[Heartlogic-dev] reactions

[William L. Jarrold]

Hi Joshua,

Okay, wow there is lots of text associated with OperationJoshuaGoal.  It 
looks impressive.  I have many detailed reactions.  Part of me
just wants to go at it and edit away.  But I don't want to do an
edit that you do not like.  Yes, yes, we get the email saying what
has changed but it can be hard to quickly grok and I do not completey
trust it.  Thus, I would not want you heavily editing something that
I feel some sort of ownership of....An alternative is for me to propose
edits and get permission to make them.

I am also REALLY liking this wiki business.  Aren't you?  For example, we 
have a lot of text associated with Op Joshua Goal and it won't be hard to 
turn it into a paper.

So, which do you prefer?

I am getting a clearer idea of what you are after.  However, I am still 
unclear on the basic research question...

E.g. at http://wiki.nirmalvihar.info/index.cgi?JoshuaGoalResearchQuestion

...one would think that this page given its title would clearly lay out 
the research question.  I see lots of interesting and helpful text giving 
me background.  But the only question I see is "Which emotions can 
conceivably be experienced by an ape and which are uniquely human 
emotions?"...But surely a web based study is not the way to ansewr such a 
question.  Rather, we'd need to play with apes to answer such a question.

Maybe the gripe in the above paragraph answered by labeling it not 
researdh question but rathher "motivation" or "background and motivation"
or "introduction."

Of course, you mention these as the research goals...

Overall Goal:

1. To empirically induce a taxonomy of goal-pairs.

2. To isolate an agent's proper goals from an agent's concern-for-others 
goals.

3. To gather believable examples of each goal-pair.

4. To see which stories 'win' the competition for the most believable in 
each goal-pair category.


...that's better.  But still I have question about this.

E.g.

For 1.  I thought we already had a taxonomy of goal pairs.  It is really 
just a set of goal pairs and it has 9 elements, goal/goal; goal/anti-goal;
goal/no-goal; etc etc.....So what is 1 a question?  Why do we need to
emprical induce what we already have?

Hrm, maybe this is what you mean....Maybe you mean, let's try hard to come 
up with a no-goal/no-goal story.  Is such a story believable?...Maybe 
weird existentialist stories like "Waiting for Godot" or "Rosencrantz and 
Guildenstern are Dead" are examples of Goal No Goal Stories.

For 2. What is an agent's proper goals?

For 3. It seems we really need to get to work and come up with the stories 
ourselves.  I don't think this is something the average jamoke on the WWW
can come up with.  No one will spend the time to read all our wiki's to
figure it out.

For 4. I don't understand why this is a scientific issue.  I mean it would 
be fun to know which ones are most believable in each category.  It wouuld 
also help us figure out the best examples to use when explaining our 
taxonomy....Buut what would really help solidify the status of the 
taxonomy is many good examples of each category.  And also clarity that 
one exemplar does not go somewhere else.

Also, for 4, why not start simple and follow occam's razor.  If so, we 
should first identify stories that win as the most believable for the
unary status of goal.  Or the unary status of no-goal.  Or the unary 
status of anti-goal.  It would seem to me that we have to do that before 
we do goal pairs.

Well, I'm curious to see how you react to my questions.  Maybe my ego 
is getting in the way and I can't let someone else "do their own thing."
or maybe my comments are construcitve.  I dunno.

I generally feel that there IS something here.  There is somethign 
important about these goal pair states.  They seem like components
of affective states of high level organisms, like humans and perhaps
some great apes and/or whales/dolphins.

If we want to establish their validity as conceptual clusters that are in 
peoples heads, one idea is that we could ask people to take a bunch of 
stories and cluster them into related groups.  If people clustered them
into 9 clumps that corresponded to the 9 goal pairs, that would support
the hypothesis that these goal pairs do underly some phenomenologically
important states...Does that seem like a core research question to you?
Trouble is that is a psychology quesiton.  not really an AI question.
I'm not steadfastlly against doing such a study but I'm more interested
in focusing on AI.

Bill