DeLong Sapience Watch...

Is Brad DeLong sapient? If so, how sapient? The evidence is mixed. Here is some more evidence:

There I was, procrastinating by looking at the iTunes music store, trying to figure out what my children had been buying. And I see a name? Aimee Mann. "That looks interesting," I think to myself. Why did it seem interesting? I didn't know. So I typed "Aimee Mann" into the search box, and...

...discovered that I had heard one of her songs, "Going Through the Motions," on the radio that day. Did I know that that song was sung by Aimee Mann? If you had asked me while I was listening to it if I knew who the singer was, I would have said no.

But something inside there did know.

Brad DeLong: sapient intellectual rational and reasonable being, or jumped-up East African plains ape running off a neural net and capable at times of putting forth an almost-convincing simulacrum of sapience?

Is Brad DeLong sapient? Express your opinion:

Comments

[Ellen1910]

How does Brad DeLong know that had he been asked at the time, he would have said he didn't know the name of the singer?

Sounds like nothing more than a man in possession of an excellent forgetter.

[Archer]

First, you are assuming that it was the fact that you heard her song that made you take interest in her name. I know bupkis about popular music, and even I have seen her name. So your interest might have been based on seeing an ad, or a review (without having read the review). That would be an older input, and less subject to recall as to where it came from.
Second, questioning your sapience is not a reader friendly strategy. If you are not sapient, we are not very smart to be reading your blog!

[jerry]

I am trying to figure out what the chances are that there would be an artist you heard on the radio appearing on prominently on iTunes.

Aren't you simulacrumbs the ones teaching *us* about survivor bias?

["As you know" Bob]

We're also plains apes who insist upon finding significance and meaning in the most trifling of coincidences.

Aimee Mann is a famous name, and she also gets radio play. This could have been a complete, meaningless coincidence just as easily as it could be evidence of mysterious subconscious reasoning.

[five toed sloth]

I don't see the contradiction. Brad DeLong, sapient rational being with additional pattern-recognition features.

It's like a computer with a dedicated, proprietary encryption card. You can't observe the add-on's operations, and you have no way of ensuring its integrity or accuracy, but it can perform certain narrow tasks far faster than the (nominal) main unit.

[SJ]

I recognised the name "Aimee Mann" when I read it here, and thought "I know the name, but who is she?". So I looked her up on Wikipedia, and it turns out she sang "Voices Carry" back in 1985.

I know the song and have the album, and I thought "Wow! What a coincidence." But after thinking about for a few minutes, I remembered that I'd come across her name a few weeks ago and looked her up back then, too. That was why the name rang a bell. Can't remember the context in which I came across her name a few weeks ago, though.

Memory does funny things.

[Stuart Kurtz]

I believe the Turing Test applies, which in this case specifically means that if an East African Plains Ape's neural network is able to respond in a way that is indistinguishable from intellegence, then it is intellegent. In short, you have nothing to worry about!

[Padraig]

Here's my opinion - I'm a big fan of Aimee Mann. Particularly her work on the Magnolia soundtrack. You may have heard that soundtrack, and if you did, you may have heard her name. you may then have forgotten it, but a shadow of a memory still existed, and was triggered by seeing her name in print. The song on the radio - clearly a coincidence. However, in the name of Intelligent Design, we could also argue that coincidences are actually God screwing with us.

[Larry]

The other day someone called you something like "the Falstaff of the Internets," and now you want to invite more abuse by questioning your own sapience? Of course, Falstaff was just a fictional character, so you might just be an intelligent seeming simulacrum. Which brings us back to the relevance of the Turing Test...

[a different chris]

>trying to figure out what my children had been buying.

Er, I hate to be a Luddite here but why the hell didn't you just ask them?

I'll never understand economists.

[divadab]

How does the word get associated with the image/sense of the thing sufficient to trigger an integrated action response?

And how does this association get broken when we want to retrieve the word? And come back to us only after conscious mental efforts fail?

Weird composite brain structure, relics (ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny)of successful accidents? Purposeful only in the flesh? Or deeper connected ethereal layers?

[D-Slam]

">trying to figure out what my children had been buying...."
"Er, I hate to be a Luddite here but why the hell didn't you just ask them?"

Economists know not to trust survey data... the people responding to the survey might lie. In this case, they might tell their father they bought Raffi songs when they were really downloading Limp Bizkit and 2 Live Crew.

[crack]

The only thing I know of that is sapient is pearwood.

[Emma Anne]

D-Slam - I told my 14 year old that I wasn't paying for her to download the explicit versions of songs (everyone here uses my account, and usually I don't bother to deduct the few bucks from allowances). Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth. :-)

Crack - I am listening to the audio book of Sourcery right now. Not one of the great Terry Pratchetts, perhaps, but it's really fun. And funnier read in a British accent, of course.

[James Killus]

I have known for a long time that I share a body with someone who is much smarter, wittier, more charming, more creative, and even better with women than I am. I have offered to let him take over, but all I get in response is a little chuckle and what feels like a shrug.

He's a better dancer, too, damn him.

[NBarnes]

I think five toed sloth has a good point. I got a lot more comfortable with my cognition when I decided that I was a collective intelligence with a thin veneer of singular identity. There is a sapient in there, but mistaking the actions of the more dedicated and specialized systems for the cognition of the sapient is a good way to confuse yourself. Memory, in particular, is surprisingly black-boxed most of the time.

Also, I think most people grossly underestimate the amount of time they spend operating out of mental modes other than the sapience unit that we usually think of as 'ourselves'.

[christofay]

Can you, kind Blog Host, give an Amicus Brief for this "The Copyright Royalty Board is proposing a large increase in the performance royalty rates for “non-interactive streaming services”"?

http://journal.davidbyrne.com/

David Byrne asks about the fairness of many "market based" decisions made by appointed bodies,

"Web radio is different than broadcast radio in that the hosting costs increase precisely as the listenership increases. With streaming web radio, information on the exact number of listeners accessing the stream at any given moment or period is available, and easy to obtain, unlike broadcast radio which is just out there and no one knows how many people are listening (so how do they determine ad rates?)"

"Who is this agency that is proposing making this change? They are not an elected body — the Copyright Royalty Board is made up of a few people appointed by the Library of Congress Copyright Office. They used to be a group of arbitrators but since 2004 they are a group of judges."

"The new rates are supposed to have been based on the model of the so-called willing buyer and willing seller in the marketplace — this according to the wording of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1996. But where does this “market value” come from? Does it mean that if I play more popular music on my streaming radio I should pay more? I’m confused. (I think I’m supposed to be confused.)"

At the least the board is a place to park for a member's fee.

KCRW is my favorite on-line radio station, Wolf Man, and sadly I have not made a contribution.

[stewart]

Brad:
I'm sure you are sapient at times (assuming that you mean logically processing information with little use of cognitive and emotional shortcuts, to outcomes that are not completely foreordained by your beliefs). However, unless you've had an unfortunate injury in, say, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, your life should be enriched/complicated by half-forgotten memories, intimations of knowing, sudden interest in seemingly obscure information, bits of emotion and sentiment for no rational reason, etc. Why else would you listen to music or care why your children spend their prodigious intellects on this? You probably read 'Descartes' Error' by Antonio Damasio at some point, which argues that pure sapience would be both inhuman and inhumane.

(I'm intrigued by the revival/cover versions of some of my favourite tunes from 1980 or so - The Saints are coming, by the Skids, for instance - my daughter copes well with my attempts to convince her that the original versions are better, frequently despite evidence)

[PaulC]

I'm about the worst person to ask about pop music, but I know who Aimee Mann is. Maybe it's just my age bracket. When I was in college, Voices Carry was a big hit with saturation play on radio and MTV (when MTV had its maximum influence on pop culture). The band was called 'til Tuesday, and the singer was Aimee Mann (which I didn't know at the time). Since then, I have heard or read interviews with her--not sure where--it could have been on Fresh Air on NPR or some free daily. That's when the name stuck in my memory. I may also have looked up 'til Tuesday, the way I occasionally look up bands that had a hit I remember but I cannot place otherwise. I haven't heard another song by Aimee Mann as far as I know, but I recognize the name immediately.

[MQ]

It is a relative and not an absolute standard...all we ask is that you are more sapient than Donald Luskin..

[SqueakyRat]

"Brad DeLong: sapient intellectual rational and reasonable being, or jumped-up East African plains ape running off a neural net and capable at times of putting forth an almost-convincing simulacrum of sapience?"

Seriously, what makes you think there's a real difference?

[andres]

"Brad DeLong: sapient intellectual rational and reasonable being, or jumped-up East African plains ape running off a neural net and capable at times of putting forth an almost-convincing simulacrum of sapience?"

No individual is completely monolithic. Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice is a loathesome anti-Semite in one moment and eloquent ennobler of Shylock in another. And as I mentioned before, Brad's normally affable and perceptive East African plains ape turns into King Kong swatting biplanes out of the sky when the subject is Noam Chomsky or Eric Hobsbawm ;-)