Nothing of writing to report until tonight
when you received the new “Edge” – Amorella
**
**
From INTRODUCTION TO PART II: “A COLLECTION OF
KLUDGES’ IN THE THIRD CULTURE: BEYOND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
By John
Brockman [5.1.96]
Introduction
One of
the central metaphors of the third culture is computation. The computer does
computation and the mind does computation. To understand what makes birds fly,
you may look at airplanes, because there are principles of flight and
aerodynamics that apply to anything that flies. That is how the idea of
computation figures into the new ways in which scientists are thinking about
complicated systems.
At
first, people who wanted to be scientific about the mind tried to treat it by
looking for fundamentals, as in physics. We had waves of so-called mathematical
psychology, and before that psychologists were trying to find a simple building
block — an "atom" — with which to reconstruct the mind. That approach
did not work. It turns out that minds, which are brains, are extremely complicated
artifacts of natural selection, and as such they have many emergent properties
that can best be understood from an engineering point of view.
We are
also discovering that the world itself is very "kludgey"; it is made
up of curious Rube Goldberg mechanisms that do cute tricks. This does not sit
well with those who want science to be crystalline and precise, like Newton's
pure mathematics. The idea that nature might be composed of Rube Goldberg
machines is deeply offensive to people who have a strong esthetic drive — those
who say that science must be beautiful, that it must be pure, that everything
should be symmetrical and deducible from first principles. That esthetic has
been a great motivating force in science, since Plato.
One of
the central metaphors of the third culture is computation. The computer does
computation and the mind does computation. To understand what makes birds fly,
you may look at airplanes, because there are principles of flight and
aerodynamics that apply to anything that flies. That is how the idea of
computation figures into the new ways in which scientists are thinking about
complicated systems.
At
first, people who wanted to be scientific about the mind tried to treat it by
looking for fundamentals, as in physics. We had waves of so-called mathematical
psychology, and before that psychologists were trying to find a simple building
block — an "atom" — with which to reconstruct the mind. That approach
did not work. It turns out that minds, which are brains, are extremely complicated
artifacts of natural selection, and as such they have many emergent properties
that can best be understood from an engineering point of view.
We are
also discovering that the world itself is very "kludgey"; it is made
up of curious Rube Goldberg mechanisms that do cute tricks. This does not sit
well with those who want science to be crystalline and precise, like Newton's
pure mathematics. The idea that nature might be composed of Rube Goldberg
machines is deeply offensive to people who have a strong esthetic drive — those
who say that science must be beautiful, that it must be pure, that everything
should be symmetrical and deducible from first principles. That esthetic has
been a great motivating force in science, since Plato.
Counteracting
it is the esthetic that emerges from this book — the esthetic that says the
beauties of nature come from the interaction of mind-boggling complexities, and
that it is complexity essentially most of the way down. The computational
perspective — machines made out of machines made out of machines — is on the
ascendant. There is a lot of talk about machines in this book.
Marvin Minsky is the leading
light of AI — that is, artificial intelligence. He sees the brain as a myriad
of structures. Scientists who, like Minsky, take the strong AI view believe
that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the
brain's cognitive abilities. Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level,
abstract thought, and believes that in principle machines can do everything a
conscious human being can do.
Conversation:
Technology
Chapter
8 “Smart Machines”
Marvin
Minsky [5.1.96]
Roger
Schank: Marvin Minsky is the
smartest person I've ever known. He's absolutely full of ideas, and he hasn't
gotten one step slower or one step dumber. One of the things about Marvin
that's really fantastic is that he never got too old. He's wonderfully
childlike. I think that's a major factor explaining why he's such a good
thinker. There are aspects of him I'd like to pattern myself after. Because
what happens to some scientists is that they get full of their power and
importance, and they lose track of how to think brilliant thoughts. That's
never happened to Marvin.
__________
MARVIN
MINSKY is a mathematician and
computer scientist; Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; cofounder of MIT's Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, Logo Computer Systems, Inc., and Thinking Machines,
Inc.; laureate of the Japan Prize (1990), that nation's highest distinction in
science and technology; author of eight books, including The
Society of Mind (1986).
[Marvin
Minsky] Like everyone else, I think
most of the time. But mostly I think about thinking. How do people recognize
things? How do we make our decisions? How do we get our new ideas? How do we
learn from experience? Of course, I don't think only about psychology. I like
solving problems in other fields — engineering, mathematics, physics, and
biology. But whenever a problem seems too hard, I start wondering why that
problem seems so hard, and we're back again to psychology! Of course, we all
use familiar self-help techniques, such as asking, "Am I representing the
problem in an unsuitable way," or "Am I trying to use an unsuitable
method?" However, another way is to ask, "How would I make a machine
to solve that kind of problem?"
A
century ago, there would have been no way even to start thinking about making
smart machines. Today, though, there are lots of good ideas about this. The
trouble is, almost no one has thought enough about how to put all those ideas
together. That's what I think about most of the time.
The
technical field of research toward machine intelligence really started with the
emergence in the 1940s of what was first called cybernetics. Soon this became a
main concern of several different scientific fields, including computer
science, neuropsychology, computational linguistics, control theory, cognitive
psychology, artificial intelligence — and, more recently, the new fields called
connectionism, virtual reality, intelligent agents, and artificial life.
Why
are so many people now concerned with making machines that think and learn?
It's clear that this is useful to do, because we already have so many machines
that solve so many important and interesting problems. But I think we're
motivated also by a negative reason: the sense that our traditional concepts
about psychology are no longer serving us well enough. Psychology developed
rapidly in the early years of this century, and produced many good theories
about the periphery of psychology — notably, about certain aspects of
perception, learning, and language. But experimental psychology never told us
enough about issues of more central concern — about thinking, meaning,
consciousness, or feeling.
The
early history of modern psychology also produced some higher-level conceptions
that promised — at least in principle — to explain a great deal more. These
included, for example, the kinds of theories proposed by Freud, Piaget, and the
gestalt psychologists. However, those ideas were too complex to study by
observing the behavior of human subjects under controlled conditions. So,
because there was no way to confirm or reject such ideas, these potentially
more adequate theories found themselves beyond the fringe of what most researchers
considered to be the proper domain of science. Today, though, our computers are
powerful enough to simulate such artificial minds, provided only that we
describe them clearly enough for our programmers to program them.
The
first modern computers arrived around 1950, but it wasn't until the 1960s, with
the arrival of faster machines and larger memories, that the field of
artificial intelligence really began to grow. Many useful systems were
invented, and by the late 1970s these were finding applications in many fields.
However, even as those applied techniques were spreading, the theoretical
progress in that field began to slow, and I found myself wondering what had
gone wrong — and what to do about it. The main problem seemed to be that each
of our so-called "expert systems" could be used only for some single,
specialized application. None of them showed what a person would call general
intelligence. None of them showed any signs of having what we call common
sense.
For
example, some people developed programs that were good at playing games like
chess. Other programs were written to prove certain kinds of theorems in
mathematics. Others were good at recognizing various kinds of visual patterns —
printed characters, for example. But none of the chess programs had any ability
to recognize text, nor could the recognition systems prove any theorems, nor
could the theorem-proving machine play competently at chess. Some people
suggested that we could make our machines more versatile by somehow fusing those
programs together into a more integrated whole, but no one had any good ideas
about how that could be done. Today, it's still almost impossible to get any
two different AI programs to cooperate.
This
is precisely the problem I tried to solve in my book The
Society of Mind. We'd already run into
this problem in the 1960s, when Seymour Papert and I started a project to build
vision-guided manipulators — that is, robots with eyes and hands. To make a
computer that could "see" things, it would need ways to recognize the
appearances of objects and the relations between them, but how could you make a
computer do such things? Well, at first, each of our researchers tried to
develop some particular method. One such project might first try to find the
edges of an object and then piece these together into a whole. The trouble was
that usually some of the edges were hidden, or were of low optical contrast, or
were not really the edges of the object itself but of some decoration on its
surface. So edge-finding never worked well enough. Another researcher might try
to locate, instead, the surfaces of each object — perhaps by classifying their
textures and shadings. This method, too, would sometimes work, but never well
enough to be dependable. Eventually, we concluded that no particular method
would ever work well enough by itself and we'd have to find ways to combine
them.
Why
was it so difficult to combine different methods inside the same computer
system? Because, I think, our community had never tried to think that way. To
do such a thing seemed almost immoral — against the very spirit of "good
programming." The accepted paradigm was, and still is, to find a good
method for doing the job, and then work on it until you've removed the last
bug! Sounds sensible, doesn't it? But eventually we had to conclude that it's a
basically wrong idea. After all, even if you did manage to completely debug a
program for some particular application, eventually someone would want to use
it for some other purpose, in a new environment — and then new bugs would
surely appear.
This
has been the universal experience with computer programs. In fact, programmers
are always joking about this; they often talk about "software rot,"
which is when a program has been working perfectly for years and then begins to
make mistakes, although supposedly nothing has changed. Even today, programmers
spend most of their time at trying to make programs work perfectly. The result
has been a pervasive trend toward making everything more precise — to make programming
into a science instead of an art, by doing everything with perfect logical
precision. In my view, this is a misguided idea. What, after all, does it mean
for anything to work perfectly? The very idea makes sense only in a rigid,
unchanging, completely closed world, like the kinds that theorists make for
themselves. Indeed, we can make flawless programs to work on abstract
mathematical models based on assumptions that we specify once and then never
change. The trouble is that you can't make such assumptions about the real
world, because other people are always changing things.
Eventually
we made that first robot more robust by installing a variety of methods, but
neither it or any of its modern descendants ever were really reliable. We
concluded that to make such systems more resourceful and dependable — in a
word, more lifelike — we'd better try to understand how human minds manage to
rarely get stuck. What are the differences between human thinking and what
computers do today? To me, the most striking difference is how almost any error
will completely paralyze a typical computer program, whereas a person whose
brain has failed at some attempt will find some other way to proceed. We rarely
depend upon any one method. We usually know several different ways to do
something, so that if one of them fails, there's always another. For example,
you can recognize your friends not just by their facial features but by the
sound of their voices, by their posture, their gait, their hair color. Given
all that variety, we rarely need to perfectly debug any single method. Instead,
we learn to recognize the situations in which each of them usually works, and
we also learn about conditions in which a method is likely to fail to work. And
if all those fail, we can always try to invent a completely new approach.
A
century ago, Sigmund Freud was already emphasizing the importance of
"negative expertise" — of having knowledge about what not to do, a
subject that has been entirely ignored by computer scientists and their programmers.
Freud talked about censors and other mechanisms that keep us from doing things
we've learned to avoid. I suspect that such systems have evolved in our brains,
and that a typical brain center is equipped from birth with several different
learning mechanisms, some of which accumulate negative knowledge. Thus, one
part might accumulate knowledge about when to activate a particular method,
another learns to construct "suppressors" or "censors" that
can oppose the use of each method, and yet other mechanisms learn what to do
when two or more methods come into conflict.
It
really is a simple idea — that our minds have collections of different ways to
do each of the things they do. Yet this challenges our more common and more
ancient ideas about what we are and how we work. In particular, we all share
the notion that inside each person there lurks another person, which we call
"the self" and which does our thinking and feeling for us: it makes
our decisions and plans for us, and later approves, or has regrets. This is
much the same idea that Daniel Dennett, who is arguably the best living
philosopher of mind, calls the Cartesian Theater — the universal fancy that
somewhere deep inside the mind is a certain special central place where all
mental events finally come together to be experienced. In that view, all the
rest of your brain — all the known mechanisms for perception, memory, language
processing, motor control — are mere accessories, which your "self"
finds convenient to use for its own inner purposes.
Of
course, this is an absurd idea, because it doesn't explain anything. Then why
is it so popular? Answer: Precisely because it doesn't explain anything! This
is what makes it so useful for everyday life. It helps you stop wondering why
you do what you do, and why you feel how you feel. It magically relieves you of
both the desire and the responsibility for understanding how you make your
decisions. You simply say, "I decided to," and thereby transfer all
responsibility to your imaginary inner self. Presumably, each person gets this
idea in infancy, from the wonderful insight that you yourself are just another
person, very much like the other people you see around you. On the positive
side, that insight is profoundly useful in helping you to predict what you,
yourself, are likely to do, based on your experience with those others.
The
trouble with the single-self concept is that it's an obstacle to developing
deeper ideas when we really do need better explanations. Then, when our
internal models fail, we're forced to look elsewhere to seek help and advice
about what to do in our real lives. Then we find ourselves going to parents,
friends, or psychologists, or resorting to those self-help books, or falling
into the hands of those folks who claim to have psychic powers. We're forced to
look outside ourselves, because that single-self mythology doesn't account for
what happens when a person experiences conflicts, confusions, mixed feelings —
or for what happens when we enjoy pleasure or suffer pain, or feel confident or
insecure, or become depressed or elated, or repelled or infatuated. It provides
no clues about why we can sometimes solve problems but other times have trouble
understanding things. It doesn't explain the natures of either our intellectual
or our emotional reactions — or even why we make that distinction.
What
are emotions, anyway? I am developing larger-scale theories of what emotions
are, how they work, and how we might learn to control and exploit them.
Psychologists have already proposed many smaller theories about different
aspects of the mind, but no one since Freud has proposed plausible explanations
of how all those systems might interact.
You
might ask why this new theory should work, when so many other attempts to
explain emotions have failed. My answer is that almost all other such attempts
have been looking in the wrong direction. The psychological community suffers
from a severe case of physics envy. They've all been searching for some minimal
set of basic principles of psychology, some very small collection of amazingly
powerful ideas that, all by themselves, can explain how the mind works. They'd
like to imitate Isaac Newton, who discovered three simple laws of motion which
solved an entire world of problems about mechanics. My method is just the
opposite.
The
brain's functions simply aren't based on any small set of principles. Instead,
they're based on hundreds or perhaps even thousands of them. In other words,
I'm saying that each part of the brain is what engineers call a kludge — that
is, a jury-rigged solution to a problem, accomplished by adding bits of
machinery wherever needed, without any general, overall plan: the result is
that the human mind — which is what the brain does — should be regarded as a
collection of kludges. The evidence for this is perfectly clear: If you look at
the index of any large textbook of neuroscience, you'll see that a human brain
has many hundreds of parts — that is, subcomputers — that do different things.
Why do our brains need so many parts? Surely, if our minds were based on only a
few basic principles, we wouldn't need so much complexity.
The
answer is that our brains didn't evolve in accord with a few well-defined rules
and requirements. Instead, we evolved opportunistically, by selecting mutations
that favored our survival under the conditions and constraints of many
different environments, over the course of at least half a billion years of
variation and selection. What, precisely, do all those parts do? We're only
beginning to find this out. I suspect that we have much more to learn. When
we're all done we'll have found out that many of those mental organs have
evolved to correct deficiencies of old ones — that is, deficiencies that did
not appear until we got so much smarter. It's characteristic of evolution that
after many new structures have developed, it's too late to go back and make
much change in those older systems on which we still depend.
In a
situation like that, it can be a mistake to focus too much on searching for
basic principles. More likely, the brain is not based on any such scheme but
is, instead, a great jury-rigged combination of many gadgets to do different
things, with additional gadgets to correct their deficiencies, and yet more
accessories to intercept their various bugs and undesirable interactions — in
short, a great mess of assorted mechanisms that barely manage to get the job
done.
When
I was a kid, I was always compelled to find out how things worked, and I used
to dissect all available machinery. I grew up in New York City. My father was
an ophthalmologist, an eye surgeon, and our household was always full of
interesting friends and visitors — scientists, artists, musicians, and writers.
I read all sorts of books, but the ones I loved most were about mathematics, chemistry,
physics, and biology. I was never tempted to waste much time at sports,
politics, fiction, or gossip, and most of my friends had similar interests.
Especially, I was fascinated with the writings of the early masters of science
fiction, and I read all the stories of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Hugo
Gernsback. Later I discovered the magazines like Astounding
Science Fiction, and consumed the works
of such pioneers as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Arthur C.
Clarke, Harry Harrison, Frederick Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon — as well as the work
of their great editor-writer, John Campbell. At first these thinkers were like
mythical heroes to me, along with Galileo, Darwin, Pasteur, and Freud. But
there was a difference: all those writers were still alive, and in later years
I met them all, and they became good friends of mine, along with their
successors — like Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Vernor Vinge, who are fellow
scientists as well. What a profound experience it was to be able to collaborate
with such marvelous imaginers!
Of
course, I also read a great deal of technical literature. But aside from the
science fiction, I find it tedious to read any ordinary writing at all. It all
seems so conventional and repetitive. To me, the science-fiction writers are
our culture's most important original thinkers, while the mainstream writers
seem "stuck" to me, rewriting the same plots and subjects, reworking
ideas that appeared long ago in Sophocles or Aristophanes, recounting the same
observations about human conflicts, attachments, infatuations, and betrayals.
Mainstream literature replays again and again all the same old stuff, whereas
the science-fiction writers try to imagine what would happen if our
technologies and societies — and our minds themselves — were differently
composed.
Aside
from this, most of my youth was involved in constructing things. Building
gadgets. Composing music. Designing new machines. Imagining new processes. When
I started at Harvard, in 1946, there was no temptation to play with computers,
because there were none. None, that is, except for the Mark I relay computer,
which was then being built. I paid almost no attention to it, but one of my
Bronx High School of Science classmates, Anthony Oettinger, did. Before long, he
became Harvard's first professor of computer science, and around 1952 he wrote
one of the first programs to make a computer learn something.
At
Harvard, my first concerns were with physics, especially mechanics and optics,
and with abstract mathematics, but I soon also got interested in
neurophysiology and the psychology of learning. I had the fortune to become
attached first to the great B.F. Skinner and then to an extraordinary crew of
young professors, including George Miller and Joseph Licklider, who were on the
frontier of cybernetics — that great collision between traditional psychology
and the new fields of control-engineering that evolved during the Second World
War. Perhaps the most important thing that happened, though, was finding a
book, Mathematical Biophysics,
by Nicholas Rashevsky, while browsing through the stacks of science books in
Widener Library. Rashevsky showed me how to make abstract models of real
things. Then, in Rashevsky's own journal, the Bulletin
of Mathematical Biophysics, I found
the current work of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. First was the original
McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper on threshold neurons and state machines, which
suggested ways to make computerlike machines by interconnecting idealized
neurons. Then there was the tremendously imaginative Pitts-McCulloch 1947 paper
on vision and group theory, which was the precursor of the group-invariance
theorem in Perceptrons,
the book Seymour Papert and I wrote in 1969. I'm pretty sure that it was works
like these, and the flurry of ideas in the early Macy Conference volumes, that
kept me thinking about how to make machines that could learn. When Norbert
Wiener's revolutionary book, Cybernetics,
was published in 1949, most of it seemed like old stuff to me, although it taught
me a great deal of mathematics.
In
the course of thinking about how one might get "neural- network
machines" to learn to solve problems, I conceived of what later came to be
called Hebb synapses, after the Montreal psychologist Donald Hebb. This inspired
me to design a machine in which a randomly connected network of such synapses
would compute approximate correlations between stimuli and responses. George
Miller got some money from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and
gave me an account to use to build that machine, which I called the Stochastic
Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator — or SNARC, for short. The machine used
about four hundred vacuum tubes and forty little magnetic clutch mechanisms,
which would automatically adjust potentiometers, which would in turn control
the probabilities that each synapse would transmit a signal from each simulated
neuron to another one. The machine worked well enough to simulate a rat
learning its way through a maze. I described it in my 1954 Ph.D. thesis, but I
don't know how much influence the thesis had on the other researchers. I've
never even seen a citation of it, although it has sections proposing other
learning mechanisms that so far have never been used.
The
SNARC machine was able to do certain kinds of learning, but it also seemed to
have various kinds of limitations. It took longer to learn with harder
problems, and it sometimes made things worse to use larger networks. For some
problems it seemed not to learn at all. This led me to start thinking more
about how to solve problems "from the top down," and to start
formulating theories about representations and about heuristics for problem
solving. In this period, there were only a few people thinking about random
neural networks. Nothing very exciting happened in that field — that is, in the
field of "general" neural networks, which included looping,
time-dependent behavior — until the work of John Hopfield at Caltech, in the
early 1980s. There were, however, important advances in the theory of loop-free
or "feed forward" networks — notably the discoveries in the late
1950s by Frank Rosenblatt of a foolproof learning algorithm for the machines he
called "perceptrons." One novel aspect of Rosenblatt's scheme was to
make his machine learn only when correcting mistakes; it received no reward
when it did the right thing. This idea has not been adequately appreciated in
most of the subsequent work.
The
most important other direction in research — of attempting to set down powerful
heuristic principles for deliberate, serial problem solving — was already being
pursued by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon. By 1956 they'd developed
a system that was able to prove almost all of Russell's and Whitehead's
theorems about the field of logic called "proposition calculus." I
myself had found a small set of rules that was able to prove many of Euclid's
theorems. In the same period, my graduate-school friend John McCarthy was
making progress in finding logical formulations for a variety of commonsense
reasoning concepts.
Soon
the field of artificial intelligence began to make rapid progress, with the
spectacular work of Larry Roberts on computer vision, and the work of Jim
Slagle on symbolic calculus, and around 1963, ARPA — the Defense Department's
Advanced Research Projects Agency — began to support several such laboratories
on a reasonably generous scale. Rosenblatt's neural-network followers were also
making ambitious proposals, and this led to a certain amount of polarization.
This was partly because some of the neural-network enthusiasts were actually
pleased with the idea that they didn't understand how their machines
accomplished what they did. When Seymour and I managed to discover some of the
reasons why those machines could solve certain problems but not others, many of
those neovitalists interpreted this not as a mathematical contribution but as a
political attack on their work. This evolved into a strange mythology about the
nature of our research — but that's another story.
What
can you do when you have a problem that you can't seem to solve in a single
step? Then you have to find ways to break it up into subproblems and try to
find ways to solve each of those. By the end of the 1960s, quite a few people
were thinking about this, and I tried to pull the field together and write a
book about it. The trouble was that we were discovering new methods faster than
we could write them down, so in 1961 I pulled together as much as I could and
published one very large paper titled "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence."
Although this was not strictly a synthesis, it did establish a fairly uniform
terminology for the field, and establish the subject as a well- defined
scientific enterprise. Some techniques proposed in that paper have still not
yet been adequately explored.
After
pursuing several different approaches to the problem of making artificial
intelligence — and trying to decide which method might be best — I finally
realized that there's no best way. Each particular method has advantages for
particular kinds of situations. This means that they key to making a smart
machine is inventing ways to manage a variety of resources — and this led to
what Seymour and I called the society-of-mind theory. If you look at the brain,
you see that there are hundreds of different kinds of neural nets there —
hundreds of different kinds of structures. When you injure different pieces of
the brain, you see different symptoms. That led to the idea that maybe you
can't understand anything unless you understand it in several different ways,
and that the search for the single truth — the pure, best way to represent
knowledge — is wrongheaded.
The reason it's wrongheaded is
that if you understand something in just one way, and the world changes a
little bit and that way no longer works, you're stuck, you have nowhere to go.
But if you have three or four different ways of representing the thing, then it
would be very hard to find an environmental change that would knock them all
up. People are always getting into situations that are a little bit different
from old ones. You have to accumulate different viewpoints and different ways
of doing things and different mechanisms. If you want to do learning with
neural nets, you can't just use one kind of neural net; you'll probably have to
design different types suited for remembering stories, for representing
geometrical structures, for causal interactions, for making chains-of-reasoning
steps, for the semantic relations of language expressions, for the sorts of
two-dimensional representations needed for vision, and so on. The secret of
intelligence is that there is no secret — no special, magical trick.
Selected and edited from
EdgeDOTorg
**
**
2138 hours.
I plan on re-reading this in the morning. I feel like I am on a ‘reasonable’
track with this concept of a soul developing from machinery from a civilization
that has had a 20,000 year head start.
But, this does nothing for your present
focus ‘Dead Eleven’. – Amorella
2141 hours. I don’t know where
to go with it.
Why not travel with Merlyn’s soul, Foretoken
and his soul friend, Venerable, and see? A weakness needs shorn up in the old
Druid, so to speak; it is something to sleep with. Recently you said your
heartansoul didn’t seem to be in touch with your mind, so why not put the
personal experience (the fictional process) to work? – Amorella
2149 hours. I will say you
stretch me a bit, Amorella
No more than you once stretched a few of your
own students over the years. Post. - Amorella
