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From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <762@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 29 Nov 88 10:30:04 GMT
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In article <1821@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks) writes:
>Well said!  Could this display of snobbery reflect an
>attempt at creating a simulation of a hierarch
>of the class-bound British educational establishment?
>Maybe he dislikes our meritocracy, but at least here
>a child of working class parents can become a professional
>without having to learn to disguise an accent.  

Several false assumptions in here:
(a) the USA has a meritocracy.  A meritocracy is "rule by persons chosen
    for their superior talents or intellect".  The ruling class in the
    USA is chosen for its ability to pay enough to look good in the media.
    As Ambrose Bierce put it:  "The best Congress money can buy."
    [That may well be the best practical criterion, what do I know?]

(b) maybe the assumption was that the educational system in the USA
    is meritocratic.  In relation to students, this may well be so, but
    considering the number of students who have to go into debt to
    finance their education at tertiary level, and the growing home-
    schooling movement, one suspects "The best education money can buy."

(c) A child of working class parents cannot become a professional in the
    UK without having to disguise an accent.  Maybe I disbelieve this
    because I studied in Edinburgh, but I visited friends in Oxford where
    there were N different accents, _and_ working-class students.

(d) This discussion is getting us anywhere.

Once before I tried to give an account of why it was reasonable for
people working on AI to pay little attention to sociology.

This time I'm going to attempt a sociological explanation.

  It is a lot of work trying to stay informed in one subject, let alone
  several.  I for one am trying to keep reasonably current in half a dozen
  topics, and I'm really stretched thin (my pockets are suffering too).  I
  literally haven't got the _time_ to study the philosophy and sociology I
  would like to.  (Adler and Bok are all I can manage at the moment, thank
  you.)  So what do I do?  I have to trust someone.  Given the choice of
  trusting John McCarthy (say) or Gilbert Cockton (say), who do I trust?
  Well, one of these people belongs to some of the same fields that I do.
  If he puts me crook, a field _he_ helped found is injured.  What's more,
  he keeps working on trying to solve the problems, and a few years ago
  came up with an approach which is of considerable mathematical interest,
  if nothing else.  (I could say similar things about quite a lot of
  people in AI.)  I claim that it is rational for me to trust McCarthy's
  (say) evaluation of the possibility of AI in preference to Cockton's.
  [It would _not_ be rational for me to prefer J.Random Hacker's; she
  hasn't the background of McCarthy.]

There _is_ a very serious challenge to the possibility of AI (in the
let's-build-a-god sense; the let's-make-amplifiers-for-the-mind camp
can only gain) in Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things".  I
think that's a very exciting book.  He tackles some very basic topics
about language, thought, and meaning, and attempts to show that the
physical-symbol-system approach is founded on sand.  But he doesn't
leave us with mysteries like "socialisation"; an AI/NL person could
expect to read this book and come away with some ideas to try.  I
would really like to see that book discussed in this newsgroup.