I got all excited, prematurely and incorrectly I am sure, when I read glen's
post.
But first: *"Is there a name for methodically assembled jury-rigged workflows?"*
Rube Goldbergian comes to mind.
I interpreted parts of this paragraph
**_In my mind, the resilience of "general intelligence" is caused by our _****_
_**
**_ability to couple tightly with the world._* _[substituting Human for
General]_*
*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 *
as supporting deep personal biases:
Human Intelligence cannot be separated from the context in which it arises and
that context must include the human body and the culturally modified external
environment. [Ultimately, perhaps, especially if OrchOR is well founded,
quantum-ly connected to the entire Universe.]
AI and even AGI can mimic only a subset of Human Intelligence, specifically
that part most influenced by the left-brain. [as elaborated by Ian McGilchrist
in some 4,000 pages: The Master and His Emissary, The Matter With Things, vol I
and II]
davew
On Fri, Jan 10, 2025, at 2:04 PM, glen wrote:
> 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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