I'm from France; when I lived there, I used a network of cheap state-subsidized subway and trains to get around the country and see friends and family; I attended a good university for a mere few hundred euros a year; I would buy fresh food at the local market every week; my friends from poorer families got free meals at the university, housing stipends, and so on; my healthcare was covered; and many other things that escape me right now.
I also lived in Louisiana; besides New Orleans, what I've seen are old decrepit roads that haven't been restored in decades, public transportation only used by the very poor and mentally ill (very often correlated), neighborhoods next to the university campus that I've been told to never cross for risk of getting shot, almost half of the people being dramatically ill (overweight), lifeless minuscule downtowns. And heck, even New Orleans is still a shitshow.
Present all the economic arguments that you want, as someone who has lived in both places, a lot of the south of the US feels like a terribly dreary place to me. And I've lived in plenty of places, and have found things to like in all of them- this is not just me being close minded, I just found the south of the US to be in a terrible state for being a part of the world's leading superpower.
I've been living in California for many years now, which is orders of magnitude more pleasant and which I love in many ways (although rife with flaws as well; notably the shameful income gap in Silicon Valley).
You want per capita, otherwise you'd think China is wealthier than Switzerland. And you want PPP (though it doesn't make that much difference) since that reflects what people can actually afford. If you made $1M a month but the prices in your country were such that it would only buy dry bread and water, you'd still be poor.
For example, Steven Pinker looks into this a little in "The Better Angels of Our Nature", long story short there's nothing conclusive, and a sufficiently motivated person can find reasons to doubt it (e.g., the big drop in crime happened some ten years after the ramp up of incarceration rates, Canada experienced a similar decline in crime over that period without the corresponding increase in prison population), however, Pinker himself thinks that when all is said and done it seems likely that incarceration was one of the reasons. One other contributing factor was a large increase in the size of police forces during Clinton's presidency. On top of that, he argues the culture just for some reason shifted to being less violent.
(I want to also mention that he debunks quite convincingly the theory that the decrease in crime had anything to do with legalizing abortion.)
Under a "Futarchy", the corn lobby can spend lots of money to "predict" that a sugar tariff will make the country better.
To do that they would have to bet a lot of money that the tariff will make the country better (by an objective metric which is decided upon by the voters), and if that turned out wrong, they would lose a lot of money.
"Questions will be raised about Snowden’s mental balance. Also propaganda."
Why? Is it not a fair question to ask whether the guy who is the single source of all the revelations might not be playing with a full deck? The guy who said "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent" about Red China? Wouldn't it even be the most Occam-compliant assumption, unless your anti-American prior is so strong you automatically grant credibility to anyone who speaks against the US government?
"Snowden will be called a defector. Also propaganda."
Isn't that technically what he did?
defect 2 |diˈfekt|
verb [ no obj. ]
abandon one's country or cause in favor of an opposing one
(Biases on the table: I'm biased against people who defect from the US to communist countries.)
So while we're at that, how do the proponents of Turing test respond to the lookup table argument? Say I make a giant lookup table, with keys being all possible conversation prefixes and values being the answers. E.g., h["Hi"] = "Hi.". h["Hi. / Hi. / How are you?"] = "I'm OK, how are you?" etc. Sure the lookup table would be big but definitely finite, since its size is bounded by the maximum possible length of a Turing test conversation (which is at most the length of a human life--we would like humans to pass the test, right?) Will we be morally obligated to grant such hash table the same rights a person enjoys?
http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf , section 4. I consider that to be essentially the final word on the topic; it is an objective, mathematically, philosophically, physically meaningful distinction drawn between a lookup table and a computing machine.
Thanks for the link. I just read section 4 and I don't really see how it addresses the argument. It mostly seems to argue against the opinion that computer programs cannot be sentient. My point is much weaker: that it is manifestly absurd to insist that all computer programs which can pass the Turing test must be presumed sentient.
The article acknowledges that a lookup table could pass the Turing test--the author even uses this argument for his own ends. At the same time, clearly he doesn't think we should presume the lookup table sentient. The only passage which might be interpreted as an "objective distinction" is this one:
Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests
that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance.
According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would
not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program
with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program
would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded.
And yet in the next paragraph the author says he's reluctant to stand behind such thesis.
Do you, unlike Scott Aaronson, want to adopt this amended postulate--i.e., do you believe all computer programs which can pass the Turing test should be granted personhood as long as they scale polynomially with the length of the conversation?
Hypothesizing about the lookup table is an irrelevant question, because no such thing can exist in the real universe. Not even in theory. Moreover, your lookup table contains some amount of information in it; either it was generated by a relatively small polynomial process, in which case for as large as the lookup table appears to be, it actually isn't, and is indistinguishable from simply using the program that was used to generate it, or it does indeed contain exponentially large amounts of information, in which case hypothesizing an exponentially large source of information for the mere purpose of passing a Turing test is a bizarre philosophical step to take. Where is this exponentially large source of information?
Recall that in information theory, being a bit sloppy but essentially accurate with the terms, the amount of information something has can be expressed as the smallest possible encoding of something. The entire Mandelbrot set, as gloriously complicated as it may look, actually contains virtually no information, a mere handful of bits, because it's all the result of a very simple equation. No matter how gloriously complicated your enormous hash table may look, if it was generated with some humanly-feasible program and nigh-infinite amounts of time, the information content of the entire table, no matter how large, is nothing more than the size of the program and perhaps a specification of how long you let it run.
Basically, the whole "big lookup table" has to have some sort of characteristic to it. Either it was created by a program, in which case the program itself could pass the Turing test, or it is somehow irreducible to a program's output, in which case in your zealous effort to swat a fly you vaporized the entire Earth; you can't agree to the possibility a machine might pass the test (or be sentient or whatever) but you can agree to the existence of an exponentially complicated source of information? That's only a gnat's whisker away from asking "Well, what if I use magic to create a philosophical zombie," (I'm referencing the specific concept of a philosophical zombie here, you can look it up if you like) "that looks like it's passing the test but it really isn't, what then?" Well, I don't know, when you're willing to invoke magic in your defense I'll concede I haven't got much of a response, but you probably shouldn't call that a victory.
The lookup table argument only makes sense nonconstructively, if you merely assert its existence but then don't allow anyone to ask any question about where it came from, or what properties it has.
So pretty much your argument boils down to, "such a lookup table cannot exist, therefore any argument using it is irrelevant." Note that even Scott Aaronson disagrees with you in the article you cited.
If we were having this debate in the XVIII-th century, you could equally as well assert that any machine capable of playing chess should be considered a person. The motivation is exactly the same as with the Turing test: so far only humans can play chess, humans are sentient, QED.
Say someone said, "But what if a machine used a minimax algorithm." To which you could respond, armed with your knowledge of XVIIIth century technology, "Such thing cannot exist therefore it's an irrelevant question."
As for the creation of such a table, not that I consider that question particularly relevant, but here it is: Say a crazy scientist in the future created a program that actually simulated a human brain, then ran it (on future super-fast hardware) on every possible input (once again, the size of the input is bounded by the maximum length of a conversation a human can have), and stored the results on future super-large hard drives. Then he deleted the human brain simulation program, and gave you just the lookup table. The act of deleting the original program we may very well consider murder. But what about the generated lookup table?
If you don't have a connection to the world of physicists you may not realize how huge Mathematica is. I have a friend for whom it is the environment of choice for pretty much everything. Like, when he needs to do some image manipulation, he doesn't reach for ImageMagick, he does it in Mathematica. If he needed to set up a web server he'd probably do it in Mathematica too.
People say they can't stand Wolfram's lack of humility. Just get over it for your own benefit. People have flaws, that's life. If you get so enraged over his style that you can't listen to what he says, then you won't hear what he has to say which happens to be a lot of interesting things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP