Today (9 January) is the first day of my spring semester, so I am busy updating my syllabi and catching up on old emails; in the meantime, I am reblogging below this 2019 song by dj poolboi.
I discovered this haunting piece of instrumental music via the “Chill” station on SiriusXM (channel 53).
Singapore’s 1982 New Year was a little special, as it arrived earlier at 11:30pm on 31 December 1981. To meet the correct time, Singapore’s …
Singapore Trivia – Time Adjustment for Singapore in 1982
Via peterme.com: “Out of Sight was placed on YouTube in 2010, but I only just discovered it in the past month, when The Algorithm served it up and I clicked out of idle curiosity. A gentle Miyazaki-esque animation with a light surprise, it quickly became a personal favorite, which I then immediately shared with D. You won’t spend a better 5:27 on YouTube today.” Hat tip: kottke.
Happy Three Kings Day! To commemorate the Epiphany, I am reblogging my Three Kings Day post from 2021.
Today (6 January) is Epiphany, or “Three Kings’ Day”; pictured below is a poster commemorating Three Kings Day, a poster originally made in 1982 by Nuyorican artist Manny Vega. More details about the significance of this holy day to my Latin American brothers and sisters are available here.
ChatGPT doesn’t know what freedom is. That, or Microsoft’s new bot has become a mouthpiece of the Cuban Communist Party! I recently asked the AI engine, When will Cuba be free? And this misleading and erroneous four-sentence reply is what I got back: “Cuba is a sovereign country and is already free. The Cuban government is responsible for determining the policies and direction of the country, and the Cuban people are free to participate in the political process and express their views. However, there are concerns about the level of political freedom in Cuba, as the government has been criticized for its human rights record and for suppressing dissent. Some people believe that Cuba will become more democratic and open in the future, but it is difficult to predict exactly when or how that might happen.” Notice the use of the passive voice in both parts of sentence #3 and the use of the words “some people” in the last sentence. Even more egregious, the second parts of sentence #1 and sentence #2 are totally false.
Today, I asked ChatGPT to solve the “Liar Paradox“, and it responded as follows:
“The Liar Paradox is a statement that says ‘This statement is false.’ If the statement is true, then it is false, and if it is false, then it must be true. This creates a contradiction, and it is impossible to determine if the statement is true or false.
“There are a few different ways that philosophers and logicians have tried to resolve the Liar Paradox. One approach is to reject the assumption that the statement is either true or false, and instead consider it to be meaningless. Another approach is to accept the contradiction as a valid result, and to consider the truth value of the statement to be indeterminate.
“Ultimately, the Liar Paradox is a challenge to our usual assumptions about truth and falsehood, and it highlights the limitations of language and logic. There is no one ‘correct’ way to resolve the paradox, and different people may have different perspectives on how to approach it.”
Suffice it to say, ChatGPT did not solve the paradox.
I asked the new AI engine ChatGPT: “Hey, where did you get your priors?” And she (it?) replied:
“I was trained by OpenAI on a dataset of billions of words taken from the Internet. As a language model, my training involves predicting the next word in a sequence of words, given the words that come before it. I do not have personal experiences or biases, and I do not have access to external information beyond what I was trained on. I exist to assist users by generating human-like text based on the input that I receive. Is there anything else I can help with?“
What? The ChatGPT bot says it has no priors? It is either misinformed or a liar!
I asked the new AI engine ChatGPT: “Hey, where did you get your priors?” And she (it?) replied:
“I was trained by OpenAI on a dataset of billions of words taken from the Internet. As a language model, my training involves predicting the next word in a sequence of words, given the words that come before it. I do not have personal experiences or biases, and I do not have access to external information beyond what I was trained on. I exist to assist users by generating human-like text based on the input that I receive. Is there anything else I can help with?“
What? The ChatGPT bot says it has no priors? It is either misinformed or a liar!
Six years ago today (3 January 2017, see here), I posted to this blog a link to a paper of mine titled “Probabilistic Interpretation, Part II: The Case of the Speluncean Explorers” in which I conjecture how a machine judge would address Lon Fuller’s fictional cave case. Yesterday, I entered the following prompt into a new AI engine called ChatGPT: “solve the case of the speluncean explorers”. Here is the AI’s reply to my legal-philosophical query:
“The case of the Speluncean Explorers is a famous problem in legal and moral philosophy. It is a fictional case that was first presented in a 1949 article by legal scholar Lon Fuller. In the case, a group of five cave explorers become trapped in a cave, and, as they run out of food and supplies, they decide to draw lots to determine which of them will be killed and eaten in order to sustain the others. The person who is chosen is killed and eaten, and the remaining four are eventually rescued. After they are rescued, they are put on trial for murder.
“There are many different ways that one could approach this case, and there is no one ‘correct’ answer. Some people might argue that the explorers had no choice but to do what they did in order to survive, and that they should therefore be acquitted of any wrongdoing. Others might argue that the explorers made a conscious decision to take the life of one of their own, and that this is murder regardless of the circumstances.
“Ultimately, the case of the Speluncean Explorers raises important questions about the limits of the law, the nature of moral responsibility, and the role of compassion in decision-making. It is a thought-provoking case that continues to be discussed and debated by legal scholars and philosophers to this day.”
That is the title of our most recent work in progress; one of the research projects we were working on while we were on sabbatical. (Part 1 of the paper will be published in the University of LaVerne Law Review this spring and is available here.) Part 2 presents Lon Fuller’s “Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” one of the most famous thought experiments in legal studies. In our paper (part 2), we imagine an alternative system of voting by appellate judges, a bayesian or cardinal voting system in which judges assign a score to their preferred judicial outcome. Appellate courts generally use an ordinal system of voting (i.e. one judge, one vote) to decide cases. By contrast, we propose a simple cardinal voting system for deciding appellate cases, using Fuller’s hypothetical case to illustrate how our simple system of cardinal voting would work in practice.
Image…
View original post 3 more words
I fell in love with Mexico during my first extended stay in Cuernavaca in 1989; below is the melancholic ballad “Sólo Quédate en Silencio”, one of my all-time faves from the now-defunct Mex-pop group RBD:
Welcome to the online home of the IASS
Hopefully It’s Interesting.
In Conversation with Legal and Moral Philosophers
dr hab. prof. UJ, Jagiellonian University
Books, papers, and other jurisprudential things
Ramblings of a retiree in France
BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH
Natalia's space
hoping we know we're living the dream
Lover of math. Bad at drawing.
We hike, bike, and discover Central Florida and beyond
Making it big in business after age 40
Reasoning about reasoning, mathematically.
I don't mean to sound critical, but I am; so that's how it comes across
remember the good old days...
"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences." - Sylvia Plath
a personal view of the theory of computation
Logic at Columbia University
Just like the Thesis Whisperer - but with more money
the sky is no longer the limit
Technology, Culture, and Ethics
Just like the horse whisperer - but with more pages
Poetry, Other Words, and Cats
