> > However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so careless about defining problems
> > that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way it is worded,
> > it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the box" answer the students
> > were expected to come up with.
> >
> > The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test named after a world-renowned
> > code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be a test that, if it is successful,
> > can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"
> >
> > There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having nothing
> > to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want anyone to think that my
> > contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.
> >
> > Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation game." This game involves
> > two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an "interrogator" (C) who
> > communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you and I are doing now.
> > (C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by asking questions of each of them.
> >
> > After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes the game by saying,
> > "What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer] takes the part of (A) in the game?"
> >
> > When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is changed; for instance, (C) is still
> > told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And so the only way the machine could FAIL
> > the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the test, and says something like what
> > a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or write:
> >
> > "You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"
> >
> >
> > After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the interrogator IS told that one participant
> > is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about the two things he had written
> > about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man." But this too has nothing to do
> > with my low opinion of Turing's essay.

> Well, your low opinion on this essay matches exactly my low opinion on
> human ability to make artificial intelligence.

And I concur. I get good laughs sometimes from when I get an email from Hungary
in Magyar, and the automatic translator gets it so wrong that the meaning of the sentence
is drastically changed.

People were making jokes about the problems of automatic translators back in the 1960's,
but this is more than half a century later. So much for most people's idea of the
rate of progress in AI.

> > Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word "Most" at the beginning of the following sentence:
> >
> >> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
> >> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.

> "People" is a generalization, and it means "most people". Although, of
> course, it can be interpreted as the ultimate disability of every human,
> it can also be interpreted as the general disability of most humans.
> Both versions are valid.

What did you mean by "ultimate disability"? You aren't asking for superhuman
levels of intelligence, are you?

> > No, it also requires a certain amount of backbone to stand up to a teacher and tell her/him that her/his
> > question is unanswerable as stated.

> Actually, it is answerable, and the answer is clear. It cannot be any
> other way, whichever way you put it, and it is simple and clear right away.

OK, but that kind of information is unavailable to us, so we don't know
about that aspect of the test.

> Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
> and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something after
> 5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
> What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes.

On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>>>
>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures" they have for teachers that they cannot
>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem.
>>>>>
>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right answer" could be found by adding
>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in simple ways. And so that was
>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an actual answer and didn't
>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>>>
>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>>>
>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way, a comment on all of the above.
>>>
>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
>>>> from seeing the answer.
>>>
>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>>>
>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
>
>
>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
>
> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge, such as a vocabulary beyond
> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an intelligence test that shows this:
>
> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
>
> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the vocabulary of
> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography on an advanced level.

Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't there, yet.
In Croatian it should be "potok".
No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question, the
question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.

>> Also, the test was clear, it *didn't* ask for the minimum age, it
>> asked for the exact age.
>
> Like I said, that is the only criticism that can be leveled at the test
> if the students were tested to help identify the most widely read of them.
>
>
>> I mean, that way I can solve any equation. I just say that the result
>> is between minus infinity and plus infinity, and it is the problem of
>> the test that it didn't ask for margins, ;) .
>
> Not necessarily. Don't forget, there are lots of tests where the
> subjects being tested are actually misled about the purpose of the test.
> See my preceding comment.

I don't consider this kind of tests to be valid tests. The purpose of
the test should be to test my intelligence. Anybody can mislead anybody.
I mean, this shouldn't be a "Men in Black" movie situation, that's just
for movies, ;) .
Anyway, whoever wants to mislead me with question, he shouldn't be
surprised if I mislead him with the answer. You see, I am not living to
accommodate his purpose, I have my own goals in life, which doesn't
involve serving as his toy. And if this line of thinking is too hard for
him, then it is he who failed the test, and it would be a waste of my
time to spend it in company with him, :) .
And, if this is some kind of job interview, I assure you, I am
perfectly capable to live my life with average-men's money, only
incapable people need more than that to live their lives, :) .

>>>> From my life
>>>> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to figure
>>>> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
>>>> they don't get it.
>>>
>>> However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so careless about defining problems
>>> that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way it is worded,
>>> it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the box" answer the students
>>> were expected to come up with.
>>>
>>> The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test named after a world-renowned
>>> code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be a test that, if it is successful,
>>> can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"
>>>
>>> There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having nothing
>>> to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want anyone to think that my
>>> contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.
>>>
>>> Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation game." This game involves
>>> two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an "interrogator" (C) who
>>> communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you and I are doing now.
>>> (C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by asking questions of each of them.
>>>
>>> After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes the game by saying,
>>> "What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer] takes the part of (A) in the game?"
>>>
>>> When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is changed; for instance, (C) is still
>>> told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And so the only way the machine could FAIL
>>> the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the test, and says something like what
>>> a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or write:
>>>
>>> "You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"
>>>
>>>
>>> After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the interrogator IS told that one participant
>>> is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about the two things he had written
>>> about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man." But this too has nothing to do
>>> with my low opinion of Turing's essay.
>
>> Well, your low opinion on this essay matches exactly my low opinion on
>> human ability to make artificial intelligence.
>
> And I concur. I get good laughs sometimes from when I get an email from Hungary
> in Magyar, and the automatic translator gets it so wrong that the meaning of the sentence
> is drastically changed.
>
> People were making jokes about the problems of automatic translators back in the 1960's,
> but this is more than half a century later. So much for most people's idea of the
> rate of progress in AI.

Absolutely. Right now I am looking at houses for sale in London (just
for fun, if I win lottery, :) ). I mean, this software (Rightmove) has
bugs. They even cannot make such a simple thing correctly. After all
those years of software evolution.

>>> Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word "Most" at the beginning of the following sentence:
>>>
>>>> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
>>>> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.
>
>> "People" is a generalization, and it means "most people". Although, of
>> course, it can be interpreted as the ultimate disability of every human,
>> it can also be interpreted as the general disability of most humans.
>> Both versions are valid.
>
> What did you mean by "ultimate disability"? You aren't asking for superhuman
> levels of intelligence, are you?

On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>>>>
>>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
>>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
>>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
>>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
>>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
>>>>>> given to solve the problem.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
>>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
>>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
>>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
>>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an
>>>>>> actual answer and didn't
>>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
>>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
>>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way,
>>>>>> a comment on all of the above.
>>>>
>>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
>>>>> from seeing the answer.
>>>>
>>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
>>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
>>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
>>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
>>
>>
>>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
>>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
>>
>> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
>> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
>> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge,
>> such as a vocabulary beyond
>> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
>> intelligence test that shows this:
>>
>> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
>>
>> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
>> vocabulary of
>> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography
>> on an advanced level.
>
>         Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
> there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
>         No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question, the
> question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.

I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian". Not clear what
anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.

>>> Also, the test was clear, it *didn't* ask for the minimum age, it
>>> asked for the exact age.
>>
>> Like I said, that is the only criticism that can be leveled at the test
>> if the students were tested to help identify the most widely read of
>> them.
>>
>>
>>> I mean, that way I can solve any equation. I just say that the result
>>> is between minus infinity and plus infinity, and it is the problem of
>>> the test that it didn't ask for margins, ;) .
>>
>> Not necessarily. Don't forget, there are lots of tests where the
>> subjects being tested are actually misled about the purpose of the test.
>> See my preceding comment.
>
>         I don't consider this kind of tests to be valid tests. The
> purpose of the test should be to test my intelligence. Anybody can
> mislead anybody. I mean, this shouldn't be a "Men in Black" movie
> situation, that's just for movies, ;) .
>         Anyway, whoever wants to mislead me with question, he shouldn't
> be surprised if I mislead him with the answer. You see, I am not living
> to accommodate his purpose, I have my own goals in life, which doesn't
> involve serving as his toy. And if this line of thinking is too hard for
> him, then it is he who failed the test, and it would be a waste of my
> time to spend it in company with him, :) .
>         And, if this is some kind of job interview, I assure you, I am
> perfectly capable to live my life with average-men's money, only
> incapable people need more than that to live their lives, :) .
>
>>>>>  From my life
>>>>> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to
>>>>> figure
>>>>> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
>>>>> they don't get it.
>>>>
>>>> However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so
>>>> careless about defining problems
>>>> that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way it
>>>> is worded,
>>>> it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the
>>>> box" answer the students
>>>> were expected to come up with.
>>>>
>>>> The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test
>>>> named after a world-renowned
>>>> code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be a
>>>> test that, if it is successful,
>>>> can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"
>>>>
>>>> There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having
>>>> nothing
>>>> to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want anyone
>>>> to think that my
>>>> contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.
>>>>
>>>> Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation game."
>>>> This game involves
>>>> two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an
>>>> "interrogator" (C) who
>>>> communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you and
>>>> I are doing now.
>>>> (C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by
>>>> asking questions of each of them.
>>>>
>>>> After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes
>>>> the game by saying,
>>>> "What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer] takes
>>>> the part of (A) in the game?"
>>>>
>>>> When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is
>>>> changed; for instance, (C) is still
>>>> told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And so
>>>> the only way the machine could FAIL
>>>> the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the
>>>> test, and says something like what
>>>> a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or
>>>> write:
>>>>
>>>> "You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two
>>>> "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the
>>>> interrogator IS told that one participant
>>>> is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about
>>>> the two things he had written
>>>> about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man." But
>>>> this too has nothing to do
>>>> with my low opinion of Turing's essay.
>>
>>> Well, your low opinion on this essay matches exactly my low opinion on
>>> human ability to make artificial intelligence.
>>
>> And I concur. I get good laughs sometimes from when I get an email
>> from Hungary
>> in Magyar, and the automatic translator gets it so wrong that the
>> meaning of the sentence
>> is drastically changed.
>>
>> People were making jokes about the problems of automatic translators
>> back in the 1960's,
>> but this is more than half a century later. So much for most people's
>> idea of the
>> rate of progress in AI.
>
>         Absolutely. Right now I am looking at houses for sale in London
> (just for fun, if I win lottery, :) ). I mean, this software (Rightmove)
> has bugs. They even cannot make such a simple thing correctly. After all
> those years of software evolution.
>
>>>> Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word "Most"
>>>> at the beginning of the following sentence:
>>>>
>>>>> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
>>>>> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.
>>
>>> "People" is a generalization, and it means "most people". Although, of
>>> course, it can be interpreted as the ultimate disability of every human,
>>> it can also be interpreted as the general disability of most humans.
>>> Both versions are valid.
>>
>> What did you mean by "ultimate disability"? You aren't asking for
>> superhuman
>> levels of intelligence, are you?
>
>         Oh, I was just talking about semantics, on the way how somebody
> can interpret the sentence (I forgot what was that about, actually, :) ).
>
>>>> No, it also requires a certain amount of backbone to stand up to a
>>>> teacher and tell her/him that her/his
>>>> question is unanswerable as stated.
>>
>>> Actually, it is answerable, and the answer is clear. It cannot be any
>>> other way, whichever way you put it, and it is simple and clear right
>>> away.
>>
>> OK, but that kind of information is unavailable to us, so we don't know
>> about that aspect of the test.
>
>         No, it is clear (to me). This was just a simple test, it was
> presented to kids, kids reacted very messy about it. Just in tune with
> what I consider to be "intelligence". There is no "intelligence", these
> are all learned, acquired patterns, and those kids reacted in tune with
> my view on this.
>
>>> Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
>>> and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something after
>>> 5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
>>> What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes.
>>
>> Wrong. The learned schemes are no longer sufficient when students are
>> asked to come up with proofs by themselves, which every graduate student
>> of mathematics needs to be able to do.
>
>         I didn't mean that we learned those patterns in school. We
> learned those patterns during our evolution, those patterns are already
> in our heads. This is how evolution works. Our generation will learn new
> patterns, and add those to the old ones.
>
>> Here is a deceptively simple sounding problem that I can almost guarantee
>> that you will be stumped by:
>>
>> Can you prove that every whole number greater than 1 is the product of
>> prime numbers
>> IN ONE WAY ONLY? [To close a loophole: list the prime factors in
>> numerical order.]
>>
>> [By prime number here is meant a whole number greater than 1 that
>> cannot be factored
>> into smaller whole numbers that are greater than 1.]
>
>         This is too hard for me. Actually, I don't think that I even
> understand the question correctly.
>         BTW, when I was kid I really liked mathematics (kids like to
> play, I guess). Today I consider it just a perversion, :) .
>
>>> Applying it
>>> on real world problems do need some intelligence. This equation above
>>> showed that "intelligence" in real light.
>>
>> You may be using a different meaning of "intelligence" than I do.
>
>         Yes, this is the problem. People invent some words (like "ego",
> "intelligence") out of nothing precisely. Generally, I don't like words
> that have no precise meaning. Anyway, I wrote above what I consider to
> be "intelligence". Just like everything else, it is evolved behavior.
> There is nothing outside Evolution. Evolution is the only thing.
> Although, we like to look at ourselves as something that is above the
> world.
>

On 18.8.2021. 0:47, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
>>>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
>>>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
>>>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
>>>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
>>>>>>> given to solve the problem.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
>>>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
>>>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
>>>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
>>>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an
>>>>>>> actual answer and didn't
>>>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
>>>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
>>>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical
>>>>>>> way, a comment on all of the above.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>>>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>>>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts
>>>>>> them
>>>>>> from seeing the answer.
>>>>>
>>>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>>>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>>>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>>>>>
>>>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
>>>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued
>>>>> that
>>>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
>>>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
>>>
>>>
>>>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
>>>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
>>>
>>> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
>>> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
>>> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized
>>> knowledge, such as a vocabulary beyond
>>> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
>>> intelligence test that shows this:
>>>
>>> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
>>>
>>> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
>>> vocabulary of
>>> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography
>>> on an advanced level.
>>
>>          Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
>> there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
>>          No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question,
>> the question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.
>
> I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian". Not clear what
> anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.

Ah yes, I was wandering why there are two colons. I am not very
familiar with those terms, anyway. Here (in Croatia) we make a
distinction between "ocean" and "sea". We live far from ocean, for us
"ocean" is just an imaginary term. On the other hand, "littoral" we are
familiar with, and it means exactly what it say if you type it in Google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=littoral&oq=littoral&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0i67j0i512l8.6830j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
So, in my mind it goes ocean => sea => river => creek => spring. Ocean
is bigger than sea and sea has "littoral" area, :) . Of course, I
assumed that two colons are a typo, or whatever.
Regarding what anything in this post has to do with paleontology, it
has, trust me. You see, I even typed the word "Evolution" (more than
once, :) ).

>>>> Also, the test was clear, it *didn't* ask for the minimum age, it
>>>> asked for the exact age.
>>>
>>> Like I said, that is the only criticism that can be leveled at the test
>>> if the students were tested to help identify the most widely read of
>>> them.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I mean, that way I can solve any equation. I just say that the result
>>>> is between minus infinity and plus infinity, and it is the problem of
>>>> the test that it didn't ask for margins, ;) .
>>>
>>> Not necessarily. Don't forget, there are lots of tests where the
>>> subjects being tested are actually misled about the purpose of the test.
>>> See my preceding comment.
>>
>>          I don't consider this kind of tests to be valid tests. The
>> purpose of the test should be to test my intelligence. Anybody can
>> mislead anybody. I mean, this shouldn't be a "Men in Black" movie
>> situation, that's just for movies, ;) .
>>          Anyway, whoever wants to mislead me with question, he
>> shouldn't be surprised if I mislead him with the answer. You see, I am
>> not living to accommodate his purpose, I have my own goals in life,
>> which doesn't involve serving as his toy. And if this line of thinking
>> is too hard for him, then it is he who failed the test, and it would
>> be a waste of my time to spend it in company with him, :) .
>>          And, if this is some kind of job interview, I assure you, I
>> am perfectly capable to live my life with average-men's money, only
>> incapable people need more than that to live their lives, :) .
>>
>>>>>>  From my life
>>>>>> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to
>>>>>> figure
>>>>>> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for them,
>>>>>> they don't get it.
>>>>>
>>>>> However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so
>>>>> careless about defining problems
>>>>> that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way
>>>>> it is worded,
>>>>> it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the
>>>>> box" answer the students
>>>>> were expected to come up with.
>>>>>
>>>>> The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test
>>>>> named after a world-renowned
>>>>> code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be
>>>>> a test that, if it is successful,
>>>>> can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"
>>>>>
>>>>> There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having
>>>>> nothing
>>>>> to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want anyone
>>>>> to think that my
>>>>> contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation game."
>>>>> This game involves
>>>>> two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an
>>>>> "interrogator" (C) who
>>>>> communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you and
>>>>> I are doing now.
>>>>> (C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by
>>>>> asking questions of each of them.
>>>>>
>>>>> After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes
>>>>> the game by saying,
>>>>> "What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer]
>>>>> takes the part of (A) in the game?"
>>>>>
>>>>> When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is
>>>>> changed; for instance, (C) is still
>>>>> told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And
>>>>> so the only way the machine could FAIL
>>>>> the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the
>>>>> test, and says something like what
>>>>> a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or
>>>>> write:
>>>>>
>>>>> "You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two
>>>>> "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the
>>>>> interrogator IS told that one participant
>>>>> is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about
>>>>> the two things he had written
>>>>> about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man." But
>>>>> this too has nothing to do
>>>>> with my low opinion of Turing's essay.
>>>
>>>> Well, your low opinion on this essay matches exactly my low opinion on
>>>> human ability to make artificial intelligence.
>>>
>>> And I concur. I get good laughs sometimes from when I get an email
>>> from Hungary
>>> in Magyar, and the automatic translator gets it so wrong that the
>>> meaning of the sentence
>>> is drastically changed.
>>>
>>> People were making jokes about the problems of automatic translators
>>> back in the 1960's,
>>> but this is more than half a century later. So much for most people's
>>> idea of the
>>> rate of progress in AI.
>>
>>          Absolutely. Right now I am looking at houses for sale in
>> London (just for fun, if I win lottery, :) ). I mean, this software
>> (Rightmove) has bugs. They even cannot make such a simple thing
>> correctly. After all those years of software evolution.
>>
>>>>> Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word "Most"
>>>>> at the beginning of the following sentence:
>>>>>
>>>>>> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just the
>>>>>> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.
>>>
>>>> "People" is a generalization, and it means "most people". Although, of
>>>> course, it can be interpreted as the ultimate disability of every
>>>> human,
>>>> it can also be interpreted as the general disability of most humans.
>>>> Both versions are valid.
>>>
>>> What did you mean by "ultimate disability"? You aren't asking for
>>> superhuman
>>> levels of intelligence, are you?
>>
>>          Oh, I was just talking about semantics, on the way how
>> somebody can interpret the sentence (I forgot what was that about,
>> actually, :) ).
>>
>>>>> No, it also requires a certain amount of backbone to stand up to a
>>>>> teacher and tell her/him that her/his
>>>>> question is unanswerable as stated.
>>>
>>>> Actually, it is answerable, and the answer is clear. It cannot be any
>>>> other way, whichever way you put it, and it is simple and clear
>>>> right away.
>>>
>>> OK, but that kind of information is unavailable to us, so we don't know
>>> about that aspect of the test.
>>
>>          No, it is clear (to me). This was just a simple test, it was
>> presented to kids, kids reacted very messy about it. Just in tune with
>> what I consider to be "intelligence". There is no "intelligence",
>> these are all learned, acquired patterns, and those kids reacted in
>> tune with my view on this.
>>
>>>> Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
>>>> and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something after
>>>> 5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
>>>> What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes.
>>>
>>> Wrong. The learned schemes are no longer sufficient when students are
>>> asked to come up with proofs by themselves, which every graduate student
>>> of mathematics needs to be able to do.
>>
>>          I didn't mean that we learned those patterns in school. We
>> learned those patterns during our evolution, those patterns are
>> already in our heads. This is how evolution works. Our generation will
>> learn new patterns, and add those to the old ones.
>>
>>> Here is a deceptively simple sounding problem that I can almost
>>> guarantee
>>> that you will be stumped by:
>>>
>>> Can you prove that every whole number greater than 1 is the product
>>> of prime numbers
>>> IN ONE WAY ONLY? [To close a loophole: list the prime factors in
>>> numerical order.]
>>>
>>> [By prime number here is meant a whole number greater than 1 that
>>> cannot be factored
>>> into smaller whole numbers that are greater than 1.]
>>
>>          This is too hard for me. Actually, I don't think that I even
>> understand the question correctly.
>>          BTW, when I was kid I really liked mathematics (kids like to
>> play, I guess). Today I consider it just a perversion, :) .
>>
>>>> Applying it
>>>> on real world problems do need some intelligence. This equation above
>>>> showed that "intelligence" in real light.
>>>
>>> You may be using a different meaning of "intelligence" than I do.
>>
>>          Yes, this is the problem. People invent some words (like
>> "ego", "intelligence") out of nothing precisely. Generally, I don't
>> like words that have no precise meaning. Anyway, I wrote above what I
>> consider to be "intelligence". Just like everything else, it is
>> evolved behavior. There is nothing outside Evolution. Evolution is the
>> only thing. Although, we like to look at ourselves as something that
>> is above the world.

On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:47:58 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> > On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> >>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
> >>>> wrote:
> >>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
> >>>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
> >>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
> >>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
> >>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
> >>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
> >>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
> >>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
> >>>>>> given to solve the problem.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
> >>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
> >>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
> >>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
> >>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an
> >>>>>> actual answer and didn't
> >>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
> >>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
> >>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
> >>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way,
> >>>>>> a comment on all of the above.
> >>>>
> >>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
> >>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
> >>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
> >>>>> from seeing the answer.
> >>>>
> >>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
> >>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
> >>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
> >>>>
> >>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
> >>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
> >>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
> >>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
> >>
> >>
> >>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
> >>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
> >>
> >> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
> >> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
> >> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge,
> >> such as a vocabulary beyond
> >> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
> >> intelligence test that shows this:
> >>
> >> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
> >>
> >> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
> >> vocabulary of
> >> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography
> >> on an advanced level.
> >
> > Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
> > there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
> > No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question, the
> > question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.

> I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian".

How could you miss the hints that I was NOT "looking for" the word
but had it well in mind? Didn't my putting "law" in addition to
"geography" tip you off?

Oh, well, no harm done. Mario has already made his guesses,
and they are a lot further off than mine when I first saw the
question about four decades ago: I had guessed "fluvial." But then somewhere, sometime,
I have no recollection when or where -- I chanced across the word "riparian" and knew
it was the best fit.

> Not clear what
> anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.

Well, I became convinced that you had totally lost interest in Dickinsonia,
having posted such nonsense as not knowing how to look for pictures, of
all things, of specimens to see if some light could be shed on what looked like
budding. YOU, who in times past used the stock phrase regularly, "Google is your friend."

I had no trouble finding more pictures of somewhat similar looking structures,
including in a peer-reviewed article which specifically mentioned them.

But it did not hypothesize about their nature, so what minuscule interest the
preceding sentence might have sparked in you is probably dead as cold ashes.

But all this is just a prelude to something you may have already noticed:
Beagle seems to be down again. The last post on record there was at 1:46 pm.
So the usual hospitality rule that I've promoted for years, of s.b.p. becoming
a talk.origins-in-exile haven as long as Beagle is down, applies.
And, as you know, almost anything under the sun can be talked about there, and often is.

The only reason I said what I did above [and, believe me, I could really have given
you an earful, but I decided to pull my punches for the sake of hospitality] was to
let you know why I turned to Mario instead of you or your buddies.

Mario and I get along well, and our numerous disagreements are all friendly,
and only serve to spice up the conversation. And the topic interested both of us.

'nuff said?

Peter Nyikos

On 8/17/21 4:14 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 18.8.2021. 0:47, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
>>>>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>>>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
>>>>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>>>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
>>>>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
>>>>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
>>>>>>>> given to solve the problem.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
>>>>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
>>>>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
>>>>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
>>>>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted
>>>>>>>> an actual answer and didn't
>>>>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
>>>>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
>>>>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>>>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical
>>>>>>>> way, a comment on all of the above.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>>>>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>>>>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts
>>>>>>> them
>>>>>>> from seeing the answer.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>>>>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>>>>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
>>>>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask,
>>>>>> "What is
>>>>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
>>>>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
>>>>
>>>> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
>>>> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
>>>> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized
>>>> knowledge, such as a vocabulary beyond
>>>> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
>>>> intelligence test that shows this:
>>>>
>>>> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
>>>>
>>>> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
>>>> vocabulary of
>>>> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or
>>>> geography on an advanced level.
>>>
>>>          Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
>>> there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
>>>          No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question,
>>> the question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.
>>
>> I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian". Not clear what
>> anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.
>
>         Ah yes, I was wandering why there are two colons.

The colons are intended to say "ocean is to littoral as river is to ???"
It's an analogy question.

> I am not very
> familiar with those terms, anyway. Here (in Croatia) we make a
> distinction between "ocean" and "sea". We live far from ocean, for us
> "ocean" is just an imaginary term. On the other hand, "littoral" we are
> familiar with, and it means exactly what it say if you type it in Google:
> https://www.google.com/search?q=littoral&oq=littoral&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0i67j0i512l8.6830j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
>
>         So, in my mind it goes ocean => sea => river => creek =>
> spring. Ocean is bigger than sea and sea has "littoral" area, :) . Of
> course, I assumed that two colons are a typo, or whatever.
>         Regarding what anything in this post has to do with
> paleontology, it has, trust me. You see, I even typed the word
> "Evolution" (more than once, :) ).
>
>>>>> Also, the test was clear, it *didn't* ask for the minimum age, it
>>>>> asked for the exact age.
>>>>
>>>> Like I said, that is the only criticism that can be leveled at the test
>>>> if the students were tested to help identify the most widely read of
>>>> them.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> I mean, that way I can solve any equation. I just say that the result
>>>>> is between minus infinity and plus infinity, and it is the problem of
>>>>> the test that it didn't ask for margins, ;) .
>>>>
>>>> Not necessarily. Don't forget, there are lots of tests where the
>>>> subjects being tested are actually misled about the purpose of the
>>>> test.
>>>> See my preceding comment.
>>>
>>>          I don't consider this kind of tests to be valid tests. The
>>> purpose of the test should be to test my intelligence. Anybody can
>>> mislead anybody. I mean, this shouldn't be a "Men in Black" movie
>>> situation, that's just for movies, ;) .
>>>          Anyway, whoever wants to mislead me with question, he
>>> shouldn't be surprised if I mislead him with the answer. You see, I
>>> am not living to accommodate his purpose, I have my own goals in
>>> life, which doesn't involve serving as his toy. And if this line of
>>> thinking is too hard for him, then it is he who failed the test, and
>>> it would be a waste of my time to spend it in company with him, :) .
>>>          And, if this is some kind of job interview, I assure you, I
>>> am perfectly capable to live my life with average-men's money, only
>>> incapable people need more than that to live their lives, :) .
>>>
>>>>>>>  From my life
>>>>>>> experience, yes, 3/4 of people wouldn't be able to concentrate to
>>>>>>> figure
>>>>>>> out the answer. They simply don't know, it is too confusing for
>>>>>>> them,
>>>>>>> they don't get it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> However, the flip side is that some world-renowned people are so
>>>>>> careless about defining problems
>>>>>> that a highly intelligent person like myself can see that the way
>>>>>> it is worded,
>>>>>> it could be a trick question calling for the kind of "outside the
>>>>>> box" answer the students
>>>>>> were expected to come up with.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The example I have in mind is the seriously overrated Turing test
>>>>>> named after a world-renowned
>>>>>> code-breaker, who wrote the essay describing it. It purports to be
>>>>>> a test that, if it is successful,
>>>>>> can definitively answer the question "Can a machine think?"
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There are many things that are wrong with the Turing test, having
>>>>>> nothing
>>>>>> to do with the feature I will now describe, and I don't want
>>>>>> anyone to think that my
>>>>>> contempt for Turing's essay has anything to do with it.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Turing's test is based on something he called "the imitation
>>>>>> game." This game involves
>>>>>> two people, a man (A) and a woman (B), in a separate room from an
>>>>>> "interrogator" (C) who
>>>>>> communicates with the other two by printed messages -- like you
>>>>>> and I are doing now.
>>>>>> (C) is trying to guess which is the man and which is the woman by
>>>>>> asking questions of each of them.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> After giving a few ways the interrogation might go, Turing changes
>>>>>> the game by saying,
>>>>>> "What will happen when a machine [we would call it a computer]
>>>>>> takes the part of (A) in the game?"
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When I first read this, I assumed no other feature of the game is
>>>>>> changed; for instance, (C) is still
>>>>>> told he has to guess which is the man and which is the woman. And
>>>>>> so the only way the machine could FAIL
>>>>>> the test is if (C) turns to the experimenter who is running the
>>>>>> test, and says something like what
>>>>>> a typical student talked about in the video is supposed to say or
>>>>>> write:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> "You haven't been leveling with me, have you? One of the two
>>>>>> "people" is really a machine, isn't it?"
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> After I read all the way through the essay, I realized that the
>>>>>> interrogator IS told that one participant
>>>>>> is a computer and the other is ... a man! Turing even forgot about
>>>>>> the two things he had written
>>>>>> about (A) and kept calling the computer's competitor "the man."
>>>>>> But this too has nothing to do
>>>>>> with my low opinion of Turing's essay.
>>>>
>>>>> Well, your low opinion on this essay matches exactly my low opinion on
>>>>> human ability to make artificial intelligence.
>>>>
>>>> And I concur. I get good laughs sometimes from when I get an email
>>>> from Hungary
>>>> in Magyar, and the automatic translator gets it so wrong that the
>>>> meaning of the sentence
>>>> is drastically changed.
>>>>
>>>> People were making jokes about the problems of automatic translators
>>>> back in the 1960's,
>>>> but this is more than half a century later. So much for most
>>>> people's idea of the
>>>> rate of progress in AI.
>>>
>>>          Absolutely. Right now I am looking at houses for sale in
>>> London (just for fun, if I win lottery, :) ). I mean, this software
>>> (Rightmove) has bugs. They even cannot make such a simple thing
>>> correctly. After all those years of software evolution.
>>>
>>>>>> Here, though, you can be criticized for leaving off the word
>>>>>> "Most" at the beginning of the following sentence:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> People *aren't* intelligent beings, for solving this problem just
>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>> basic intelligence is needed, but 3/4 of people don't have it.
>>>>
>>>>> "People" is a generalization, and it means "most people". Although, of
>>>>> course, it can be interpreted as the ultimate disability of every
>>>>> human,
>>>>> it can also be interpreted as the general disability of most humans.
>>>>> Both versions are valid.
>>>>
>>>> What did you mean by "ultimate disability"? You aren't asking for
>>>> superhuman
>>>> levels of intelligence, are you?
>>>
>>>          Oh, I was just talking about semantics, on the way how
>>> somebody can interpret the sentence (I forgot what was that about,
>>> actually, :) ).
>>>
>>>>>> No, it also requires a certain amount of backbone to stand up to a
>>>>>> teacher and tell her/him that her/his
>>>>>> question is unanswerable as stated.
>>>>
>>>>> Actually, it is answerable, and the answer is clear. It cannot be any
>>>>> other way, whichever way you put it, and it is simple and clear
>>>>> right away.
>>>>
>>>> OK, but that kind of information is unavailable to us, so we don't know
>>>> about that aspect of the test.
>>>
>>>          No, it is clear (to me). This was just a simple test, it was
>>> presented to kids, kids reacted very messy about it. Just in tune
>>> with what I consider to be "intelligence". There is no
>>> "intelligence", these are all learned, acquired patterns, and those
>>> kids reacted in tune with my view on this.
>>>
>>>>> Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
>>>>> and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something
>>>>> after
>>>>> 5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
>>>>> What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes.
>>>>
>>>> Wrong. The learned schemes are no longer sufficient when students are
>>>> asked to come up with proofs by themselves, which every graduate
>>>> student
>>>> of mathematics needs to be able to do.
>>>
>>>          I didn't mean that we learned those patterns in school. We
>>> learned those patterns during our evolution, those patterns are
>>> already in our heads. This is how evolution works. Our generation
>>> will learn new patterns, and add those to the old ones.
>>>
>>>> Here is a deceptively simple sounding problem that I can almost
>>>> guarantee
>>>> that you will be stumped by:
>>>>
>>>> Can you prove that every whole number greater than 1 is the product
>>>> of prime numbers
>>>> IN ONE WAY ONLY? [To close a loophole: list the prime factors in
>>>> numerical order.]
>>>>
>>>> [By prime number here is meant a whole number greater than 1 that
>>>> cannot be factored
>>>> into smaller whole numbers that are greater than 1.]
>>>
>>>          This is too hard for me. Actually, I don't think that I even
>>> understand the question correctly.
>>>          BTW, when I was kid I really liked mathematics (kids like to
>>> play, I guess). Today I consider it just a perversion, :) .
>>>
>>>>> Applying it
>>>>> on real world problems do need some intelligence. This equation above
>>>>> showed that "intelligence" in real light.
>>>>
>>>> You may be using a different meaning of "intelligence" than I do.
>>>
>>>          Yes, this is the problem. People invent some words (like
>>> "ego", "intelligence") out of nothing precisely. Generally, I don't
>>> like words that have no precise meaning. Anyway, I wrote above what I
>>> consider to be "intelligence". Just like everything else, it is
>>> evolved behavior. There is nothing outside Evolution. Evolution is
>>> the only thing. Although, we like to look at ourselves as something
>>> that is above the world.
>

On 8/17/21 6:48 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:47:58 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
>>>>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>>>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
>>>>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>>>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
>>>>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
>>>>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
>>>>>>>> given to solve the problem.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
>>>>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
>>>>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
>>>>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
>>>>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an
>>>>>>>> actual answer and didn't
>>>>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
>>>>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
>>>>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>>>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way,
>>>>>>>> a comment on all of the above.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>>>>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>>>>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
>>>>>>> from seeing the answer.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>>>>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>>>>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
>>>>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
>>>>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
>>>>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
>>>>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
>>>>
>>>> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
>>>> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
>>>> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge,
>>>> such as a vocabulary beyond
>>>> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
>>>> intelligence test that shows this:
>>>>
>>>> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
>>>>
>>>> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
>>>> vocabulary of
>>>> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography
>>>> on an advanced level.
>>>
>>> Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
>>> there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
>>> No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question, the
>>> question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.
>
>
>> I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian".
>
> How could you miss the hints that I was NOT "looking for" the word
> but had it well in mind? Didn't my putting "law" in addition to
> "geography" tip you off?

You are misunderstanding what I said. By "looking for" I meant "asking
you for". No implication that you didn't know the word, and in fact the
implication was that you did.

> Oh, well, no harm done. Mario has already made his guesses,
> and they are a lot further off than mine when I first saw the
> question about four decades ago: I had guessed "fluvial." But then somewhere, sometime,
> I have no recollection when or where -- I chanced across the word "riparian" and knew
> it was the best fit.

Mario isn't even playing the game, because he didn't know that it was an
analogy question.

>> Not clear what
>> anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.
>
> Well, I became convinced that you had totally lost interest in Dickinsonia,
> having posted such nonsense as not knowing how to look for pictures, of
> all things, of specimens to see if some light could be shed on what looked like
> budding. YOU, who in times past used the stock phrase regularly, "Google is your friend."
>
> I had no trouble finding more pictures of somewhat similar looking structures,
> including in a peer-reviewed article which specifically mentioned them.

So you can't bother to cite that article? Why? Are you uninterested in
paleontology?

> But it did not hypothesize about their nature, so what minuscule interest the
> preceding sentence might have sparked in you is probably dead as cold ashes.
>
>
> But all this is just a prelude to something you may have already noticed:
> Beagle seems to be down again. The last post on record there was at 1:46 pm.
> So the usual hospitality rule that I've promoted for years, of s.b.p. becoming
> a talk.origins-in-exile haven as long as Beagle is down, applies.
> And, as you know, almost anything under the sun can be talked about there, and often is.
>
> The only reason I said what I did above [and, believe me, I could really have given
> you an earful, but I decided to pull my punches for the sake of hospitality] was to
> let you know why I turned to Mario instead of you or your buddies.
>
> Mario and I get along well, and our numerous disagreements are all friendly,
> and only serve to spice up the conversation. And the topic interested both of us.
>
> 'nuff said?

Way more than enough. Notice that you take offense when there is no
offense offered. Try dialing it back.

On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:56:20 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/17/21 6:48 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:47:58 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> >>> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> >>>>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
> >>>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
> >>>>>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
> >>>>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
> >>>>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
> >>>>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
> >>>>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
> >>>>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
> >>>>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
> >>>>>>>> given to solve the problem.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
> >>>>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
> >>>>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
> >>>>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
> >>>>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an
> >>>>>>>> actual answer and didn't
> >>>>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
> >>>>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
> >>>>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
> >>>>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
> >>>>>>>>
> >>>>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way,
> >>>>>>>> a comment on all of the above.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
> >>>>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
> >>>>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
> >>>>>>> from seeing the answer.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
> >>>>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
> >>>>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
> >>>>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
> >>>>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
> >>>>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
> >>>>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
> >>>>
> >>>> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
> >>>> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
> >>>> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge,
> >>>> such as a vocabulary beyond
> >>>> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
> >>>> intelligence test that shows this:
> >>>>
> >>>> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
> >>>>
> >>>> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
> >>>> vocabulary of
> >>>> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography
> >>>> on an advanced level.
> >>>
> >>> Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
> >>> there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
> >>> No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question, the
> >>> question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.
> >
> >
> >> I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian".
> >
> > How could you miss the hints that I was NOT "looking for" the word
> > but had it well in mind? Didn't my putting "law" in addition to
> > "geography" tip you off?

> You are misunderstanding what I said.

Wrong. YOU are misunderstanding what you said.

> By "looking for" I meant "asking
> you for". No implication that you didn't know the word, and in fact the
> implication was that you did.

Wrong again. If that was your intent, you should have said,
"I believe the word Peter has in mind is "riparian."

But over a decade of putting the worst spin that you can
think of [1] on thousands of things I say or do has probably clouded
your mind to where you often don't realize that what you are saying is bullshit.

And that's why I wrote "should" instead of "would" where I fixed your sentence for you.

[1] A very notable exception was the oasis of civilization you agreed to
in sci.bio.paleontology between June (or was it April? I'll have to check when I have more time)
1995 and early 1998. But you kept up that denigration full blast on talk.origins the
whole time.

> > Oh, well, no harm done. Mario has already made his guesses,
> > and they are a lot further off than mine when I first saw the
> > question about four decades ago: I had guessed "fluvial." But then somewhere, sometime,
> > I have no recollection when or where -- I chanced across the word "riparian" and knew
> > it was the best fit.

> Mario isn't even playing the game, because he didn't know that it was an
> analogy question.

Yes, I should have also spelled it out for him: "ocean is to littoral as river is to __________"
But I mistakenly assumed that the notation was familiar to him.

I did not make that kind of mistake when I told him about the Unique Factorization Theorem
of integers. I very carefully removed all possible ambiguity from it, and wrote "whole number"
instead of "integer".

But hey, if you had really wanted to help him, you should have told him it was an
analogy question instead spoiling the riddle for him.

> >> Not clear what
> >> anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.
> >
> > Well, I became convinced that you had totally lost interest in Dickinsonia,
> > having posted such nonsense as not knowing how to look for pictures, of
> > all things, of specimens to see if some light could be shed on what looked like
> > budding. YOU, who in times past used the stock phrase regularly, "Google is your friend."
> >
> > I had no trouble finding more pictures of somewhat similar looking structures,
> > including in a peer-reviewed article which specifically mentioned them.

> So you can't bother to cite that article? Why? Are you uninterested in
> paleontology?

There you go again, putting the worst possible spin on what I wrote.
You just can't break yourself of the habit.

I wouldn't have said what I did if you hadn't shown a total lack of interest
in what I wrote in talk.origins about the spectacular master gene in *Anabaena* the
first time around, only to misrepresent what I had written the second time around.

> > But it did not hypothesize about their nature, so what minuscule interest the
> > preceding sentence might have sparked in you is probably dead as cold ashes.
> >
> >
> > But all this is just a prelude to something you may have already noticed:
> > Beagle seems to be down again. The last post on record there was at 1:46 pm.
> > So the usual hospitality rule that I've promoted for years, of s.b.p. becoming
> > a talk.origins-in-exile haven as long as Beagle is down, applies.
> > And, as you know, almost anything under the sun can be talked about there, and often is.
> >
> > The only reason I said what I did above [and, believe me, I could really have given
> > you an earful, but I decided to pull my punches for the sake of hospitality] was to
> > let you know why I turned to Mario instead of you or your buddies.
> >
> > Mario and I get along well, and our numerous disagreements are all friendly,
> > and only serve to spice up the conversation. And the topic interested both of us.
> >
> > 'nuff said?

On 18.8.2021. 13:43, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:56:20 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> Mario isn't even playing the game, because he didn't know that it was an
>> analogy question.
>
> Yes, I should have also spelled it out for him: "ocean is to littoral as river is to __________"
> But I mistakenly assumed that the notation was familiar to him.
>
> I did not make that kind of mistake when I told him about the Unique Factorization Theorem
> of integers. I very carefully removed all possible ambiguity from it, and wrote "whole number"
> instead of "integer".
>
> But hey, if you had really wanted to help him, you should have told him it was an
> analogy question instead spoiling the riddle for him.

Oh, nothing would help me. I have "brain fog", or something, I am not
in the mood for solving that kind of riddles, actually, I even didn't
think that this is some kind of a game, I just answered anything to
continue with conversation. Yes, John was right, I wasn't actually
playing, I didn't, actually, understand, nor did I make an effort to
understand, and, after all, I don't think that I would understand it in
the first place. Word riddles aren't quite suitable for non-English
speakers. Since my line of thinking was too simple, I thought that this
is just some kind of example, and juts wanted to show that I know two
words for small river, lol.
Your mathematical question I did consider a riddle, but, for sure I
cannot get into this. I don't know, maybe it has something to do with
Covid, maybe its the old age, maybe I am just too full, or maybe I am
more concerned about the imminent global political reshuffling (which
should greatly affect my region, Balkans, actually, this should be the
most important thing of my life). I even don't follow paleoanthropology,
lately.

--
https://groups.google.com/g/human-evolution
human-evolution@googlegroups.com

At the moment, Mario, I am a bit pressed for time, so I leave in only a bit of your post and
hope to come back to it later today. Even so, I have a lot to say.

On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:44:16 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:

> >> Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
> >> and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something after
> >> 5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
> >> What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes.
> >
> > Wrong. The learned schemes are no longer sufficient when students are
> > asked to come up with proofs by themselves, which every graduate student
> > of mathematics needs to be able to do.

> I didn't mean that we learned those patterns in school. We learned
> those patterns during our evolution, those patterns are already in our
> heads. This is how evolution works. Our generation will learn new
> patterns, and add those to the old ones.

I don't see how evolution prepared us for the question that I posed for you.

> > Here is a deceptively simple sounding problem that I can almost guarantee
> > that you will be stumped by:
> >
> > Can you prove that every whole number greater than 1 is the product of prime numbers
> > IN ONE WAY ONLY? [To close a loophole: list the prime factors in numerical order.]
> >
> > [By prime number here is meant a whole number greater than 1 that cannot be factored
> > into smaller whole numbers that are greater than 1.]

For instance, 2 and 3 and 5 are primes, but 4 is not, because it is 2x2, and 6 is not, because it is 2x3.
and, getting into two digits, 60 = 2x2x3x5. All prime factors, in numerical order.

> This is too hard for me. Actually, I don't think that I even
> understand the question correctly.

Did you at least have some practice in factoring numbers into primes? I did, in high school,
but it was only my first year in college that the question occurred to me: is there only ONE
right way to do it or might there be a gigantic number with two DIFFERENT factorizations
into primes, even with that loophole closed.

It took me about a month to figure out how to do it, but I succeeded in showing
that, indeed, there was only one way to do it for any whole number, no matter how large.
All without ever knowing whether it was true or not. It was only after I succeeded
that I learned that this was a well known fact among mathematicians.
Some even call it The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.

> BTW, when I was kid I really liked mathematics (kids like to play, I
> guess). Today I consider it just a perversion, :) .

For me it is great fun. That is what keeps me working at proving things
and reading the clever proofs of others. And I really admire some of the work they do.
In fact, I have a theorem in mind that I would show any alien intelligent species that we
might come into contact with, to show them what human beings are capable of.

I could even explain it to you, but it would take twenty times as long as it took
to explain the unique factorization of primes just now. But the amazing ideas that
went into proving it require mathematics that even I have a hard time following.

> >> Applying it
> >> on real world problems do need some intelligence. This equation above
> >> showed that "intelligence" in real light.
> >
> > You may be using a different meaning of "intelligence" than I do.

> Yes, this is the problem. People invent some words (like "ego",
> "intelligence") out of nothing precisely. Generally, I don't like words
> that have no precise meaning.

That's another thing I love about mathematics. Everything has a
precise meaning that can be explained to anyone with the right background.

> Anyway, I wrote above what I consider to
> be "intelligence". Just like everything else, it is evolved behavior.
> There is nothing outside Evolution. Evolution is the only thing.

The Communists did their work well, I see. They destroyed all
your hope for a better life after death.

> Although, we like to look at ourselves as something that is above the world.

And Christians like to look at God as something above everything.
If only they could be content with a God who has learned a great deal by
his mistakes in dealing with humans [the Bible even depicts God that way]
and who designed our universe from the matter in his universe, a tremendously
greater one than ours, and who arose by evolution there.

I have strong doubts about whether even such a God exists,
but I still entertain faint hopes. I think if more Christians thought that way,
fewer would lose all their hope than do now.

Peter Nyikos

Peter Nyikos <peter2nyikos@gmail.com> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> Notice that you cast aspersions on my sanity when I caught you red-handed
> in a lie on a talk.origins thread, following the lead of the perennial "you need to show
> what you wrote to your psychiatrist" Mark Isaak, and supported
> by Hemidactylus to the hilt, with all three of you gossiping about me in a
> typical Internet Hellion Thread Diluting Kaffeeklatsch.
>
And here you are diluting discussion on a sci.** newsgroup while
compulsively bringing me (and Mark Isaak) into the mix because you can’t
help yourself.

Oh look a dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compulsion

“an irresistible persistent impulse to perform an act (such as excessive
hand washing)”

No Oxford but it will suffice.

On 18.8.2021. 14:52, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> At the moment, Mario, I am a bit pressed for time, so I leave in only a bit of your post and
> hope to come back to it later today. Even so, I have a lot to say.
>
> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:44:16 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>
>>>> Peter, there is no excuse, people aren't smart. We do have language,
>>>> and that's it. With language, any primate could achieve something after
>>>> 5 million years of using it. It doesn't have to be "smart" at all.
>>>> What we call "math" are actually just a learned schemes.
>>>
>>> Wrong. The learned schemes are no longer sufficient when students are
>>> asked to come up with proofs by themselves, which every graduate student
>>> of mathematics needs to be able to do.
>
>> I didn't mean that we learned those patterns in school. We learned
>> those patterns during our evolution, those patterns are already in our
>> heads. This is how evolution works. Our generation will learn new
>> patterns, and add those to the old ones.
>
> I don't see how evolution prepared us for the question that I posed for you.

If you talk about "riparian" question, we did all this (comparison) in
the past, and we are doing it all the time. Actually, the main function
of brain probably is to compare things. Our brain works the most while
we do shopping.

>>> Here is a deceptively simple sounding problem that I can almost guarantee
>>> that you will be stumped by:
>>>
>>> Can you prove that every whole number greater than 1 is the product of prime numbers
>>> IN ONE WAY ONLY? [To close a loophole: list the prime factors in numerical order.]
>>>
>>> [By prime number here is meant a whole number greater than 1 that cannot be factored
>>> into smaller whole numbers that are greater than 1.]
>
> For instance, 2 and 3 and 5 are primes, but 4 is not, because it is 2x2, and 6 is not, because it is 2x3.
> and, getting into two digits, 60 = 2x2x3x5. All prime factors, in numerical order.
>
>> This is too hard for me. Actually, I don't think that I even
>> understand the question correctly.
>
> Did you at least have some practice in factoring numbers into primes? I did, in high school,
> but it was only my first year in college that the question occurred to me: is there only ONE
> right way to do it or might there be a gigantic number with two DIFFERENT factorizations
> into primes, even with that loophole closed.
>
> It took me about a month to figure out how to do it, but I succeeded in showing
> that, indeed, there was only one way to do it for any whole number, no matter how large.
> All without ever knowing whether it was true or not. It was only after I succeeded
> that I learned that this was a well known fact among mathematicians.
> Some even call it The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic.

Excellent. But, right now I am not in mood. Just few hours ago I
noticed a biggish bulb at the left end of my jaw, right below left ear.
I hope it will go away soon. It looks like I am going through something.
This never happened to me, before.

>> BTW, when I was kid I really liked mathematics (kids like to play, I
>> guess). Today I consider it just a perversion, :) .
>
> For me it is great fun. That is what keeps me working at proving things
> and reading the clever proofs of others. And I really admire some of the work they do.
> In fact, I have a theorem in mind that I would show any alien intelligent species that we
> might come into contact with, to show them what human beings are capable of.
>
> I could even explain it to you, but it would take twenty times as long as it took
> to explain the unique factorization of primes just now. But the amazing ideas that
> went into proving it require mathematics that even I have a hard time following.

Of course, this is far above my weight, :).
BTW, no Alien heavier than few grams would ever reach Earth. It would
take too much energy to do that, :) .
Besides, the Universe works on big numbers game. If you make
100,000,000,000,000,000 planets, one of them will be a success. It is
true, though, that successful planets will come in clusters, but never
the less, space is too vast.

>>>> Applying it
>>>> on real world problems do need some intelligence. This equation above
>>>> showed that "intelligence" in real light.
>>>
>>> You may be using a different meaning of "intelligence" than I do.
>
>> Yes, this is the problem. People invent some words (like "ego",
>> "intelligence") out of nothing precisely. Generally, I don't like words
>> that have no precise meaning.
>
> That's another thing I love about mathematics. Everything has a
> precise meaning that can be explained to anyone with the right background.

Yes, exactly this is what I liked about mathematics when I was a kid.
I didn't like biology, it is too unprecise. And look at me now, lol.

>> Anyway, I wrote above what I consider to
>> be "intelligence". Just like everything else, it is evolved behavior.
>> There is nothing outside Evolution. Evolution is the only thing.
>
> The Communists did their work well, I see. They destroyed all
> your hope for a better life after death.

Yes, exactly. I hate communism, but I am grateful for that, :) .

>> Although, we like to look at ourselves as something that is above the world.
>
> And Christians like to look at God as something above everything.
> If only they could be content with a God who has learned a great deal by
> his mistakes in dealing with humans [the Bible even depicts God that way]
> and who designed our universe from the matter in his universe, a tremendously
> greater one than ours, and who arose by evolution there.
>
> I have strong doubts about whether even such a God exists,
> but I still entertain faint hopes. I think if more Christians thought that way,
> fewer would lose all their hope than do now.

--
https://groups.google.com/g/human-evolution
human-evolution@googlegroups.com

On 8/18/21 4:43 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:56:20 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/17/21 6:48 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:47:58 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> On 8/17/21 3:44 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>>> On 17.8.2021. 23:04, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>> On Thursday, July 8, 2021 at 5:55:17 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 21:37, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 11:31:56 PM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> On 8.7.2021. 1:56, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On Wednesday, July 7, 2021 at 1:33:24 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic
>>>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> https://youtu.be/uyS1cXrsgIg
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> OK, I watched the rest of it. And if the narrator is telling the
>>>>>>>>>> truth, it (and an even more absurd problem)
>>>>>>>>>> is a sobering example of how all too many elementary school
>>>>>>>>>> students cannot recognize that there is not enough
>>>>>>>>>> information in a math problem to answer it.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Either that, or they are so inhibited by the "authority figures"
>>>>>>>>>> they have for teachers that they cannot
>>>>>>>>>> bring themselves to write that there isn't enough information
>>>>>>>>>> given to solve the problem.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Instead, we are told, a lot of the students thought the "right
>>>>>>>>>> answer" could be found by adding
>>>>>>>>>> or subtracting or otherwise manipulating the numbers given in
>>>>>>>>>> simple ways. And so that was
>>>>>>>>>> what they turned in. IOW, they guessed that the teacher wanted an
>>>>>>>>>> actual answer and didn't
>>>>>>>>>> care whether it really had anything logically to do with the
>>>>>>>>>> problem, thinking it might improve their score on the test.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> There may be a general lesson about human behavior in here
>>>>>>>>>> somewhere, but I'm not going to spend any
>>>>>>>>>> more time trying to figure it out.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> PS I do see the way the title of your post is, in a satirical way,
>>>>>>>>>> a comment on all of the above.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Yes, those students can be, and, obviously, are, confused by many a
>>>>>>>>> things. One of the thing is that they think that the problem is
>>>>>>>>> solvable. There may also be a lot of other things which distracts them
>>>>>>>>> from seeing the answer.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> But, on the other hand, the problem is extremely simple, *everybody*
>>>>>>>>> should be able to solve it without problems. It is *obvious* that
>>>>>>>>> captain's age has nothing to do with sheep and goats.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On the other hand, the video did give a clever way of theorizing that
>>>>>>>> the captain had to be at least 28 years old. So it could be argued that
>>>>>>>> the only thing wrong with the problem was that it didn't ask, "What is
>>>>>>>> the minimum age that the captain could be?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Actually, no. The whole "license" thing isn't part of the equation at
>>>>>>> all. Those variables aren't part of the test.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Wrong. To carry cargo beyond a certain low limit, one needs licensure.
>>>>>> This could then be a test question like so many other test questions
>>>>>> that ostensibly study intelligence, yet require specialized knowledge,
>>>>>> such as a vocabulary beyond
>>>>>> what the ordinary person knows. Here is one question from an
>>>>>> intelligence test that shows this:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ocean : littoral : : river : _________________
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Can you answer it? I assure you, the word is only part of the
>>>>>> vocabulary of
>>>>>> maybe 1% of Americans, mostly those who have studied law or geography
>>>>>> on an advanced level.
>>>>>
>>>>> Creek? :) . Maybe, stream. Pond shouldn't be. Spring isn't
>>>>> there, yet. In Croatian it should be "potok".
>>>>> No, this (the original question) isn't a "trick" question, the
>>>>> question is for kids, the "license" thing is out of the scoop.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I believe the word Peter is looking for is "riparian".
>>>
>>> How could you miss the hints that I was NOT "looking for" the word
>>> but had it well in mind? Didn't my putting "law" in addition to
>>> "geography" tip you off?
>
>> You are misunderstanding what I said.
>
> Wrong. YOU are misunderstanding what you said.

You misunderstand simple English expressions and idioms. "The answer I'm
looking for" is easily and commonly understood as implying that I know
the answer and are hoping you can also produce it. Perhaps
mathematicians have difficulties with idioms?

> > By "looking for" I meant "asking
>> you for". No implication that you didn't know the word, and in fact the
>> implication was that you did.
>
> Wrong again. If that was your intent, you should have said,
> "I believe the word Peter has in mind is "riparian."
>
> But over a decade of putting the worst spin that you can
> think of [1] on thousands of things I say or do has probably clouded
> your mind to where you often don't realize that what you are saying is bullshit.
>
> And that's why I wrote "should" instead of "would" where I fixed your sentence for you.
>
> [1] A very notable exception was the oasis of civilization you agreed to
> in sci.bio.paleontology between June (or was it April? I'll have to check when I have more time)
> 1995 and early 1998. But you kept up that denigration full blast on talk.origins the
> whole time.
>
>>> Oh, well, no harm done. Mario has already made his guesses,
>>> and they are a lot further off than mine when I first saw the
>>> question about four decades ago: I had guessed "fluvial." But then somewhere, sometime,
>>> I have no recollection when or where -- I chanced across the word "riparian" and knew
>>> it was the best fit.
>
>> Mario isn't even playing the game, because he didn't know that it was an
>> analogy question.
>
> Yes, I should have also spelled it out for him: "ocean is to littoral as river is to __________"
> But I mistakenly assumed that the notation was familiar to him.
>
> I did not make that kind of mistake when I told him about the Unique Factorization Theorem
> of integers. I very carefully removed all possible ambiguity from it, and wrote "whole number"
> instead of "integer".
>
> But hey, if you had really wanted to help him, you should have told him it was an
> analogy question instead spoiling the riddle for him.

I don't think he knew the word either, so no spoiler.

>>>> Not clear what
>>>> anything in this post or thread has to do with paleontology.
>>>
>>> Well, I became convinced that you had totally lost interest in Dickinsonia,
>>> having posted such nonsense as not knowing how to look for pictures, of
>>> all things, of specimens to see if some light could be shed on what looked like
>>> budding. YOU, who in times past used the stock phrase regularly, "Google is your friend."
>>>
>>> I had no trouble finding more pictures of somewhat similar looking structures,
>>> including in a peer-reviewed article which specifically mentioned them.
>
>> So you can't bother to cite that article? Why? Are you uninterested in
>> paleontology?
>
> There you go again, putting the worst possible spin on what I wrote.
> You just can't break yourself of the habit.

On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 8:34:55 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 18.8.2021. 13:43, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:56:20 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
> >> Mario isn't even playing the game, because he didn't know that it was an
> >> analogy question.
> >
> > Yes, I should have also spelled it out for him: "ocean is to littoral as river is to __________"
> > But I mistakenly assumed that the notation was familiar to him.
> >
> > I did not make that kind of mistake when I told him about the Unique Factorization Theorem
> > of integers. I very carefully removed all possible ambiguity from it, and wrote "whole number"
> > instead of "integer".
> >
> > But hey, if you had really wanted to help him, you should have told him it was an
> > analogy question instead spoiling the riddle for him.

> Oh, nothing would help me. I have "brain fog", or something, I am not
> in the mood for solving that kind of riddles, actually, I even didn't
> think that this is some kind of a game,

I didn't mean it as a game, I meant it as an illustrative example
of how tests for intelligence are not well set up for measuring
intelligence. It does take a bit of intelligence to grasp that
"littoral" means "having to do with the shore of a sea or ocean"
[and if you don't know that, you can look up the word in a good dictionary]
and to then realize that when "river" is substituted for "ocean", you need to
find a word that means "having to do with a bank of the river."

Then it becomes a vocabulary test of an especially difficult sort.
The usual vocabulary test might ask you to define "riparian,"
but this one starts with the definition and makes you hunt for the word.
Short of going through a dictionary with at least 100,000 words,
it just boils down to the luck of being familiar with the word "riparian" .

So we have a question that is under-1% an intelligence test and over-99% a vocabulary test.

> I just answered anything to
> continue with conversation. Yes, John was right, I wasn't actually
> playing, I didn't, actually, understand, nor did I make an effort to
> understand, and, after all, I don't think that I would understand it in
> the first place. Word riddles aren't quite suitable for non-English
> speakers. Since my line of thinking was too simple, I thought that this
> is just some kind of example,

Yes, an example to illustrate a point I was making.

There is a very serious side to this. Back in the early 1970's was a furor when a professor
named Shockley published a paper that said Blacks in the USA were less intelligent
on average than Whites. He was branded a racist and his public appearances
were accompanied by riots. I witnessed one when a like-minded professor named Banfield
came to the University of Chicago and tried to give a speech; it was completely
disrupted by radicals.

All this trouble could have been avoided if these people had been made
to see that IQ tests are unfair for making such allegations, because
of the different experiences an average Black has than the average White has.

>and juts wanted to show that I know two
> words for small river, lol.
> Your mathematical question I did consider a riddle, but, for sure I
> cannot get into this. I don't know, maybe it has something to do with
> Covid, maybe its the old age,

Old age? I seem to recall that you are more than a decade younger
than I am. If you are in as good health when I was your age, you have a lot of great years ahead of you.

One of my favorite sayings after I became 60 is "The sixties are the youth of old age."
When I turned 60 I still could have run a kilometer in 4.5 minutes; now, 15 years older, I think
I'll be lucky to do it in 5.5.

>maybe I am just too full, or maybe I am
> more concerned about the imminent global political reshuffling (which
> should greatly affect my region, Balkans, actually, this should be the
> most important thing of my life).

All true, but since you have little way of predicting how it will turn out,
and less of being to change it, you might as well take time to have
some fun, and only think hard about it from time to time.

>I even don't follow paleoanthropology, lately.

I can relate to that. When Trump was impeached, I was really bothered by the wildly conflicting narratives
that the majority of Republicans and practically all the Democrats in Congress were sticking to.
When it turned out that first the House and then the Senate hardly had anyone addressing the
allegations of the other side, and almost no witnesses were called, I knew the USA was in for a lot of trouble.

Both the impeachment by the House and the trial in the Senate were mere formalities,
and both rushed to a vote that was almost all along party lines.

I didn't return to talk.origins or sci.bio.paleontology for over two months, because I wanted
to get a good feel for how people with a wide range of outlooks thought of these
events and of many other issues. The pandemic was a major source of conflicting
narratives. There were some really toxic, pseudoscientific stories about what the mRNA vaccines
could do to you, and I persisted until I found out the truth about them. As a result,
I gladly took the Pfizer vaccine: first dose February 1, second February 22.

Peter Nyikos

On 19.8.2021. 1:11, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 8:34:55 AM UTC-4, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> On 18.8.2021. 13:43, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:56:20 PM UTC-4, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> Mario isn't even playing the game, because he didn't know that it was an
>>>> analogy question.
>>>
>>> Yes, I should have also spelled it out for him: "ocean is to littoral as river is to __________"
>>> But I mistakenly assumed that the notation was familiar to him.
>>>
>>> I did not make that kind of mistake when I told him about the Unique Factorization Theorem
>>> of integers. I very carefully removed all possible ambiguity from it, and wrote "whole number"
>>> instead of "integer".
>>>
>>> But hey, if you had really wanted to help him, you should have told him it was an
>>> analogy question instead spoiling the riddle for him.
>
>> Oh, nothing would help me. I have "brain fog", or something, I am not
>> in the mood for solving that kind of riddles, actually, I even didn't
>> think that this is some kind of a game,
>
> I didn't mean it as a game, I meant it as an illustrative example
> of how tests for intelligence are not well set up for measuring
> intelligence. It does take a bit of intelligence to grasp that
> "littoral" means "having to do with the shore of a sea or ocean"
> [and if you don't know that, you can look up the word in a good dictionary]
> and to then realize that when "river" is substituted for "ocean", you need to
> find a word that means "having to do with a bank of the river."
>
> Then it becomes a vocabulary test of an especially difficult sort.
> The usual vocabulary test might ask you to define "riparian,"
> but this one starts with the definition and makes you hunt for the word.
> Short of going through a dictionary with at least 100,000 words,
> it just boils down to the luck of being familiar with the word "riparian" .
>
> So we have a question that is under-1% an intelligence test and over-99% a vocabulary test.
>
>> I just answered anything to
>> continue with conversation. Yes, John was right, I wasn't actually
>> playing, I didn't, actually, understand, nor did I make an effort to
>> understand, and, after all, I don't think that I would understand it in
>> the first place. Word riddles aren't quite suitable for non-English
>> speakers. Since my line of thinking was too simple, I thought that this
>> is just some kind of example,
>
> Yes, an example to illustrate a point I was making.
>
> There is a very serious side to this. Back in the early 1970's was a furor when a professor
> named Shockley published a paper that said Blacks in the USA were less intelligent
> on average than Whites. He was branded a racist and his public appearances
> were accompanied by riots. I witnessed one when a like-minded professor named Banfield
> came to the University of Chicago and tried to give a speech; it was completely
> disrupted by radicals.
>
> All this trouble could have been avoided if these people had been made
> to see that IQ tests are unfair for making such allegations, because
> of the different experiences an average Black has than the average White has.

In tune with my view on intelligence, I am looking at it from the
Evolution point of view. Just like physical abilities, I am claiming
that different races have different mental abilities, depending on the
conditions they evolved in. Of course, a lot of those mental abilities
aren't measurable at all.

>> and juts wanted to show that I know two
>> words for small river, lol.
>> Your mathematical question I did consider a riddle, but, for sure I
>> cannot get into this. I don't know, maybe it has something to do with
>> Covid, maybe its the old age,
>
> Old age? I seem to recall that you are more than a decade younger
> than I am. If you are in as good health when I was your age, you have a lot of great years ahead of you.
>
> One of my favorite sayings after I became 60 is "The sixties are the youth of old age."
> When I turned 60 I still could have run a kilometer in 4.5 minutes; now, 15 years older, I think
> I'll be lucky to do it in 5.5.

I'll turn 60 in two months. Of course, a lot depends on your physical
abilities. I don't move out of my room *at all* (I am retired, :) ),
during my whole life I was sitting whole day long (being a train driver,
but I did hike a lot for one period on my life), and things like that.
After making a short walk, I am so tired that I usually fell to sleep, lol.
I like it that way never the less. My idea is that people aren't made
for physical endeavor. I am claiming that we ate shellfish, shellfish
give you protein, but not energy. So, we probably did what we are doing
on our vacation, laying down on the sun for whole day, :) .

>> maybe I am just too full, or maybe I am
>> more concerned about the imminent global political reshuffling (which
>> should greatly affect my region, Balkans, actually, this should be the
>> most important thing of my life).
>
> All true, but since you have little way of predicting how it will turn out,
> and less of being to change it, you might as well take time to have
> some fun, and only think hard about it from time to time.

Oh, not at all. Actually, I am really good at that. And I am doing it
naturally, it looks like (since I grew up in this messy situation on
Balkans). I grew up in the capitol of my country, in a, kind of, richer
neighborhood (comparable to Berkeley Hills, but me being poor), going to
school with kids from some prominent families. Later I was politically
active (after the fall of communism) in my neighborhood, volunteer in
war, in my youth I was hanging out with some intelligent people (one of
my closest friends is now the main editor of 8 book history of Croatia,
a major work; I learned some things from him, 30 years ago, when we were
close). So, I was involved in some things, seen a lot with my own eyes,
I know a lot of people, daughter of one Croatian president was my
classmate, father of another classmate was the first director of
national TV network, later, another classmate became that director (of
national TV network, lol). And I was discussing the politics with
everybody around me, and on the internet, whole the time.
I can easily predict a lot of things. When West started with
Globalization, I knew how this will end up. When you follow politics
closely, things just add one onto another, if you've sorted your basics
right, and I am good at sorting basics right, being objective, not
greedy and subjective.
Of course, politics is very dynamic, and even politicians cannot
predict a lot of things, but, it is easy for me to see in which
direction things are going, the dynamics of how things will unroll isn't
that much important, actually.
In my view, after Nord Stream 2 is finished (next month), there will
be some major reshuffling going on, at least in Europe (I already see
preparations going on, for it). I am still not quite sure how West will
handle Iran, but, we'll see.

>> I even don't follow paleoanthropology, lately.
>
> I can relate to that. When Trump was impeached, I was really bothered by the wildly conflicting narratives
> that the majority of Republicans and practically all the Democrats in Congress were sticking to.
> When it turned out that first the House and then the Senate hardly had anyone addressing the
> allegations of the other side, and almost no witnesses were called, I knew the USA was in for a lot of trouble.
>
> Both the impeachment by the House and the trial in the Senate were mere formalities,
> and both rushed to a vote that was almost all along party lines.
>
> I didn't return to talk.origins or sci.bio.paleontology for over two months, because I wanted
> to get a good feel for how people with a wide range of outlooks thought of these
> events and of many other issues. The pandemic was a major source of conflicting
> narratives. There were some really toxic, pseudoscientific stories about what the mRNA vaccines
> could do to you, and I persisted until I found out the truth about them. As a result,
> I gladly took the Pfizer vaccine: first dose February 1, second February 22.

Thanks, Peter, for the encouraging words. I am strongly against
vaccination, for sure I will never do it, :) .

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On 19.8.2021. 0:56, John Harshman wrote:
> I don't think he knew the word either, so no spoiler.

I did meet all three words, but:
- littoral I know, because Marc Verhaegen (he writes a lot in s.a.p.)
talks a lot about it
- riparian I did meet reading science papers, but I always have to look
in dictionary for what it means (yes, I am very bad at languages, even
my own). I wouldn't recall it, even if I knew what to look for
- fluvial I also met, but frankly, right now I would need to look out
for the meaning of it (but I don't care, :) )

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On 8/18/21 6:02 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 19.8.2021. 0:56, John Harshman wrote:
>> I don't think he knew the word either, so no spoiler.
>
>         I did meet all three words, but:
> - littoral I know, because Marc Verhaegen (he writes a lot in s.a.p.)
> talks a lot about it
> - riparian I did meet reading science papers, but I always have to look
> in dictionary for what it means (yes, I am very bad at languages, even
> my own). I wouldn't recall it, even if I knew what to look for
> - fluvial I also met, but frankly, right now I would need to look out
> for the meaning of it (but I don't care, :) )
>
Can't help myself: fluvial refers to stuff in a river, riparian to stuff
near a river, which is why riparian is the exact analog to littoral.

On 19.8.2021. 3:31, John Harshman wrote:
> On 8/18/21 6:02 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>> On 19.8.2021. 0:56, John Harshman wrote:
>>> I don't think he knew the word either, so no spoiler.
>>
>>          I did meet all three words, but:
>> - littoral I know, because Marc Verhaegen (he writes a lot in s.a.p.)
>> talks a lot about it
>> - riparian I did meet reading science papers, but I always have to
>> look in dictionary for what it means (yes, I am very bad at languages,
>> even my own). I wouldn't recall it, even if I knew what to look for
>> - fluvial I also met, but frankly, right now I would need to look out
>> for the meaning of it (but I don't care, :) )
>>
> Can't help myself: fluvial refers to stuff in a river, riparian to stuff
> near a river, which is why riparian is the exact analog to littoral.

Oh, thanks very much. I really needed this, :) . Now it is all sorted
well (I hope I'll remember it).
Englishmen would say: "Good man.". Thanks again.

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On 19.8.2021. 3:56, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
> On 19.8.2021. 3:31, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 8/18/21 6:02 PM, Mario Petrinovic wrote:
>>> On 19.8.2021. 0:56, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> I don't think he knew the word either, so no spoiler.
>>>
>>>          I did meet all three words, but:
>>> - littoral I know, because Marc Verhaegen (he writes a lot in s.a.p.)
>>> talks a lot about it
>>> - riparian I did meet reading science papers, but I always have to
>>> look in dictionary for what it means (yes, I am very bad at
>>> languages, even my own). I wouldn't recall it, even if I knew what to
>>> look for
>>> - fluvial I also met, but frankly, right now I would need to look out
>>> for the meaning of it (but I don't care, :) )
>>>
>> Can't help myself: fluvial refers to stuff in a river, riparian to
>> stuff near a river, which is why riparian is the exact analog to
>> littoral.
>
>         Oh, thanks very much. I really needed this, :) . Now it is all
> sorted well (I hope I'll remember it).
>         Englishmen would say: "Good man.". Thanks again.

Though, I have to say that littoral actually means near shore, but in
both directions, towards the land, and in the sea. So, it, actually,
isn't analogous neither to riparian, or fluvial (fluvial is, actually, a
process).
A tough question, indeed, :) .

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