There are, of course, an infinite number of "arguments" one can come up with to expand what Nick Szabo calls the "Argument Surface" and that is where the real "problem for statistics about people" arises -- not in the choice of language ambiguity. People who are not motivated to get rid of motivated reasoning will not be motivated to solve problems like the choice of language ambiguity -- as just one example of many. I will grant, however, that particular redoubt is only for the elect who, like you and I, have been involved with judging the Hutter Prize. IIRC, even Shane Legg sets forth that argument as a reason to avoid the ALgorithmic Information Criterion -- and you can't get much more authoritative than that unless you go to Hutter himself or, in the hypothetical case, Solomonoff. I did express concern to Marcus at one time, when Solomonoff was still living and shortly after the Hutter Prize had been announced, that Solomonoff might "torpedo" the Hutter Prize with that argument (if I recall the exact wording). Marcus reassured me that Solomonoff would do no such thing. IIRC shortly thereafter Solomoff posted something like that argument to his blog. IIRC Marcus objected to using the ALIC for global warming despite the Biden administration setting the value of addressing that issue at around $10T/year -- and I can see merit in that objection given the scale of the data.
But it all comes down to "incentives" when we are addressing the "motivated reasoning" problem and that's why I posted my Congressional testimony about the "incentives" regarding rocket technology -- which you commented on but did not seem to get the point I was trying to make about incentives. Once we're in the realm of macrosocial psychological dynamical models, the incentives are so great as to beggar the imagination. This is far greater even than Biden's rNPV of $10T/year and the macrosocial psychology data is many orders of magnitude smaller than climate data. That said, there is room for your concern about choice of language in conjunction with the identification "noise" regarding which, as I've often pointed out: "one man's noise is another man's cyphertext". So we have two "argument surfaces" here: How much of the macrosocial dataset is "*noise*" as opposed to inadequately motivated forensic epistemology "decyphering" that noise? How much of the wiggle room for *choice of language *can be squeezed out by forensic epistemology motivated by an rNPV of $10T/year, ie: well in excess of $100T, with let's say only 1% of that amount going to ALIC research: >$1T? First of all, recognize that the exploit you regard is decisive is miniscule compared to the argument surface presently not only tolerated but exploited by the academy, think tanks and punditry. At present there is virtually nothing BUT macrosocial psychological "argument surface", e.g. arguments such as the one to which you appealed for normative alignment of young men to be optimistic lest their pessimism be a self fulfilling prophecy. Secondly, forensic epistemology is precisely about *presuming* criminal behavior such as that to which you appeal as a reason for despair. With >$1T at stake there will be enormous motivation to suss out issues regarding "language choice" and I can easily demonstrate that none of the existing authorities have been sufficiently motivated to reduce that aspect of the argument surface: As I've pointed out before, not only is there an entirely different theoretical basis for addressing that reason (really excuse) to support avoidance of scientific accountability by our policy makers (ie: NiNOR Complexity), but there are obvious, at-hand, techniques to reduce that argument surface. For example, a GPU provides an "instruction set", ie "language", that is radically different from a CPU. So are we to now throw up our hands in despair and let those in power get away with "Well gee who could have KNOWN???" when things don't go "according to projections"? Really? Why am I the ONLY person to have addressed the *obvious* fact that a GPU's "instruction set" is describable as a relatively tiny procedure in a canonical instruction set and that procedure's algorithmic length should be used? Could it be that, perhaps, I'm the only sufficiently MOTIVATED person among those who have been taking information criteria remotely seriously? On Thu, Nov 20, 2025 at 5:27 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 10:11 AM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > >> >> >> On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 11:19 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> Algorithmic information or compression is great for evaluating language >>> models but not for everything.... >>> >>> I could try compressing world population data by fitting it to a >>> polynomial, >>> >> >> Do you understand the difference between statistics and dynamics? >> > > No, it's the difference between compressing text and compressing video. > You can't accurately measure the compression of a tiny signal in a sea of > noise. > > This becomes a problem for statistics about people. It only takes a few > bits of Kolmogorov complexity for social scientists to construct models > that favor one group over another, and those bits can be hidden in the > choice of language ambiguity. > > I think it would be great if we could answer political questions > objectively. So how would you solve the problem? > > >> <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T504adacb23f3c455-Md49fd5f054dbc9f5d8062388> >> > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T504adacb23f3c455-M417cdb6912f7a31e584ba578> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T504adacb23f3c455-M7931c7e8f4f1083a38690dce Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
