charleshmorse

I think us commenters are all on the same page here :)

The author is almost making it seem like models are reality and that people think that. They're not and I don't think anyone has ever thought they were...

Further and like other comments already mentioned, the brain is thought of and treated as a turing machine, not a digital computer. It's done this way, because the brain can be mapped to the definition of a turing machine.

And I have to defend Von Neumann. In his book, he explored turing equivalencies between the brain and computer concepts at the time used to implement the digital turing machine, he didn't actually think that the brain was a one-to-one mapping to a digital computer... He knew the difference between models and reality.

Even for the history of models the author mentions (hydraulics, automata, etc.), these all contain some turing equivalencies if implemented correctly and they were simply using the language and examples at the time to express this.

The author also continues to mangle any and all ideas of modeling, abstraction, and equivalence throughout the whole article. With regard to his 'uniqueness problem', I mean 'information loss' is modeled digitally for a reason.. just because humans are lossy, doesn't mean we can't model them that way. Think of a compressed image file.

I don't think there's a single researcher worth their salt that thinks the 'IP Metaphor' is gospel. That is just a grossly unscientific idea to assume.

We're all free to choose any model or collection of models we wish to approximate reality, but some of them work better than others and the brain is a complicated thing to model.

The author is trying to dramatize a triviality.

One mating season is monogamous? Tell my wife that.

Also, this seems to make no mention of 'rearing complexity'. A more developmentally complex brain should imply prolonged rearing and have a bias of survival in favor of shared parenting.

I guess you can find anything you're looking for in gene expressions, if you really want.

Watch Gary Bernhardt at https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts and judge for yourself.

Good points, and I am not advocating sweeping lies in every instance. There's also the assumption that lies always take on a negative form, there are many positive forms of lies. The most obvious example being white lies in conversation to not insult people, when the truth can only be interpreted as insulting (the 'Do I Look Fat In This?' Dilemma).

And then there is also the consideration of the lies lifespan. If the effect of a lie is momentary, its residual effects could only last mere moments, instead of continuously into perpetuity (the ripples of water from a rock thrown into a pond only last for so long). It's chain of causality could die-off - now continuous lying is another matter all together.

My points in this blurb merely show that a rational economic member of society should use lies in some cases; for it is a best response in many common instances - but of course not all and, if avoidable, not for the wrong reasons.

I would say the 'changed your mind' value of a book comes from how analogous it is to your current life situation and the number of habits it imbues on you thereafter. Two of those for me are: 1. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations 2. Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin

I am 24 and have been consulting for close to a year now, with no real end in site. However, each assignment includes problems and skills on a spectrum between pure dev and pure business. So your comment about not understanding what people are trying to accomplish worries me. However from my perspective, there is a lot of value from my confidence and being able to map out what my client SHOULD do (not necessarily what he wants or is trying to accomplish) and directing him down that path. You can't always get them there, but you really need to be able to read people well to bridge the gap from a potentially idiotic or doomed decision they are about to make and a much much better one.

Also, I recommend reading Alan Weiss's The Consulting Bible: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Consulting_Bible.htm...

To be overly simplistic and aggressively reductive, balance the value of networking using this:

http://smg.media.mit.edu/library/Granovetter.WeakTies.pdf (coupled with the probabilities of value for each connection, among many other things) -

with the value of working at that moment (maybe with consideration of diminishing returns at the day goes on, seeing as networking events happen later in the day).

And you'll be at the start of quantifying the trade-off.

Then realize you just spent a whole bunch of time, and wasted productivity calculating that, and the next time just promise yourself to make a spur of the moment decision based on mood, feelings of social isolation, how many 'good' friends you have at the moment, how 'included' you feel, and all the other computation reducing techniques your brain employs via intuition and emotional well-being and instead go off of that.

Fantastic! Thank you for this.