date:20231009

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread Marcus Daniels

Being that LLMs are probabilistic may get the user of a LLM in some trouble 
here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_and_Quranic_narratives

From: Friam  On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Monday, October 9, 2023 12:45 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

"Truth" is well defined.  It is the set of propositions which assert that what 
is the case is the case.  Determining whether a given proposition is true may 
be difficult.
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Oct 9, 2023, 10:23 AM glen 
mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
OK, I agree, mostly. But "truth" is no more well-defined than any other 
specific grounding style. E.g. the insistence that there is truth in fiction. 
There is affective truth in MAGA, just like there's truth in whatever 
justification Hamas might give for its reaction to the bloodshed of the Israeli 
settlements. But such truths are so abstracted, they can be [a|mis]used at will 
and the narrative spin used to whip up the adherents provides any glue needed 
to make it seem as true as it needs to seem to spur the adherents to action.

It's a bad analogy from, say, Hamas to shut up and calculate. But it can be 
made. It's fun watching intra-science tribe members pick at each other for 
their sloppiness in communicating science. E.g. Sabine's take on transitioning. 
Whatever. If a tribe polices itself, then their trustworthiness is much higher 
... for me, at least. I'm glad the Republicans are in a civil war. It's 
evidence they may recover as a party. If people stop telling me I'm wrong, then 
I'm most likely very wrong. As long as I've still got people telling me I'm 
wrong, then I'm at least somewhere near not-wrong.


On 10/9/23 08:24, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I mean there are some categories that are disjoint or mostly disjoint.   
> Similarly, the grounding is not total.   I agree that value systems like MAGA 
> have power, but they don't have truth.  There is no truth.  All there is, is 
> power, which is my point.  QM and demagoguery are both tools, with different 
> contexts for use.
>
>> On Oct 9, 2023, at 7:48 AM, glen 
>> mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hm. Even with the caveat of "generally", I think this complementarity 
>> argument fails because all the various categories are not disjoint. And it's 
>> the (somewhat) lack(ing) of grounding/binding that allows the mixing of the 
>> modes. I'd tried to point this out by using "computation", the idea that 
>> human innovation might be more universal than microbial innovation. It's not 
>> really that the values *lack* grounding. It's that their grounding is 
>> complicated, perhaps iterative? maybe heterarchical? IDK, but certainly not 
>> lacking any grounding.
>>
>> An abstracted value system like that of the 09A OR MAGA cults may have 
>> *more* power, more chances to hook and unhook because it gives the donner 
>> and doffer of that value system more opportunities to do the donning and 
>> doffing at whatever arbitrary points they choose, to lazily benefit 
>> themselves without having to handle any unintended/unconsidered entailments.
>>
>>> On 10/8/23 18:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> This doesn't make them more valuable because they lack grounding.
>>
>>> On 10/8/23 13:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Generally attaching to one value system means not attaching to another 
>>> value system.   For example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is 
>>> at odds with policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this 
>>> morning he drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared.   
>>> (Reducing that fear by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)
>>> It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t work 
>>> don’t have power.

--
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread Frank Wimberly

"Truth" is well defined.  It is the set of propositions which assert that
what is the case is the case.  Determining whether a given proposition is
true may be difficult.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Oct 9, 2023, 10:23 AM glen  wrote:

> OK, I agree, mostly. But "truth" is no more well-defined than any other
> specific grounding style. E.g. the insistence that there is truth in
> fiction. There is affective truth in MAGA, just like there's truth in
> whatever justification Hamas might give for its reaction to the bloodshed
> of the Israeli settlements. But such truths are so abstracted, they can be
> [a|mis]used at will and the narrative spin used to whip up the adherents
> provides any glue needed to make it seem as true as it needs to seem to
> spur the adherents to action.
>
> It's a bad analogy from, say, Hamas to shut up and calculate. But it can
> be made. It's fun watching intra-science tribe members pick at each other
> for their sloppiness in communicating science. E.g. Sabine's take on
> transitioning. Whatever. If a tribe polices itself, then their
> trustworthiness is much higher ... for me, at least. I'm glad the
> Republicans are in a civil war. It's evidence they may recover as a party.
> If people stop telling me I'm wrong, then I'm most likely very wrong. As
> long as I've still got people telling me I'm wrong, then I'm at least
> somewhere near not-wrong.
>
>
> On 10/9/23 08:24, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > I mean there are some categories that are disjoint or mostly disjoint.
>  Similarly, the grounding is not total.   I agree that value systems like
> MAGA have power, but they don't have truth.  There is no truth.  All there
> is, is power, which is my point.  QM and demagoguery are both tools, with
> different contexts for use.
> >
> >> On Oct 9, 2023, at 7:48 AM, glen  wrote:
> >>
> >> Hm. Even with the caveat of "generally", I think this complementarity
> argument fails because all the various categories are not disjoint. And
> it's the (somewhat) lack(ing) of grounding/binding that allows the mixing
> of the modes. I'd tried to point this out by using "computation", the idea
> that human innovation might be more universal than microbial innovation.
> It's not really that the values *lack* grounding. It's that their grounding
> is complicated, perhaps iterative? maybe heterarchical? IDK, but certainly
> not lacking any grounding.
> >>
> >> An abstracted value system like that of the 09A OR MAGA cults may have
> *more* power, more chances to hook and unhook because it gives the donner
> and doffer of that value system more opportunities to do the donning and
> doffing at whatever arbitrary points they choose, to lazily benefit
> themselves without having to handle any unintended/unconsidered entailments.
> >>
> >>> On 10/8/23 18:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >>> This doesn't make them more valuable because they lack grounding.
> >>
> >>> On 10/8/23 13:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >>> Generally attaching to one value system means not attaching to another
> value system.   For example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is
> at odds with policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this
> morning he drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared.
>  (Reducing that fear by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)
> >>> It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t
> work don’t have power.
>
> --
> glen
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread Steve Smith



On 10/9/23 9:24 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I mean there are some categories that are disjoint or mostly disjoint.   
Similarly, the grounding is not total.   I agree that value systems like MAGA 
have power, but they don't have truth.  There is no truth.  All there is, is 
power, which is my point.  QM and demagoguery are both tools, with different 
contexts for use.


Which is why "speaking truth to power" is considered a vain conceit by 
some?  Or "by some" are we speaking only of the cynical who seem to be 
close cousin to the nihil?


BTW... I ran this by my "new bar friend" ChatGPT and they set me 
straight...  there are plenty of other reasons to take this position 
besides mere cynicism and nihilism...  


One of my more profound weaknesses seems to be conflating skepticism 
with cynicism.




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Re: [FRIAM] natalism

2023-10-09 Thread Steve Smith

Glen -

In the spirit of succinctness (succinctity?) my intuition aligns with
your argument here about the relevance/utility of flex/slop... I think
this is a corollary to Deacon's "absential" but to pursue it more
formally would puncture the walls of my aspired /succintity/.

At the risk of (over) tangenting... your invocation of Semon's Engram
seems to reference Mountcastle's Cortical Columns as considered in
Hawkin's work (1000 Brains
).
I didn't dive down that rabbit hole (yet)...

Your recent (and repeated) specific brush-back of Dawkin's /Meme/s and
the modern variant (often deployed/weaponized by the right with "woke")
of "mind virus" feels to be a good example of what you gesture at here?
It (/memetics/) was *such* a compelling/powerful concept when it was
coined (no matter how misbegotten?) that it has held (and developed) a
life of it's own over the ensuing decades (near half-century?). It
feels as if the very "excess meaning" (or sloppy meaning?) you
?disparage? in cognitive metaphor is, in fact, what makes them so
"powerful". To the extent the point of "powerful speech" or "powerful
thoughts" might be to jump over the threshold/saddle from one attractor
to another, this makes sense (for better and worse)...

- Steve

As usual, there's too much in your post for me to follow a thread. But
I can cherry-pick this one: affect - or what it is to be about/for
something. An option is to think in terms of soft types such that the
lower order objects over which the higher order operators ... uh,
operate, have some "flex and slop", allowing the higher order
operators to become schema and the lower order objects to constitute
(nearly? ... quasi?) equivalence classes.

The ontological status "engrams"
came up
recently in another context. I'm told they're quite *specific*. But
I'm not convinced. I think they can be specific (e.g. the efficacy of
things like a Memory Palace). But I also think they can be
accidentally invoked in non-specific or specific, but various ways.
The non-specificity might provide for variation in stimulus (memory
triggered by something different, different part of the body, smell vs
taste, etc.) or components (memory of a visual scene versus that of a
somatic context).

All my speculation is subject to falsifying or validating data, of
which I have none. But whatever. My point, here, is that overly simple
hypotheses for the spread of (largely) cultural or psychological
behaviors are so impoverished that they feel like just-so stories to
me. E.g. Dawkin's memes ... or Hanson's "innovation" ... or the
nihilistic mode-switching facility of cult-members.

Deutsch's "hard to vary" constraint for good scientific theories comes
to mind, I guess. Call me contrarian if you want. But in order for a
"theory" to convolve into all the other "theories" wallowing out there
in the ambience, it has to percolate into the unoccupied interstitial
spaces left blank by the others. And that requires them to have a
little flex and slop, allowing them to "be about" or "be for" things
other than what you might think they're about or for.

Abuse seems to be the norm, not the exception.

On 10/6/23 09:28, Steve Smith wrote:
Another fancy word I've come to like is /"Ententional"/ which
combines the ideas of what something is "about" with what it is "for".

This leads me around to Deacon's "Teleodynamics" which might be
obliquely related to your invocation recently of a physics
"Lagrangian vs Eulerian" rather than the Anthropological "Emic vs
Etic" axis of understanding first-third person,
reductionist-holistic, nominal-real perspectives? This also leads
me back around to the (nearly) ineffable discussion of Stationary
Action revisited from time to time here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects

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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread Marcus Daniels

People can interact with the world and find groundings for symbols using their 
senses.   Some of their semantic bindings may be learned from works of fiction. 
 Some of their bindings may be copied from other people that did the same.  
Other bindings may be from planting things in dirt or playing on a jungle gym.  
 The people that learn things about using dirt in New Mexico may learn 
different things that people that use dirt in Washington.   The more indirect 
the source of the bindings, the more suspicious it is.   I wouldn't agree that 
all these bindings add value to the world.  We are better off if the ones that 
carry demonstrably false claims are proportionately devalued.   

-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, October 9, 2023 9:23 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

OK, I agree, mostly. But "truth" is no more well-defined than any other 
specific grounding style. E.g. the insistence that there is truth in fiction. 
There is affective truth in MAGA, just like there's truth in whatever 
justification Hamas might give for its reaction to the bloodshed of the Israeli 
settlements. But such truths are so abstracted, they can be [a|mis]used at will 
and the narrative spin used to whip up the adherents provides any glue needed 
to make it seem as true as it needs to seem to spur the adherents to action.

It's a bad analogy from, say, Hamas to shut up and calculate. But it can be 
made. It's fun watching intra-science tribe members pick at each other for 
their sloppiness in communicating science. E.g. Sabine's take on transitioning. 
Whatever. If a tribe polices itself, then their trustworthiness is much higher 
... for me, at least. I'm glad the Republicans are in a civil war. It's 
evidence they may recover as a party. If people stop telling me I'm wrong, then 
I'm most likely very wrong. As long as I've still got people telling me I'm 
wrong, then I'm at least somewhere near not-wrong.

On 10/9/23 08:24, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I mean there are some categories that are disjoint or mostly disjoint.   
> Similarly, the grounding is not total.   I agree that value systems like MAGA 
> have power, but they don't have truth.  There is no truth.  All there is, is 
> power, which is my point.  QM and demagoguery are both tools, with different 
> contexts for use.
> 
>> On Oct 9, 2023, at 7:48 AM, glen  wrote:
>>
>> Hm. Even with the caveat of "generally", I think this complementarity 
>> argument fails because all the various categories are not disjoint. And it's 
>> the (somewhat) lack(ing) of grounding/binding that allows the mixing of the 
>> modes. I'd tried to point this out by using "computation", the idea that 
>> human innovation might be more universal than microbial innovation. It's not 
>> really that the values *lack* grounding. It's that their grounding is 
>> complicated, perhaps iterative? maybe heterarchical? IDK, but certainly not 
>> lacking any grounding.
>>
>> An abstracted value system like that of the 09A OR MAGA cults may have 
>> *more* power, more chances to hook and unhook because it gives the donner 
>> and doffer of that value system more opportunities to do the donning and 
>> doffing at whatever arbitrary points they choose, to lazily benefit 
>> themselves without having to handle any unintended/unconsidered entailments.
>>
>>> On 10/8/23 18:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> This doesn't make them more valuable because they lack grounding.
>>
>>> On 10/8/23 13:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>>> Generally attaching to one value system means not attaching to another 
>>> value system.   For example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is 
>>> at odds with policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this 
>>> morning he drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared.   
>>> (Reducing that fear by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)
>>> It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t work 
>>> don’t have power.

-- 
glen

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Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread glen

OK, I agree, mostly. But "truth" is no more well-defined than any other
specific grounding style. E.g. the insistence that there is truth in fiction. There is
affective truth in MAGA, just like there's truth in whatever justification Hamas might
give for its reaction to the bloodshed of the Israeli settlements. But such truths are so
abstracted, they can be [a|mis]used at will and the narrative spin used to whip up the
adherents provides any glue needed to make it seem as true as it needs to seem to spur
the adherents to action.

It's a bad analogy from, say, Hamas to shut up and calculate. But it can be
made. It's fun watching intra-science tribe members pick at each other for
their sloppiness in communicating science. E.g. Sabine's take on transitioning.
Whatever. If a tribe polices itself, then their trustworthiness is much higher
... for me, at least. I'm glad the Republicans are in a civil war. It's
evidence they may recover as a party. If people stop telling me I'm wrong, then
I'm most likely very wrong. As long as I've still got people telling me I'm
wrong, then I'm at least somewhere near not-wrong.

On 10/9/23 08:24, Marcus Daniels wrote:

I mean there are some categories that are disjoint or mostly disjoint.
Similarly, the grounding is not total. I agree that value systems like MAGA
have power, but they don't have truth. There is no truth. All there is, is
power, which is my point. QM and demagoguery are both tools, with different
contexts for use.

On Oct 9, 2023, at 7:48 AM, glen wrote:

Hm. Even with the caveat of "generally", I think this complementarity argument fails
because all the various categories are not disjoint. And it's the (somewhat) lack(ing) of
grounding/binding that allows the mixing of the modes. I'd tried to point this out by using
"computation", the idea that human innovation might be more universal than microbial
innovation. It's not really that the values *lack* grounding. It's that their grounding is
complicated, perhaps iterative? maybe heterarchical? IDK, but certainly not lacking any grounding.

An abstracted value system like that of the 09A OR MAGA cults may have *more*
power, more chances to hook and unhook because it gives the donner and doffer
of that value system more opportunities to do the donning and doffing at
whatever arbitrary points they choose, to lazily benefit themselves without
having to handle any unintended/unconsidered entailments.

On 10/8/23 18:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
This doesn't make them more valuable because they lack grounding.

On 10/8/23 13:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Generally attaching to one value system means not attaching to another value
system. For example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is at odds
with policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this morning he
drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared. (Reducing that fear
by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)
It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t work don’t
have power.

--
glen

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread Marcus Daniels

I mean there are some categories that are disjoint or mostly disjoint.   
Similarly, the grounding is not total.   I agree that value systems like MAGA 
have power, but they don't have truth.  There is no truth.  All there is, is 
power, which is my point.  QM and demagoguery are both tools, with different 
contexts for use.

> On Oct 9, 2023, at 7:48 AM, glen  wrote:
> 
> Hm. Even with the caveat of "generally", I think this complementarity 
> argument fails because all the various categories are not disjoint. And it's 
> the (somewhat) lack(ing) of grounding/binding that allows the mixing of the 
> modes. I'd tried to point this out by using "computation", the idea that 
> human innovation might be more universal than microbial innovation. It's not 
> really that the values *lack* grounding. It's that their grounding is 
> complicated, perhaps iterative? maybe heterarchical? IDK, but certainly not 
> lacking any grounding.
> 
> An abstracted value system like that of the 09A OR MAGA cults may have *more* 
> power, more chances to hook and unhook because it gives the donner and doffer 
> of that value system more opportunities to do the donning and doffing at 
> whatever arbitrary points they choose, to lazily benefit themselves without 
> having to handle any unintended/unconsidered entailments.
> 
>> On 10/8/23 18:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> This doesn't make them more valuable because they lack grounding.
> 
>> On 10/8/23 13:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> Generally attaching to one value system means not attaching to another value 
>> system.   For example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is at odds 
>> with policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this morning 
>> he drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared.   (Reducing 
>> that fear by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)
>> It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t work 
>> don’t have power.
> 
> --
> glen
> 
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Re: [FRIAM] natalism

2023-10-09 Thread glen

As usual, there's too much in your post for me to follow a thread. But I can cherry-pick
this one: affect - or what it is to be about/for something. An option is to think in
terms of soft types such that the lower order objects over which the higher order
operators ... uh, operate, have some "flex and slop", allowing the higher order
operators to become schema and the lower order objects to constitute (nearly? ... quasi?)
equivalence classes.

The ontological status "engrams"
came up recently in another
context. I'm told they're quite *specific*. But I'm not convinced. I think they can be specific
(e.g. the efficacy of things like a Memory Palace). But I also think they can be accidentally
invoked in non-specific or specific, but various ways. The non-specificity might provide for
variation in stimulus (memory triggered by something different, different part of the body,
smell vs taste, etc.) or components (memory of a visual scene versus that of a somatic context).

All my speculation is subject to falsifying or validating data, of which I have none. But
whatever. My point, here, is that overly simple hypotheses for the spread of (largely)
cultural or psychological behaviors are so impoverished that they feel like just-so
stories to me. E.g. Dawkin's memes ... or Hanson's "innovation" ... or the
nihilistic mode-switching facility of cult-members.

Deutsch's "hard to vary" constraint for good scientific theories comes to mind, I guess. Call me contrarian if you
want. But in order for a "theory" to convolve into all the other "theories" wallowing out there in the
ambience, it has to percolate into the unoccupied interstitial spaces left blank by the others. And that requires them to have a
little flex and slop, allowing them to "be about" or "be for" things other than what you might think they're
about or for.

Abuse seems to be the norm, not the exception.

On 10/6/23 09:28, Steve Smith wrote:

Another fancy word I've come to like is /"Ententional"/ which combines the ideas of what something
is "about" with what it is "for".

This leads me around to Deacon's "Teleodynamics" which might be obliquely related to your
invocation recently of a physics "Lagrangian vs Eulerian" rather than the Anthropological
"Emic vs Etic" axis of understanding first-third person, reductionist-holistic, nominal-real
perspectives? This also leads me back around to the (nearly) ineffable discussion of Stationary Action
revisited from time to time here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects

--
glen

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

2023-10-09 Thread glen

On 10/8/23 18:18, Marcus Daniels wrote:

This doesn't make them more valuable because they lack grounding.

On 10/8/23 13:21, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Generally attaching to one value system means not attaching to another value
system. For example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is at odds
with policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this morning he
drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared. (Reducing that fear
by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)

It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t work don’t
have power.

--
glen

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Re: [FRIAM] natalism

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Re: [FRIAM] natalism

Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

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