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 <[email protected]> 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? 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