No I meant Andy.
No harm done here.
As I mentioned, I've been in a lot of forums (some were science forums that were heavily into AI, so maybe my wording in that regard was inaccurate), so I'm getting awfully sensitive to potential trolls. An interesting psychological pattern I've seen in online forums is that, regardless of the subject matter of the forum, there always exist one or two long-timers who are experts in the subject matter who react strongly negatively to anyone invading their "territory" since those experts subconsciously fear competition and maybe loss of status if another expert enters "their" forum with the potential of making them look foolish. Those are the people who immediately start challenging me, questioning my qualifications, asking for personal information, ridiculing me, and in general acting weird. That's almost universal, and it even happens in forums that have nothing whatsoever to do with science or AI (I have a lot of interests). It also happens constantly whenever I start a new job, since there is always some long-timer there who wants to become manager and they see me as a threat since it's obvious my education, speech, mannerisms, and so on make me a manager candidate, so they start backstabbing me and acting weird when I'm around. It's not just me, either: the genius brother of a lady I dated told a similar story of how when that guy took a temporary summer job the ladies on the job got unusually hostile with him right from the start until he realized they were fearing they would lose their job to him, so he reassured them it was only a summer job and he didn't want to stay there any longer, whereupon they all got along fine after that. I did mention that I'm really getting fed up with people acting like animals, right? This is part of what I hate about people--people who react based solely on emotion and self-interest instead of logic so such people are so predictable, so mundane, so negative, so destructive, and so manipulable. Government types love manipulable people like that, so everybody suffers in the long run.
This phenomenon even happens among meetings with top scientists:
(p. 257)
McCarthy can be enormously provoking. Several people told
me about a meeting where the leading researchers in AI had gath-
ered to make a collective presentation insuring the continuation
(p. 258)
of funds from the defense department. Not only were all the big-
gest names in AI there, but several high-level executives from de-
fense department agencies were present as well, and the object of
the meeting was to overcome their skepticism. McCarthy had
brought along his Polaroid, and shortly after the meeting began,
he brought it out and began ostentatiously snapping pictures.
Pretty soon he got up out of his seat and walked around the small,
crowded meeting room, getting close-ups, fresh angles. After an
hour or so, somebody got annoyed enough to ask him why he
was doing it. "As a memory aid," McCarthy replied simply, and
kept on snapping.
"Anybody could see what was going on," one person at the
meeting told me. "Here was supersmart John, but he was in a room
full of people who are probably just as supersmart. How else could
he distinguish himself except by making a pest of himself?"
McCorduck, Pamela. 2004. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. Natick, Massachusetts: A K Peters.
