This is one of those conversations where I remember you aren’t neurotypical so there isn’t a point. If you want to play a semantic word game, have at it. It is a complete side issue on the point being made, which is that Apple, unlike other tech companies, makes its own hardware. If you want to argue about the specific meaning of the word “make,” have a good time. In any case, no one else is doing it, which is that REAL point.
1 Like
If I draw a schematics, and draw a board, I did not make it yet. It gets made only after it gets etched and populated. I may or may not do that step myself.
If I draw the board and subcontract it out, I get the board. I designed it but I did not make it.
Small but meaningful difference.
Also important in context of Apple as it is not the Apple that poisons the workers with solvents, but Foxconn. The Fruit’s hands stay off.
I should remind you that the actual point of assembly can be a crucial issue in import tariffs and other paperwork related stuff. So there are at least the customs bureaucrats that care.
Edit: I am (okay, my team is) in process of preparing a device for production. So I am getting somewhat familiar with all the steps, from design, to making the prototype, to subcontracting the making and assembly of the individual components. And there are very significant differences. The terminology is very important there.
XD How is being “typical” a point? Why limit people when they can be optimal?
This seems to be a recurring theme for you, the armchair populism of knowing what most people supposedly do or think. It seems more probable and accurate to me to assume that you are ultimately thinking and speaking only for yourself. I hope you can eventually become more accepting and respectful of your own individual thoughts and opinions.
Install Start8,(or any of the other options), and get the start button back. Make it boot to the desktop and never use Metro. My son’s computer is 8.1, and he flips back and forth from Metro to desktop, but he is 18. I only use the desktop. As an operating system 8 is pretty rugged. It has never and I repeat never blue screened in the last year. More importantly it has played nice with my network of Windows 7 machines. If you really want a Linux box, build one from scratch using parts you know you will be able to get drivers for.
Sort of like your point that social norms don’t matter and the fact that much of the world/country/online populace does things a certain way or has certain perceptions isn’t important or need to be included in discussions?
and I hope you can quit playing semantic word games and bikeshedding most interactions here but I don’t expect it to happen.
1 Like
I have closed friends and family with severe Asperger’s or who are autistic. You learn to recognize, when having debates or discussions with them, that there are hotpoints for them (like many people) that are different but also that they will obsess on certain kinds of minutiae that more “average/neurotypical” will find boring, pointless, or a complete derailment. When you know this, you can decide whether it is worth the time to go there or if it is simply one of those things where you don’t discuss X with Y because Y will start debating statistics until the Sun burns out.
Discussing the exact meaning of “Apple” when it “makes” a laptop with @shaddack is one of those things. There is no point to it. He knows what I mean. I know what he means. There is no point in doing another three rounds about it.
1 Like
The reason why it appears that it appears that I am “playing semantic word games” is because people somehow misquote my positions ad infinitum even when I spell it out in plain language. So, they either are trying to misrepresent my position (whilst complaining about it), or simply don’t/can’t understand it. Semantics is the whole discipline of trying to communicate clearly in order to facilitate understanding, and is not a game when used this way. For (YAMF) example, when you say:
Which, again, demonstrates that you are either misrepresenting what I say, or simply lack a clear understanding of what I mean. It would be more productive if we understood each other, and could then agree or disagree based upon what our actual positions are.
I had to look up “bikeshedding”, which seems to be defined as avoiding the fundamental aspects of a topic and diluting the discussion with trivia. Which is pretty much the opposite of what I am trying to do. The actual mechanisms of human perception and communication are the fundamental problem, and not an irrelevant aside. People strive to marginalise them because they want a more palatable course of action, not because what I am saying is demonstrably untrue. I am going for the core of the issue, instead of treating the symptoms of countless instances. People not only confuse between facts and opinions, they demand to do so.
1 Like
No, I don’t understand you. I’m pretty convinced you’re a Chinese Room AI experiment that has been linked to the Boing Boing BBS.
2 Likes
Ask 100 people if Apple makes computers. This will probably take you about 100 hours because you’ll spend a long time arguing with them after they answer, but it should give you a good idea of what other human beings understand the word “make” to be.
You’ve already admitted that all other companies do this. So why is it important in the case of Apple, again, when everyone does this?
Point of assembly ≠ who assembles it.
Because there are huge transaction costs with things like idiolects, which is why we have standardized all sorts of things. You know, the kinds of standards that some people seem to like when it comes to the ports Apple uses on their computers.
OK, what other companies are doing what Apple does? Feel free to give examples from your position of armchair iconoclasm.
Here is how I understand the following statements:
Translation: I don’t accept demonstrations that anything I say can be untrue.
Demonstrations through countless instances (i.e., empirical data) is irrelevant, and I prefer to supply general ideas without any empirical support for those ideas.
The Chinese are much too capitalistic for this to be true.
2 Likes
Fortunately, a “Chinese Room” is not actually Chinese, just Euro-based American ethnocentric:
2 Likes
I knew my Master’s in Interdisciplinary Humanities would be useful someday!
My computers exist to facilitate my goals, they are tools, and I choose or make the tools I need. So whose tool am I, then? What goals and values would they choose to retool my thought processes in service of? What are the benefits and disadvantages of this to my cognition? These factors may even be negotiable, but if nobody can speak up and make a case for it - it’s not going to happen.
I don’t even have any specific data on what Apple themselves do, My point was that there is no basis for making statistical observations without statistics. And even if we have some, they can never be taken at face value. They are only more data to inconclusively interpret.
If people are going to agree or disagree with an observation or opinion I put forth, they need to know what it is first. When people make clear that what they are responding to completely misses the point of what I am saying, I simply say so. I am perfectly happy with my message being refuted. I am responsible for what I say. You are responsible for your own interpretation. And in honest communication, we can easily discern the difference between these.
Empirical data about what, precisely? What you are suggesting here is an atopical jibe that anything I ever say is counterfactual. I hate to break it to you, but hardly anything about human society is based upon empirical data. It’s a giant, instinctively driven mess of vague goals and pointless acquisition - with a nice veneer of civilized behavior and superficial attempt at science. Which, by coincidence, tends to mirror the layout of their psyches. Data is usually irrelevant, there is more meaning in the process. So if you need empiricism, try basing your society upon how the larger world works, rather than the sum of seven billion people’s personal problems.
Apple makes both software and the hardware it runs on. I think there’s enough data out there to either agree (as most would) or disagree (as some do) with this statement.
What does this have to do with anything? There’s no standard and no computer that is going to perfectly meet the needs of everyone. This doesn’t mean standards aren’t useful, if if they are (when viewed in isolation) suboptimal for pretty much every individual.
Well, you reject standards and embrace highly idiomatic approaches to things, including language. This actually makes it difficult to discern the difference.
The other factor that makes it difficult to discern your opinions or observations is that you refuse to articulate them. Our discussion on capitalism is a case in point, as you largely refused to articulate what you consider to be non-capitalistic societies, or even say whether you think the US is capitalist. There your argument was essentially giving examples of a non-capitalistic systems would be limiting and implicitly foreclose the non-capitalist systems you didn’t mention. You eventually claimed that most societies aren’t capitalistic.
Hey, that’s quite an assertion, I guess it’s a good thing it just an idea, and that you don’t need the support of any empirical data for this. It’s also interesting how it seems to suggest that people are inherently capitalistic, and even more interesting how easily you make broad statements about people while also claiming that you don’t make any assumptions about people and their motivations.
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:95, topic:54106”]
Data is usually irrelevant, there is more meaning in the process. So if you need empiricism, try basing your society upon how the larger world works, rather than the sum of seven billion people’s personal problems.
[/quote]I don’t know if you don’t understand what empirical data is, nor do I know how you think that “the sum of seven billion people’s personal problems,” in aggregate, don’t reflect how the larger world works. Unless you’re talking about the non-human larger world, but I believe they would also operate as “a giant, instinctively driven mess,” which means they act pretty much the same as human. Maybe you’re talking about minerals, though.
1 Like
I never initially mentioned capitalism! You introduced it as a topic, and insisted that I found its tenets disagreeable, and baited me with questions - some thought provoking - about the nature of it. But money does not automatically imply contemporary trends in capitalism. I thought that your insistence in framing it that way make the discussion rather circular.
Yes, this is precisely the point. Stereotypical human motives and frames of reference are a vast subset of what has been demonstrated to exist.
Perhaps they would, but you might be biased! Of course, I may be as well. But my experience is that most of human concern is tightly focused upon what other humans think of them, with hardly any concern for anything beyond this. And that most phenomena do not work as humans do, otherwise we would relate to that which was not human just as easily - apart from animism and such.
Oh, good thing nobody is required to provide empirical support—which is meaningless, anyway—or someone might challenge you on this vast spectrum of what has been demonstrated to exist.
“Perhaps” animals might act instinctively? How else might they act?
What exactly do you mean by animism?
Are you suggesting that I should provide the evidence here for how most human activity relates primarily to other humans? It would dwarf the whole site. And I said that most data is meaningless, which, statistically, it is. Empirical support tends to be commonly referred to as knowledge, which is distinct from raw data.
You are making this into a personal problem. There is no challenging “me”, you don’t even have any evidence that I exist, or what I may be like. I assume, for convenience, that we are two distinct organisms who can compare our observations about what we each assume to be the realities we experience. There is no contest. It doesn’t take much to demonstrate that humans appear to be a subset of the universe they inhabit. The other obvious option might be solipsism, but I don’t find it an interesting consideration.
However they are programmed, or meta-programmed to. Acting as they do, they define what it means to be animal.
I mean, more or less, the practice of explicitly attributing human or human-like personalities. That some people understand what they encounter in the world around as having an essence which they use to comprehend it as if they were engaged in an inter-personal relationship. Anthropomorphism might be more accurate, although some might disregard that their concepts of a tiger, mountain, or automobile might be only models which are still fundamentally human. It is not even unusual for some humans to explain the entire universe as being the work of a giant human-like entity. And, most perniciously, humans also project their own models of other humans onto such other humans.
What is money, anyway? Do tell? 
Tell us more about your ideas about data.
See?!? I knew you were just an AI that Cory is testing on the site.
I recommend you read some Dennett and Searle, among others, and think about zimboes. There is no proof that any of us are conscious or have an “I” anyway.
2 Likes
Something that earns and spends itself.
So, it is a prostitute venture capitalist?
It doesn’t matter if most data is meaningless, because you are asserting that meaning has been extracted from some data, and that a huge non-human set of motives and frames of reference have been demonstrated to exist.
Asking for descriptions of these non-human motives or references to demonstrations of their existence is not asking for data that will dwarf this site. It’s asking for clarification and substance.
And you know, despite most data being “meaningless” (in the sense that the sugar content of bread and the number of times my dog barks every day are meaningless in cancer research), it’s also true that people are pretty good at conceptualizing what data might be significant and then confirming/denying meaningful relationships through statistical analysis.
Hey, you seemed comfortable assuming the existence of other people, and with yourself being refuted (which presumes some sort of challenge), just a few posts ago. Now there’s no challenging you, because you might not even exist (although you also reject solipsism, which seems a bit contradictory), and we certainly don’t know what you may be like (which probably says something about the way you communicate):
I bet that if I made this statement you would talk about how impossible it is to demonstrate this, since we would have to start by proving that the universe—let alone humans—exists.
And you consider this programming to be different than instinct? Most people would accept it as the definition of instinct.
Animism is a word that already exists in English, and you assigning new meanings to it makes communication difficult. Which is why, as I said a few posts ago, that your rejection of standards makes it difficult to discern the difference between our positions. Or maybe you’re just not engaging in honest communication.
[quote=“popobawa4u, post:101, topic:54106”]
Something that earns and spends itself.
[/quote]That’s not much of a definition, and could apply to virtually anything in the same way it conceivably applies to money. And it seems to better and more properly describe time, not money.
1 Like
