Thread: You are locked inside a small, soundproof room for one day.

Person I'd want to be there: Derren Brown (would like him to show me how to do he stuff he does, try it on me)
I can't think of a person I'd hate being with. I suppose any really judgmental person, or maybe some creepy old man trying to hit on me the whole time?

Originally Posted by Dianeva

Person I'd want to be there: Derren Brown (would like him to show me how to do he stuff he does, try it on me)

I was thinking of Derren too. He's so cool.

Given that they can't hurt me physically (and presuming they can be people who aren't currently alive) I'd pick a serial killer for the first one. Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, etc.

Or David Foster Wallace.

If they have to be alive, I don't know.

I wouldn't like to be locked in a room with somebody whose thoughts are primarily on sex at their stage in their lifecycle. As a teenager I get too much of that in my head already and it'd destroy the productivity of the conversation.

There aren't really any living people I look up to, or many dead ones either. Does nobody else feel modern society has no intellectual leaders? Don't say Stephen Hawking, there are plenty of living physicists in his league; having a cool computer voice doesn't make you any deeper. He is very philosophically naive and I don't recall him saying anything interesting from a human perspective.

I guess Feynman would be a good bet, I'm always enlightened or entertained by him; he's a respectable and witty guy who you could have a deep conversation with.

Either that or David Attenborough, world's most travelled man. Or one of the really smart and interesting philosophers, British empiricists especially.

The worst person for me I think would be a stupid loudmouthed zealot, like a televangelist. They'd drive me nuts. Somebody already mentioned Bill O'Reilly and the like; that's pretty much bang on the mark.

Originally Posted by Heavy Sleeper

I'd like to be locked in with Stephen Fry. By the end of the day, I'd probably walk out of that room with an encyclopedia for a mind.

Implying reading a dubious autocue for a game show makes you knowledgeable. He's some fella with a 2:1 in English, not some kind of cultural deity.

Originally Posted by Xei

Either that or David Attenborough,

Not just the most travelled man on earth but the coolest too.

Originally Posted by Xei

Implying reading a dubious autocue for a game show makes you knowledgeable. He's some fella with a 2:1 in English, not some kind of cultural deity.

Implying I give a shit whether or not he's some kind of genius. I'm not one of those people who believes he's some kind of "cultural deity", so calm down. For some reason, I knew someone would attack that choice and I had a funny feeling it would be you, Xei. If I could actually be stuck in the room with anybody, I honestly don't know who I'd choose. I just settled on Stephen because I thought he'd be quite interesting.

Living:
Want- Nathan Fillion
Don't Want - Tommo from this forum

Dead:
Want- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Don't Want - Still Tommo

Fictional
Want- Sherlock Holmes, Maybe Arsene Lupin
Don't Want- Still Tommo

Originally Posted by Xei

There aren't really any living people I look up to, or many dead ones either. Does nobody else feel modern society has no intellectual leaders? Don't say Stephen Hawking, there are plenty of living physicists in his league; having a cool computer voice doesn't make you any deeper. He is very philosophically naive and I don't recall him saying anything interesting from a human perspective.

Tearing away the mysteries of the universe is pretty boring, I agree.

On the other hand, the conversation would be a lot shorter than with anyone else.
Could probably only really have an hour long conversation, drawn out over the whole 24 hours.

I've changed my choice now.

WANT:
Laughing Man

I'm wondering why people choose people they like?
Or people they basically agree with on everything.

Why not choose a person who has complete opposite views to you,
so that you can understand why they think that way, and maybe you can sway them.
They would have to end up talking, even if you piss them off, coz they've got a whole 24 hours in there
with you.
Pretty much the only opportunity you'd have to talk to someone for that long.
And personally I find it extremely boring talking to someone with whom I just agree on everything.
A fundamentalist christian would be interesting.

I would kill to see Syd Barrett. We would make art, and music, while acting childish and absurd.

Someone I wouldn't want to see.. Hannity, or O'Reilly..

Originally Posted by Xei

Does nobody else feel modern society has no intellectual leaders?

I think it's just that our scientific understanding is so advanced now that it's nearly impossible for any single person to greatly advance science. Great minds of centuries past like Kepler or Newton single-handedly revolutionized science, but their ideas were still rather simple to comprehend. By the early 20th century, brilliant minds like Einstein and von Braun were leading entire research teams and government agencies to test their ideas, they simply didn't have the resources or manpower to do it alone.

Nowadays it seems that most important breakthroughs come from large research teams instead of any single individual. There's not much "easy" science left to discover.

Originally Posted by Spartiate

I think it's just that our scientific understanding is so advanced now that it's nearly impossible for any single person to greatly advance science. Great minds of centuries past like Kepler or Newton single-handedly revolutionized science, but their ideas were still rather simple to comprehend. By the early 20th century, brilliant minds like Einstein and von Braun were leading entire research teams and government agencies to test their ideas, they simply didn't have the resources or manpower to do it alone.

Nowadays it seems that most important breakthroughs come from large research teams instead of any single individual. There's not much "easy" science left to discover.

This is very true.
I've been thinking this recently as well.
All the scientists are like a giant collaborating machine now.
They're not making huge individual discoveries, they're all building off each other.
Using their discoveries and going further.

There's also so much information and new discoveries now that people can't even keep up within
their own specialty. That's what I've heard anyway, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's true.

Basically they're working more like a brain now, rather than individual organisms.
Which is cool in one way. In another way there is no one person for the general public to follow
and look up to. So that could explain the low popularity of science. Coz laymen don't follow or get inspired by ideas.

Probably helping to hijack this thread. Sorry Seroquel.

I apologize for my lack of reading skills, I am truly sorry for your lots. I'll do it over again.

I'd love to be in a room with Sigmund Freud. I wanna hear what he'd have to say about me. But, I'd hate to be in a room with Jeff Dahmer. I'd be scared as shit.

Originally Posted by Spartiate

I think it's just that our scientific understanding is so advanced now that it's nearly impossible for any single person to greatly advance science. Great minds of centuries past like Kepler or Newton single-handedly revolutionized science, but their ideas were still rather simple to comprehend. By the early 20th century, brilliant minds like Einstein and von Braun were leading entire research teams and government agencies to test their ideas, they simply didn't have the resources or manpower to do it alone.

Nowadays it seems that most important breakthroughs come from large research teams instead of any single individual. There's not much "easy" science left to discover.

That really isn't true, Einstein's gigantic acheivements were the single-handed work of his intellect, whilst in Germany. He wasn't leading any 'research teams' or collaborative projects when he developed special and general relativity, or explained Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, I'm not sure where you got even the semblance of this idea.

There's a good case to be put for the theory that science happens in fits and starts. It's all noodling around with the details, which is what we see at the moment with lots of people doing specialised stuff or big experiments into old fields, all pretty routine and uncreative, until somebody comes along with a conceptual revolution which blows a lot of the previous stuff out of the water and creates a new flurry of activity. These events are rare and so maybe it's not so surprising that we haven't seen one in our generation, but there is quite a lot of this stuff left to do. Physics is currently disjointed and it looks like there will need to be a conceptual revolution there before it starts to look done; the problem of unifying gravity and the other three forces, and the problems of dark matter and energy, are very troublesome and messy. Or in neuroscience and AI; almost certainly what is needed there is a new conceptual framework, the kind of thing only an individual can conjure up after sitting down and grappling with it, and once that's done we will see an explosion of progress with huge industrial applications.

Although, I wasn't even talking about a scientist particularly, when I said an intellectual leader, though it's true I can't think of anybody there who fits the bill. What I find troubling is that today the world seems to me completely confused. There are no big ideas, just an increasingly messy continuation of the same old stuff, with economic disaster looming on the horizon. And I cannot think of a single person who has stepped up to the mark and spoken about it in a coherent fashion that reassures me about human sanity and makes me feel like there is some kind of sensible purpose to be had. Musicians don't seem to understand anything and have simply abandonded their old political posts and taken to increasingly superficial banality, except a those who sing about how confusing everything is and how alienated they feel. I can't think of anybody in politics who has any vision or who I respect... I can only think of one guy who talks sense and he's retired. Obama seems like a guy with good intentions but he hasn't really pulled anything major off or provided any answers. Politics has gone nowhere for decades. If Douglas Adams were still around then at least there would be somebody to laugh at everything with. Obviously no religious leader is going to do it for me, but there don't seem to be any of them either. I just feel that the world is becoming increasingly chaotic and the reaction of culture has been to refuse to grapple with it and just bugger around.

Originally Posted by [SomeGuy]

I apologize for my lack of reading skills, I am truly sorry for your lots. I'll do it over again.

I'd love to be in a room with Sigmund Freud. I wanna hear what he'd have to say about me. But, I'd hate to be in a room with Jeff Dahmer. I'd be scared as shit.

YOUR READING SKILZ ARE TEH SUCK<!!!!11111oneoneone
He also said they can't hurt you.

Also, Xei - I think this King Jigme Singye Wangchuck guy had it right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness
I think that is a guy who brought a serious re-thinking of our values to the table.
Why are we trying to increase GDP?
Because we thought that it is directly correlated with the level of happiness of the people of the country.
It's so obviously not true, but this guy was the first one, afaik, to really say it and actually implement some way of seeing how happy people really are.
Of course, this obviously hasn't been implemented everywhere.
So yeah for the most part you are correct.

As for the science bit, I mostly agree with you, except for the AI part.
I think all the ways we could possible get good AI are already invented.
I think it's going to be done with evolving programs. As well as sharing collected data (right and wrong responses, sent from everyone who uses the program). I doubt any one is going to think of some new, better way to do it.

Although I could be completely wrong. I'm not a programmer. It also depends what kind of AI you're talking about.

AI does not currently exist. There are just a bunch of brute force programs written by programmers. AI means a program autonomously working out how to solve novel problems. The brain can do this but we have no idea how to make a program do it. There is loads that has not been worked out and entirely new concepts are required.

What about the NASA program where they got it to figure out the best type of antenna?
If that's not "working out how to solve novel problems" I don't know what is.
And it did it better than any human could.

Unless you're talking about broad AI.

No, it isn't solving novel problems. The program was specifically designed for the single problem of finding the best antenna by the programmers (not the AI. This is the point, there was zero understanding of the problem; it was the programmers which 'did it'), and it did it in a brute force way (creating new designs totally randomly and selecting the best ones) with zero conceptualisation and intelligence.

I think that the reason that there's a lack of intellectual leaders is that nobody wants to listen to what the potential intellectual leaders have to say. Consider Daniel Quinn. It's hard to be an intellectual leader when nobody listens.

Essentially the intellectual leaders are the ones that are telling us that we're stupid hairy monkeys and not magic monkeys and that we're facing extinction. But nobody wants to listen to that. Many people can't deny it on scientific grounds and so "accept" it. They then go back to worrying about debt ceilings and other abstractions (that they treat as being real) without allowing the realization of stupid hairy monkeyhood to significantly influence their thinking.

want- either of the three old spice men

not want- the creator of portal

Originally Posted by Raish

not want- the creator of portal

Seriously...? That's like one of the top 10 games ever made...

I've never even played Portal and I consider that a sin.

Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

I think that the reason that there's a lack of intellectual leaders is that nobody wants to listen to what the potential intellectual leaders have to say. Consider Daniel Quinn. It's hard to be an intellectual leader when nobody listens.

Essentially the intellectual leaders are the ones that are telling us that we're stupid hairy monkeys and not magic monkeys and that we're facing extinction. But nobody wants to listen to that. Many people can't deny it on scientific grounds and so "accept" it. They then go back to worrying about debt ceilings and other abstractions (that they treat as being real) without allowing the realization of stupid hairy monkeyhood to significantly influence their thinking.

My mum was saying something the other day about "humans and animals".
Can't remember exactly what it was now.
But I said "humans are animals".

She went absolutely nuts.
I think it was because she can't actually come to terms with the fact that she is really is just an animal.
She says she knows it, but I think language gives us a very good insight in to the way people of a culture think.

So many people say "humans" and "animals" as distinct categories.
It shows that we think we are separate. Other we would say "non-human animals", or come up with a different
word that means "all animals that aren't human" and use that instead. I don't know if there is one, but it isn't in common usage.

It's the same thing as "alcohol and drugs", which is constantly in the news. But people get mad when you correct them, because
it challenges their world view.

Originally Posted by BLUELINE976

I've never even played Portal and I consider that a sin.

Don't worry about going off topic Tommo.

Edit: No way is portal in the top 10.