Fantastic. So I continue pressing my colleagues to use some parallax in their
modeling. E.g. one group recently used LCA on our data. And they intend to use
the same Python package, in the very same way, on some other data. That's
great. But what would be better would be to switch it up a bit. Use another
package. Pre-knead the data in a different way. Maybe have someone else do the
low-level work. Maybe have 2 people do similar analyses isolated and compare
the result. Etc.
The same goes for LLMs. People talk too much about OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, etc. What would facilitate Eric's
concept of a scale-free ecology of innovations (the overwhelming majority of which die off as the space is
explored) is a "democratization" of AIs. Granted, it goes beyond lowering the cost of training and
fine-tuning to consumer hardware scales, though. It requires something like the IoT. When we get to the point
we can put an LLM on something like a Raspberry Pi, the project won't have that caveat. ... i.e. not merely
"consumer grade", but "tinkerer grade". I don't know about y'all. But any time *I* try to
tinker, I end up with a pile of bricked devices where only 1 or 2 on top of the pile that works. ... like
those basketball swish or guitar virtuoso videos on Youtube ... you don't see the thousand of takes where
they failed. You only see the one they upload.
On 2/28/25 3:00 AM, Santafe wrote:
This (Ruiu’s Hinterland) was a nice read. Perhaps under-treats the things that
aren’t his topic — like the deep professionalization of concentrating and
retaining wealth, which has not yet been reduced to a children’s online food
fight — while somewhat universalizing the things that are his topic. But still
I think several of its observations are insightful.
There’s a new take on Lord of the Flies, in which this time we really mean
children as children, not children as allegories for adults. It will be a
different kind of terror.
I wouldn’t have written a post just to say the above two things, though.
But reading it a second time, having recommended it to somebody else and
knowing the differences in the eyes with which she will read it from mine, a
different thought did come up that I hadn’t heard anybody say:
Suppose we take Ruiu’s perspective that two applications of ubiquitous
computing — “social” media, and the interposition of ML discourse into all
human communications, combined with the capability for universal surveillance
and automated coercion — as an actual sea change not like other things before
them, and run with that image a bit.
(btw, in keeping with my recent harping that we should see our discourse as
part of the joint-humanity system, but not necessarily containing a model of
it, I was looking for a corresponding image of what ML-discourse is doing as an
addition to society, which is the reason I refer to it above as merely “the
interposition of ML discourse into all human communications”, to try to be
specific about what it is and not thoughtlessly overload it with
human-affective metaphors. The image is what a nitrogen compound like
guanidinium chloride does when mixed into the solvent that hosts a protein. It
denatures the protein. Exact mechanisms not fully understood, but some
combination of interposition between sidechains, and providing ubiquitous
alternative hydrogen-bond donors to the ones that hold the protein fold
together. Whether we think of the effect as equivalent to melting (for which
it is used as an alternative to temperature increase), or more metaphorically,
“dissolution” of the fold order, both of those images work for me.)
Anyway, if these computing innovations are a sea change, what would I analogize
them to? Ruiu writes of them as if the changes were final. “We’re not getting
our polity back.” That characterization feels like it lacks complexity, since
there will be tomorrows (for somebody), and they will have some structure, that
probably won’t be the exact image of today's.
My analogy would be that, at the worst, the computing/communication innovations
are like the invention of oxygenic photosynthesis by cyanobacteria, in a world
that had never experienced elevated oxygen concentrations. It took probably
some hundreds of millions of years to achieve enough innovations to make enough
systems oxygen tolerant, for O2 to be possible as an element of stable
ecosystems. While those innovations were being discovered, though, we had
relentless waves of proliferation and death, probably more chaotic and
idiosyncratic on local scales than is reflected in the simplicity of the banded
Fe formations that have remained from those times.
The main thing that I immediately object to in my own metaphor above is that
big computing is an energy-consuming and heat-generating monster, and I suspect
that big feedbacks from source- and sink-limits may come in and collapse the
social coordination that maintains it at scale before we have lots of such
cycles. The engineer-children (or, better, the not-even-engineer children)
don’t think about systems outside themselves, and hence about the inherence of
complexity and the capability to exercise control in such systems, for reasons
that Ruiu already says much more elegantly than I could.
The part of the image I want to keep, though, is that it could require a
surprising variety of innovations — not some simple regulatory regime that we
can foresee — which will probably have to be organically evolved through trial
and error in a lot of sectors, before these computing paradigms can even
potentially get absorbed into something with a stability that we consider
desirable or acceptable. The “what it would need to be” picture is one I don’t
mind articulating, even as I understand there is a separate question whether
there is time for such a thing to come into existence from the ecological and
demographic situation we are starting from now.
Eric
On Feb 25, 2025, at 12:22 PM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm reminded of this article I read a week or so ago:
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.the-hinternet.com%2fp%2fmy-kind-of-conservatism&c=E,1,gzQf0lJ5kY7HC7MlNO2lMkaryVetlNidko8hlvoRFFGQngDbpZ7xIoKUKCVmY6nF6jgUvJpxGchALBHZSvfj-qlcQ9xmuVE4dbBeQvnG-io9phtYQA,,&typo=1
"Any true conservative would do better to withdraw from history, to the extent
possible, to retreat into his wooded grove and to rediscover his kinship with the trees
..."
Not only is insisting that Harvard disassociate from Harris akin to tilting at
windmills, the very conception of Harvard as a conservative institution is
patently silly. If it hasn't already, it'll soon be taken over by the same or
similar fscking children currently in charge of our government.
Academe is dead. Long live Academe.
On 2/24/25 10:12 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
It's increasingly difficult not to include many of our most elite institutions
as willing participants under the MAGA umbrella. Here's a link to one of
numerous examples published a year ago. It took the students to publish a
rebuke. And I'll be damned, the university has gone and done it again this
week. Have you no shame, Harvard?
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.thecrimson.com%2fcolumn%2fforging-harvards-future%2farticle%2f2024%2f3%2f26%2fbodnick-%2f&c=E,1,9FCLHchjNPBMm9sjD6UY_MzJ0c_jRQK8DXXa4yh9zOEyFR-NBl_tty2vEgwiVUW6tA1GgxdRXd3D9MZqU4K-WR5YwBVojsY3iw8osbBUGhYnCtnTCfv9&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.thecrimson.com%2fcolumn%2fforging-harvards-future%2farticle%2f2024%2f3%2f26%2fbodnick-%2f&c=E,1,_z4MB6OnuX3DQ-FUlv1u56c0HL-T5mlF2122fgOjhNCtCyo97JI9FULLD0EkpwYqDcR3xURNshQAmHTIDpW7x_CRapqqXUN5cqW0Dc1lIHJbfnH7FfU,&typo=1>
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¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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