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.
>