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.

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