So, maybe I'm being contrarian. But we can consider both the paper Eric was
focusing on and this one:
Medical large language models are vulnerable to data-poisoning attacks
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03445-1
But I don't think we really need to. The problem can be boiled down to asking where does
the novelty (if there is any) come from? Logical/algorithmic/reason stability seems
fragile to bullsh¡t/poisoning. An example of poisoning might be Escher's, Dalí, or maybe
even Warhol's art. More practically, maybe we consider training Full Self-Driving
algorithms with footage from Grand Theft Auto video games. As long as the
"physics" that generates the input bears a tight behavioral analogy to the
physics of the actual world, then the inductively trained model can learn a physics
that's good enough to operate in the actual world.
But the interesting stuff isn't in the big middle parts of the distributions.
It's at the edges. I haven't spent much time in GTA lately. But when I did
play, there was some really wacky stuff you could do ... fun glitch
exploitation. It seems Escher did this explicitly and purposefully. (IDK about
Dalí and Warhol.)
In my mind, the resilience of "general intelligence" is caused by our ability to couple tightly with the world. Yes,
"numerical solutions" - running forward an axiomatic system - provide a predictive lookahead unmatched by anything we've ever
known before. Voyager I is still out there! But, as with games like GTA, "we" quickly get bored with closed-world games. What
makes such things "sticky" is the other people [⛧], often including glitch exploitation, our ability to "bend the
circuits" or bathe wood burl in epoxy and turn it on a lathe ... Is there a name for methodically assembled jury-rigged workflows?
Another good example is here <https://youtu.be/l8PxXZoHTVU?si=b79XBVJbyYl04feW> ... putting magnets on a Lister just to make some
LEDs blink ... what a dork!
I guess this targets what Eric means by "empiricism", at least to some extent.
It's not the *regularity* of the world that attracts me. It's the irregularity of the
world. And the edge cases between our model-composed cover of the world often (always?)
provide the inspiration for tightly coupling with the world. (Maybe just a restatement of
the predictive coding hypothesis?)
So the best way to understand the world is NOT to create it. The best way to
understand it is to create many models of it, then focus on where those models
fail/disagree. I.e. anyone who confuses the map for the territory (apparently
Lincoln, Drucker, and Kay >8^D ) will never understand the actual world.
They'll merely get high on their own supply.
[⛧] Of course, there are those of us who'll stare for hours as, say, a 1D CA rule plays
out ... but I argue those are very rare people whose concept of "interesting"
is perverse, however ultimately useful. What catches most people's (and non-human
animals', I'd argue) eye is the stuff other people do.
On 1/9/25 13:06, steve smith wrote:
Glen -
Very well articulated, the images such as "where the cartoons don't weave together well" and
"dog catches car" were particularly poignant. I am reminded of Scott McCloud's maxim about panel
cartooning that "all of the action happens in the gutters".
I'm unclear on your first point regarding whether "the Transformer is categorically different
from our own brain structures" (or not). I'm not sure if the scope is the human brain or if
it is somehow the larger "stigmergic culture within which said brains are formed and
trained"? I'm looking for evidence to help me understand this.
Your distinction between (pure) Science and (practical?) Engineering is on point IMO. While I have also
burned plenty of muscular and neural calories in my life attempting to "form the world" around me,
I believe those energies have significantly been applied more like the "running alongside the car"
you evoke. I also agree that many are biased heavily in the other direction. I'm not sure which of the SUN
founders said something like: "the best way to predict the future is to create it". I don't
disagree with the effectiveness of such a plan, the likes of all the TechBros (billionaires or not) or more
to the point of the moment, the Broligarchs (Billioned up as well as now MAGAed up) are playing it out pretty
clearly right now.
The question is perhaps more what the "spiritual" implications of doing such a thing is? At the
ripe old age of 68 (in a month) and a few years into no longer seeking significant work-for-pay
(retirement/failed career?) I can reflect on the nature of the many things I asserted myself against (work,
homebuilding, tech innovation, travel, influencing others) and have to say the very little if any of it
feels like the kind of "right livelihood" I now wish it had been. Having enough material (own my
own home and vehicles and tools and ...) momentum to maybe coast on over the horizon of my telomeric destiny
with access to enough calories (dietary and environmental), I can be a little less assertive at making sure
the steep pyramid of Maslow is met than I did in my "prime".
I am currently focused on ideations about what the phase transition between homo-sapiens/habilus/technicus/??? and homo-hiveus/collectivus
might look like. Your (glen's) notion that we are collectively roughly a "slime mold" might be accurate but I think we might be
at least Lichens or Coral Reefs, or even Colonial Hydrozoans? Maybe I can do this merely out of "idle curiosity" or perhaps my
inner-apex-predator is lurking to pounce and *force* things to fall "my way" if I see the chance. It is a lifetime habit
(engineering-technofumbling) that is hard to avoid... hard not to want to "make things better" even when I've schooled myself
well on the nature of "unintended consequences" and "best laid plans".
Mumble,
- Steve
On 1/9/25 7:28 AM, glen wrote:
OK. In the spirit of analog[y] (or perhaps more accurately "affine" or "running
alongside"), what you and perhaps Steve, cf Hoffstadter, lay out seems to fall squarely into
xAI versus iAI. I grant it's a bit of a false dichotomy, perhaps just for security. But I don't
think so.
I don't see architectures like the Transformer as categorically different from
our own brain structures. And if we view these pattern induction devices as
narrators and the predicates they induce as narratives, then by a kind of
cross-narrative validation, we can *cover* the world from which we induced the
narratives. But that cover (as you point out) contains interstitial
points/lines/saddles/etc where the cartoons don't weave together well. The
interfaces where the induced predicates fail to match up nicely become the
focus of the ultracrepidarians/polymaths. So the narration is a means to the
end.
The question is, though, to what end? I'm confident that most of us, here, think of the End as "understanding the
world", with little intent to program in a manipulative/engineering agenda. Even though we build the very world we study, we
mostly do that building with the intent of further studying the world, especially those edge cases where our cartoons don't match
up. But I believe there are those whose End is solely manipulative. The engineering they do is not to understand the world, but
to build the world (usually in their image of what it should be). And they're not necessarily acting in bad faith. It seems to be
a matter of what "they" assume versus what "we" assume. Where "we" assume the world and build
architectures/inducers, "they" assume the architecture(s)/inducer(s) and build the world.
In the former case, narrative is a means. In the latter, narrative is the End.
And the universality of our architecture (as opposed to something more limited
like the Transformer) allows us to flip-flop back and forth ... though more
forth than back. Someone like Stephen Wolfram may have begun life as a
pure-hearted discoverer, but then too often got too high on his own supply and
became a world builder. Maybe he sometimes flips back and forth. But it's not
the small scoped flipping that matters. It's the long-term trend that matters.
And what *causes* such trends? ... Narrative and its hypnotic power. The better
you are at it, the more you're at risk.
I feel like a dog chasing cars, running analog, nipping at the tires. The End
isn't really to *catch* the car (and prolly die thereby). It's the joy of
running alongside the car. I worry about those in my pack who want to catch the
car.
On 1/8/25 12:54, Santafe wrote:
Glen, your timing on these articles was perfect. Just yesterday I was having a
conversation with a computational chemist (but more general polymath) about the
degradation of content from recursively-generated data, and asking him for
review material on quantifying that.
But to Steve’s point below:
This is, in a way, the central question of what empiricism is. Since I have
been embedded in that for about the past 2 years, I have a little better grasp
of the threads of history in it than I otherwise would, though still very
amateurish.
But if we are pragmatists broadly speaking, we can start with qualitative
characteristics, and work our way toward something a bit more formal. Also can
use anecdotes to speak precisely, but then suppose that they are representative
of somewhat wider classes.
Yesterday, at a meeting I was helping to run, the problem of AI-based classification and structure prediction for proteins came up briefly, though I don’t think there was a person in the room who actually does that for a living, so the conversation sounded sort of like one would expect in such cases. The issue, though, if you do work in the area, and know a bit about where performance is good, where it is bad, and how those contexts are structured, there is a lot you can see. Where performance is good, what the AIs are doing is leveraging low-density but (we-think-) good-span empirical data, and performing a kind of interpolation to cover a much denser query set within about the same span. When one goes outside the span, performance drops off in ways one can quantify. So for proteins, the well-handled part tends to be soluble proteins that crystallize well, and the badly-handed parts are membrane-embedded proteins or proteins that are “disordered” when sitting idly in
solution, though perhaps taking on order through interaction with whatever substrate they are evolved to handle. (One has to be a bit careful of the word “good” here. Crystallization is not necessarily the functional context in which those proteins live in organisms. So the results can be more consistent, but because the crystal context is a rigid systematic bias. For many proteins, and many questions about them, I suspect this artifact is not fatal, but for some we know it actively misdirects interpretations.)
That kind of interpolation is something one can quantify. Also the fact that
there is some notion of “span” for this class of problems, meaning that there
is something like a convex space of problems that can be bounded by X-ray
crystallographic grounding, and other fields outside the perimeter (which
probably have their own convex regions, but less has been done there — or I
know so much less that I just don’t know about it, but I think it is the former
— that we can’t talk well about what those regions are).
But then zoom out, to the question of narrative. I can’t say I am against it, because it seems (in the very broad gloss on the term that I hear Glen as using) like the vehicle for interpolation, for things like human minds, and the tools built as prosthetics to those minds. But the whole lesson of empiricism is that narrative in that sense is both essential and always to be held in suspicion of unreliability. To me the Copernican revolution in the empiricist program was to emancipate it from metaphysics. As long as people sought security, they had tendencies to go into binary categories: a priori or a posteriori, synthetic or analytic, and so on. All those framings seem to unravel because the categories themselves are parts of a more-outer and contingent edifice for experiencing the world. And also because the phenomenon that we refer to as “understanding” relies in essential ways on lived and enacted things that are delivered to us from the ineffable. One can make
cartoon diagrams for how this experience-of-life interfaces with the various “things in the world”, whether the patterns and events of nature that we didn’t create, or our artifacts (including not only formalisms, but learnable progams of behavior, like counting out music or doing arithmetic in the deliberative mind). The cartoons are helpful (to me) for displacing other naive pictures by cross-cutting them, but of course the my cartoons themselves are also naive, so the main benefit is the awareness of having been broken out, which one then applies to my cartoons also. (I don’t even regard the ineffable as an unreachable eden that has to be left to the religious people; there should be lots we can say toward understanding it within cognitive psychology and probably other approaches. But the self-referential nature of talk-about-experience, and the rather thin raft that language and conversation form over the sea of experience, do make these hard problems, and it seems
we are in early days progressing on them.)
In any case, the point I started toward in the last two paragraphs and then veered from was: when one isn’t seeking security and tempted by the various binary or predicate framings that the security quest suggests, one asks different questions, like how reliability measures for different interpolators can be characterized, as fields of problems change, etc. The choice to characterize in that way, like all others, reduces to a partly indefensible arbitrariness, because it reduces an infinite field of choices to something concrete and definite. But once one has accepted that, the performance characterization becomes a tractable piece of work, and the pairing of the kind of characterization and the characteristics one gets out is as concrete as anything else in the natural world. It comes to exist as an artifact, which has persistence even if later we decide we have to interpret it in somewhat different terms than the ones we were using when we generated it. All of that
seems very tractable to me, and not logically fraught.
Anyway; don’t think I have a conclusion….
Eric
On Jan 9, 2025, at 4:16, steve smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote:
Why language models collapse when trained on recursively generated text
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14872
Without doing more than scanning this doc, I am lead to wonder at just what the
collective human knowledge base (noosphere?) is if not a recursively generated text? An
obvious answer is that said recursive text/discourse also folds in sensori-motor
engagement in the larger "natural world" as it unfolds... so it is not
*entirely* masturbatory as the example above appears to be.
seems to make the point in a hygienic way (even if ideal or over-simplified). We make
inferences based on "our" (un-unified) past inferences, build upon the built
environment, etc. In the humanities, I guess it's been called hyperreality or somesuch.
Notice the infamous Catwoman died a few days ago.
I need to review the "hyperreality" legacy... I vaguely remember the coining of
the term in the 90s?
It all (even the paper Roger just posted) reminds me of a response I learned from Monty
Python: "Oh, come on. Pull the other one." And FWIW, I think this current
outburst on my part spawns from this essay:
Life is Meaningless: What Now?
https://youtu.be/3x4UoAgF9I4?si=7uVDeiDQ8STTJtv7
In particular, "he [Camus] has to introduce the opposing concept—solidarity. This
solidarity is a way of reconstructing mutual respect and regard between people in the
absence of transcendent values, hence his argument for a natural sense of shared humanity
since we are all forever struggling against the absurd."
Fascinating summary/treatment of Camus and the kink he put in Existentialism... familiar
to me in principle but in this moment, with this presentation and your summary, and
perhaps the "existential crisis of this moment" (as discussed with Jochen on a
parallel thread?) it is particularly poignant.
Thanks for offering some "solidarity" of this nature during what might be a collective existential
crisis. Strange to realize that it might be "as good as it gets" to rally around the
"meaninglessness of life"?
On 1/7/25 09:40, steve smith wrote:
Regarding Glen's article "challenging the 'paleo' diet narrative". I'm sure
their reports are generally accurate and in fact homo-this-n-that have been including
significant plant sources into our diets for much longer than we might have suspected.
Our Gorilla cousins at several times our body mass and with significantly higher muscle
tone live almost entirely on low-grade vegetation. But the article presents this as if
~1M years of hominid development across a very wide range of ecosystems was monolithic?
There are still near subsistence cultures whose primary source of nourishment is animal
protein (e.g. Aleuts, Evenki/Ewenki/Sami)?
I'm a fan of the "myth of paleo" even though I'm mostly vegetarian. I like the
*idea* of living a feast/famine cycle and obtaining most of my nutrition from fairly
primary/raw sources. Of course, my modern industrial embedding has me eating avocados grown on
Mexican-Cartel owned farms and almonds grown in the central valley of California on river water
diverted from the Colorado river basin. <sigh>.
On 1/7/25 06:21, glen wrote:
Archaeological study challenges 'paleo' diet narrative of ancient
hunter–gatherers
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-archaeological-paleo-diet-narrative-ancient.html
Renee' convinced me to eat fried chicken the other night. ... Well, OK. She just put it
in front of me and my omnivorous nature took over. Fine. It's fine. Everything's fine.
But it reminded me of the fitness influencers and their obsession with chicken and [ahem]
"protein". Then I noticed the notorious non-sequitur science communicator
Andrew Huberman is now platforming notorious motivated-reasoning through evolutionary
psychology guru Jordan Peterson. Ugh. And Jan 6 is now a holiday celebrating those morons
who broke into the Capitol. Am I just old? Or is the world actually going to hell in a
handbasket? Get off my lawn!
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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