Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Marcus Daniels]

W. F. Donkin wrote:

"When several hypotheses are presented to our mind which we believe to be 
mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but about which we know nothing further, we 
distribute our belief equally among them  This being admitted as an account 
of the way in which we actually do distribute our belief in simple cases, the 
whole of the subsequent theory follows as a deduction of the way in which we 
must distribute it in complex cases if we would be consistent."

In another context, Eric mentioned the concept of branching structures.   In 
mixed integer branch & cut solvers, the decisions concerning how to repeatedly 
separate a problem into sub-spaces is one of the most crucial to get right.   
There's a significant literature on it.   Some involve lookahead, others use 
information theoretic techniques, others do aggregation of variables into 
simpler forms.   Which one works the best, as far as I can tell, is problem 
dependent.   It is some analogue to No Free Lunch, I suspect.   It is not 
unreasonable for a solver to compete them, given the compute resources, however 
the conclusion from that competition should not be that one policy is better 
than the other.   Also it reminds me of Glens' advocacy of parallax.

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Roger Frye]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 8:59 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

>
>
>> When several hypotheses are presented to our mind which we believe to be
>> mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but about which we know nothing further,
>> we distribute our belief equally among them  This being admitted as an
>> account of the way in which we actually do distribute our belief in simple
>> cases, the whole of the subsequent theory follows as a deduction of the way
>> in which we must distribute it in complex cases if we would be consistent.
>
>
>
>> -- W. F. Donkits.
>
>
> The epigram by W. F. Donkits in this paper is apparently the only place
> his name appears on the internet.
>

The proper attribution is
W. F. Donkin, Prof of Astronomy, Oxford
May 1851 Article XLVII
Phil. Mag. S. $. Vol. 1. No.5. May 1851.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Fishburn_Donkin

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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Roger Critchlow]

Following up Daston's paper on the origins of objective and subjective
probability, one of the files that ended up in my Downloads folder was
http://www.fitelson.org/probability/ramsey.pdf, a collection of three
essays by Frank P. Ramsey on probability.  HackerNews came up with a link
to Cheryl Misak's biography of Frank Ramsey this morning,
https://hnn.us/article/174250.

Ramsey's first essay commences with these epigrams:

To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false,
> while to say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not is
> true.



> -- Aristotle.



> When several hypotheses are presented to our mind which we believe to be
> mutually exclusive and exhaustive, but about which we know nothing further,
> we distribute our belief equally among them  This being admitted as an
> account of the way in which we actually do distribute our belief in simple
> cases, the whole of the subsequent theory follows as a deduction of the way
> in which we must distribute it in complex cases if we would be consistent.



> -- W. F. Donkits.



> The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we
> already know, something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning
> is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premises, and
> not otherwise.



> -- C. S. Peirce.



> Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.



> -- W. Blake.


The epigram by W. F. Donkits in this paper is apparently the only place his
name appears on the internet.

What follows to the end of the section is almost entirely based on the
> writings of C. S. Peirce. [Especially his
> "Illustrations of the Logic of Science", Popular Science Monthly, 1877 and
> 1878, reprinted in Chance Love and Logic
> (1923).]


Back to Popular Science again!

-- rec --

On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 11:43 AM Roger Critchlow  wrote:

> I thought she was arguing that very mechanisms that google, facebook,
> twitter, etc. are using right now to engage people's interest online are
> already engendering and entrenching all sorts of weird beliefs.  6-9
> minutes of activated charcoal advocacy videos and you're probably certain
> that black smoothies are okay, maybe even good for you.  There are no
> neutral platforms, because the order in which content is presented is never
> neutral, and it is especially biased if its goal is to keep you clicking.
> Whether this allows focused election manipulation seems dubious, but it
> does allow for thousands of bizarre theories to be injected into the public
> consciousness at low cost, and some of them even make money.  Hey, some of
> them, bizarre as they are, might turn out to be correct, not that the
> platforms have any interest in that aspect, because that wouldn't be
> neutral.
>
> Andrew Gelman linked this paper,
> https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81961261.pdf, earlier this week, too.
> It's about the genesis of the distinction(s) between objective and
> subjective probabilities in the 19th century.  Several writers started
> distinguishing objective and subjective probabilities writing in German,
> French, and English at about the same time.  True to Kidd's scatterplots of
> concept variability, none of them appear to be making the same distinction
> even when they claim to be agreeing.  Part of the problem may have been
> that objective and subjective had just barely adopted the meanings which we
> more or less use to this day.  Prior to this time:
>
>> The objective in this context referred to the objects of thought, and the
>> subjective to objects in themselves [35, A.2.a]. This (to modern ears)
>> inverted sense survived well into the 18th century; witness, for example,
>> the entry for "Objective/objectivus" in the 1728 edition of Chamber's
>> Dictionary: "Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objectivè, when it
>> exists no otherwise than in being known; or in being an Object of the Mind"
>> [6, 649]. The meanings of the terms had, however, already branched and
>> crisscrossed in the 17th century in both Latin and in various vernaculars,
>> although "objective" still generally modified thoughts rather than external
>> objects. A famous example can be found in the Meditationes (1641) of René
>> Descartes, in which he contrasted the "objective reality" of an
>> idea--whether it represents its cause by perfection and/or content--with
>> its "formal reality"--whether it corresponds to anything external to the
>> mind [15, 40-42; 8, 136-137; 33]
>
> Over the 18th century we -- or at least some of us -- swapped Platonic
> objects for Empirical objects.  The dictionaries attribute the change to
> Kant, but the author notes that the new concept was sort of a
> Cartesian-Kantian-wild-type hybrid, not exactly anything that anyone had
> exactly proposed.
>
> -- rec --
>
> On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:23 AM Steven A Smith  wrote:
>
>> REC -
>>
>> Good find!
>>
>> I am not closely following the development and results 

Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Roger Critchlow]

Physical vs Metaphysical is probably dragging my own deviant concept of
Objective vs Subjective into the foreground, as well as my rhetorical
style.

I think that concrete vs. abstract is identifying categories of conceived
object, while perceptual vs. higher-level is identifying the amount of
reasoning involved in the conception.

The Daxxy experiment was directly manipulating the perceptual vs.
higher-level contrast, measuring certainty and performance as the rules
varied from the purely perceptual (Daxxy is Red) to higher-level
distinctions (Daxxy is (Red and Square and Small) or (Green and Triangular
and Large)), and found that certainty was a good guide to performance at
perceptual level and increasingly a crap shoot as rules got more
convoluted.

The "Is X more like Y or Z?" experiment looked for variance in
conceptions.  They thought they would find less variance in concepts of
everyday objects than in concepts of political leadership.  I'd like to see
that paper, but it's still in preparation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01NHcTM5IA4

I don't think Dr. Kidd is anywhere near resolving all these issues, many
more entertaining experiments are coming.

-- rec --

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 9:19 AM uǝlƃ ☣  wrote:

> I'm struggling to reconcile something she said from the presentation with
> what's said in the paper. In the presentation, she said (my probably flawed
> transcription) "The original vision was: we'd ask about concrete things.
> And we'd ask about abstract things. And we were expecting to see more
> agreement for things like cups and bowls and maybe more disagreement for
> abstract concepts like love and war. Instead what we found was a surprising
> amount of variance for both abstract and concrete concepts, though people
> do agree more for some concepts than others. ... even in the same context,
> people's concepts can vary quite a bit."
>
> And in the paper they say something like "Thus, while our certainty might
> be a useful guide with regard to perceptual decisions, such as trying to
> locate a friend yelling for help in the middle of the woods, it may be
> misleading in higher-level domains, such as deciding whether to see a
> chiropractor versus a medical doctor."
>
> So, in the talk, the contrast is between concrete and abstract, whereas in
> the paper, the contrast is between perceptual versus higher-level.
>
> I worry that your contrast (physical vs. metaphysical) might well be
> orthogonal to both of those other contrasts. Even if by "physical", you
> intend something like "perceptual", your contrast with metaphysical evokes
> the abstract (e.g. Platonic forms or whatever). Since I don't really
> understand what your contrast means, my question is more about her 2:
>
>   1) concrete vs. abstract, and
>   2) perceptual vs. higher-level.
>
> In the talk, she says there's similar concept-mismatching variation across
> (1). In the paper, they say accuracy of certainty is distinct within (2)
> (more accurate with perceptual concepts). This is either something
> paradoxical and I'm missing the resolution. *Or* there's a counter
> intuitive result lurking. According to (1), my certainty about your concept
> of "cup" should be just as inaccurate as my certainty about your concept of
> "centroid". But according to (2), the former should be more accurate than
> the latter. What am I missing?
>
> On 12/30/19 1:53 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > The sub-fact I liked, which might be in the Daxxy paper, is that people
> are very good at evaluating their certainty with respect to facts about the
> physical environment, but that same feeling of certainty is all over the
> place respecting the metaphysical environment.  I guess we've known that
> for a while.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC 
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I'm struggling to reconcile something she said from the presentation with 
what's said in the paper. In the presentation, she said (my probably flawed 
transcription) "The original vision was: we'd ask about concrete things. And 
we'd ask about abstract things. And we were expecting to see more agreement for 
things like cups and bowls and maybe more disagreement for abstract concepts 
like love and war. Instead what we found was a surprising amount of variance 
for both abstract and concrete concepts, though people do agree more for some 
concepts than others. ... even in the same context, people's concepts can vary 
quite a bit."

And in the paper they say something like "Thus, while our certainty might be a 
useful guide with regard to perceptual decisions, such as trying to locate a 
friend yelling for help in the middle of the woods, it may be misleading in 
higher-level domains, such as deciding whether to see a chiropractor versus a 
medical doctor."

So, in the talk, the contrast is between concrete and abstract, whereas in the 
paper, the contrast is between perceptual versus higher-level.

I worry that your contrast (physical vs. metaphysical) might well be orthogonal 
to both of those other contrasts. Even if by "physical", you intend something 
like "perceptual", your contrast with metaphysical evokes the abstract (e.g. 
Platonic forms or whatever). Since I don't really understand what your contrast 
means, my question is more about her 2:

  1) concrete vs. abstract, and
  2) perceptual vs. higher-level.

In the talk, she says there's similar concept-mismatching variation across (1). 
In the paper, they say accuracy of certainty is distinct within (2) (more 
accurate with perceptual concepts). This is either something paradoxical and 
I'm missing the resolution. *Or* there's a counter intuitive result lurking. 
According to (1), my certainty about your concept of "cup" should be just as 
inaccurate as my certainty about your concept of "centroid". But according to 
(2), the former should be more accurate than the latter. What am I missing?

On 12/30/19 1:53 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> The sub-fact I liked, which might be in the Daxxy paper, is that people are 
> very good at evaluating their certainty with respect to facts about the 
> physical environment, but that same feeling of certainty is all over the 
> place respecting the metaphysical environment.  I guess we've known that for 
> a while.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Roger Critchlow]

If you're deviant and you know it, clap your hands!

The sub-fact I liked, which might be in the Daxxy paper, is that people are
very good at evaluating their certainty with respect to facts about the
physical environment, but that same feeling of certainty is all over the
place respecting the metaphysical environment.  I guess we've known that
for a while.

-- rec --

On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 2:45 PM uǝlƃ ☣  wrote:

> Ha!  "There's a fun sub-result, which is, if you have a very deviant
> concept ... if you have a very weirdo concept that other people don't
> share, you're actually much more likely to be aware that you have a deviant
> concept."
>
> At least I *know* I'm a deviant.
>
>
> On 12/29/19 8:43 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> > I thought she was arguing that very mechanisms that google, facebook,
> twitter, etc. are using right now to engage people's interest online are
> already engendering and entrenching all sorts of weird beliefs.  6-9
> minutes of activated charcoal advocacy videos and you're probably certain
> that black smoothies are okay, maybe even good for you.  There are no
> neutral platforms, because the order in which content is presented is never
> neutral, and it is especially biased if its goal is to keep you clicking.
> Whether this allows focused election manipulation seems dubious, but it
> does allow for thousands of bizarre theories to be injected into the public
> consciousness at low cost, and some of them even make money.  Hey, some of
> them, bizarre as they are, might turn out to be correct, not that the
> platforms have any interest in that aspect, because that wouldn't be
> neutral.
> > [...]
>
> >
> > On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:23 AM Steven A Smith  > wrote:
> >
> > REC -
> >
> > Good find!
> >
> > I am not closely following the development and results of GAN work,
> but it seems like this kind of study explicates at least ONE GOOD REASON
> for worrying about AI changing the nature of the world as we know it (even
> if it isn't a precise existential threat).   Convolved with Carl's offering
> around "weaponizing complexity", it feels more and more believable
> (recursion unintended) that the wielders of strong AI/ML will have the
> upper hand in any tactical and possibly strategic domain (warfare, public
> opinion, markets, etc.).
> > [...]
> >
> > On 12/27/19 8:21 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> >> This talk was mentioned on hacker news this week and inspired my
> babbling at Saveur this morning.
> https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know.  The talk was delivered at
> Neural IPS on December 9 and discusses recent research on how people come
> to believe they know something.
> >>
> >> This paper
> https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017 describes
> the Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment on people becoming certain they
> understood the boolean rule they were being taught by examples.
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC 
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
>

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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Ha!  "There's a fun sub-result, which is, if you have a very deviant concept 
... if you have a very weirdo concept that other people don't share, you're 
actually much more likely to be aware that you have a deviant concept."

At least I *know* I'm a deviant.


On 12/29/19 8:43 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> I thought she was arguing that very mechanisms that google, facebook, 
> twitter, etc. are using right now to engage people's interest online are 
> already engendering and entrenching all sorts of weird beliefs.  6-9 minutes 
> of activated charcoal advocacy videos and you're probably certain that black 
> smoothies are okay, maybe even good for you.  There are no neutral platforms, 
> because the order in which content is presented is never neutral, and it is 
> especially biased if its goal is to keep you clicking.  Whether this allows 
> focused election manipulation seems dubious, but it does allow for thousands 
> of bizarre theories to be injected into the public consciousness at low cost, 
> and some of them even make money.  Hey, some of them, bizarre as they are, 
> might turn out to be correct, not that the platforms have any interest in 
> that aspect, because that wouldn't be neutral.
> [...]

> 
> On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:23 AM Steven A Smith  > wrote:
> 
> REC -
> 
> Good find!
> 
> I am not closely following the development and results of GAN work, but 
> it seems like this kind of study explicates at least ONE GOOD REASON for 
> worrying about AI changing the nature of the world as we know it (even if it 
> isn't a precise existential threat).   Convolved with Carl's offering around 
> "weaponizing complexity", it feels more and more believable (recursion 
> unintended) that the wielders of strong AI/ML will have the upper hand in any 
> tactical and possibly strategic domain (warfare, public opinion, markets, 
> etc.).   
> [...]
> 
> On 12/27/19 8:21 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>> This talk was mentioned on hacker news this week and inspired my 
>> babbling at Saveur this morning.  
>> https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know.  The talk was delivered at 
>> Neural IPS on December 9 and discusses recent research on how people come to 
>> believe they know something.
>>
>> This paper 
>> https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017 describes the 
>> Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment on people becoming certain they understood 
>> the boolean rule they were being taught by examples.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Roger Critchlow]

I thought she was arguing that very mechanisms that google, facebook,
twitter, etc. are using right now to engage people's interest online are
already engendering and entrenching all sorts of weird beliefs.  6-9
minutes of activated charcoal advocacy videos and you're probably certain
that black smoothies are okay, maybe even good for you.  There are no
neutral platforms, because the order in which content is presented is never
neutral, and it is especially biased if its goal is to keep you clicking.
Whether this allows focused election manipulation seems dubious, but it
does allow for thousands of bizarre theories to be injected into the public
consciousness at low cost, and some of them even make money.  Hey, some of
them, bizarre as they are, might turn out to be correct, not that the
platforms have any interest in that aspect, because that wouldn't be
neutral.

Andrew Gelman linked this paper,
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/81961261.pdf, earlier this week, too.  It's
about the genesis of the distinction(s) between objective and subjective
probabilities in the 19th century.  Several writers started distinguishing
objective and subjective probabilities writing in German, French, and
English at about the same time.  True to Kidd's scatterplots of concept
variability, none of them appear to be making the same distinction even
when they claim to be agreeing.  Part of the problem may have been that
objective and subjective had just barely adopted the meanings which we more
or less use to this day.  Prior to this time:

> The objective in this context referred to the objects of thought, and the
> subjective to objects in themselves [35, A.2.a]. This (to modern ears)
> inverted sense survived well into the 18th century; witness, for example,
> the entry for "Objective/objectivus" in the 1728 edition of Chamber's
> Dictionary: "Hence a thing is said to exist OBJECTIVELY, objectivè, when it
> exists no otherwise than in being known; or in being an Object of the Mind"
> [6, 649]. The meanings of the terms had, however, already branched and
> crisscrossed in the 17th century in both Latin and in various vernaculars,
> although "objective" still generally modified thoughts rather than external
> objects. A famous example can be found in the Meditationes (1641) of René
> Descartes, in which he contrasted the "objective reality" of an
> idea--whether it represents its cause by perfection and/or content--with
> its "formal reality"--whether it corresponds to anything external to the
> mind [15, 40-42; 8, 136-137; 33]

Over the 18th century we -- or at least some of us -- swapped Platonic
objects for Empirical objects.  The dictionaries attribute the change to
Kant, but the author notes that the new concept was sort of a
Cartesian-Kantian-wild-type hybrid, not exactly anything that anyone had
exactly proposed.

-- rec --

On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 10:23 AM Steven A Smith  wrote:

> REC -
>
> Good find!
>
> I am not closely following the development and results of GAN work, but it
> seems like this kind of study explicates at least ONE GOOD REASON for
> worrying about AI changing the nature of the world as we know it (even if
> it isn't a precise existential threat).   Convolved with Carl's offering
> around "weaponizing complexity", it feels more and more believable
> (recursion unintended) that the wielders of strong AI/ML will have the
> upper hand in any tactical and possibly strategic domain (warfare, public
> opinion, markets, etc.).
>
> I don't know how deeply technical the presumed election-manipulation of
> 2016 (now 2020) is, but it *does* seem like the work you reference here
> implies that with the information venues/vectors like streaming video (TV,
> Movies, Clips, attendant advertising) and social media (FB/Insta/Twit...)
> the understanding and tools are already in place to significantly
> manipulate public opinion.  Based on my anecdotal experience about people's
> *certainty*, this article is very on-point.   And this doesn't even
> reference the technology of "deep fakes".
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 12/27/19 8:21 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>
> This talk was mentioned on hacker news this week and inspired my babbling
> at Saveur this morning.  https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know.
> The talk was delivered at Neural IPS on December 9 and discusses recent
> research on how people come to believe they know something.
>
> This paper https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017 
> describes
> the Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment on people becoming certain they
> understood the boolean rule they were being taught by examples.
>
> -- rec --
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. 

Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Steven A Smith]

Marcus -

I do like the idea that a good "comedy team" might effectively
de-weaponize deep-fakes...   like The Yes Men or SNL perhaps...   there
is the risk that such "normalizes" deep fakes, but to the extent that it
is already on it's way...  comedy-ifying may be the best (least-worst)
alternative?

After Trump's ascendancy showed it's worst true-colors I had any number
of "comedy-centric" ideations to generate a crowd-sourced reaction.  
The first (dark) one was called "take a Dump for Trump" and involved
variations on the old teenager's bad joke of placing a burning bag of
dogshit on a rival's porch to be "stomped out".   The second was more
campy and involved collecting donations to be put into a fund to pay out
"bounties" on pie-throwers.   Think of an Iraq-War style pack of cards
with faces/names/bounties on Trump and his inner-mid-outer circles.  
Maybe starting with a $1 bounty for anyone who has shaken hands with
him, spiraling in toward those working/living in the White House...  

It would surely play havoc for the Secret Service but more entertaining
I can just imagine the distortion of security at Mara Lago for him and
his.   Would his aides who got booed out of restaurants a few years back
instead have gotten a pie in the face (and a bounty big enough to fund
future operations paid to the pie-thrower?).   Imagine all the pies
being confiscated at the entry to one of his rallys?   With a $1 bounty
on any rally attender, you might see a very different style and texture
of counter-protest.

While there would surely be civil and legal consequences... there
*would* also be a comic-relief and perhaps de-escalation of
self-seriousness consequence as well.

I wonder if anyone has a (meta?) model of this kind of "changing the game"?

- Steve

> Steve writes:
>
> < I don't know how deeply technical the presumed election-manipulation
> of 2016 (now 2020) is, but it *does* seem like the work you reference
> here implies that with the information venues/vectors like streaming
> video (TV, Movies, Clips, attendant advertising) and social media
> (FB/Insta/Twit...) the understanding and tools are already in place to
> significantly manipulate public opinion.  Based on my anecdotal
> experience about people's *certainty*, this article is very
> on-point.   And this doesn't even reference the technology of "deep
> fakes".   >
>
> What would be some fun deep fakes?   He’s decided the wall was all a
> big mistake and that now families in the south will be required to
> give up their living room floor and extra bedrooms for families that
> cross the border?   The especially vulnerable, like gender-conflicted
> teens are at the front of the line.    Once a week will be (mandatory)
> take your visitor to work day, where you train them to do your job.  
> Another good one might be the announcement of a  white people tax,
> which will pay reparations to native Americans and black people.  
>   There’s a long list of fun taxes to announce, like 5 dollars per
> gallon for gasoline for each mpg less than 25mpg.    Oh, and how about
> tax incentives for mixed race couples in order to diversify the gene
> pool.   Concurrent with this, all other dependent tax deductions will
> be eliminated.   In fact, because of global warming, all children of
> non-mixed races couples will be subject to a $20,000 a year tax. 
> Churches will no longer be tax exempt. 
>
> Marcus
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Marcus Daniels]

Steve writes:

< I don't know how deeply technical the presumed election-manipulation of 2016 
(now 2020) is, but it *does* seem like the work you reference here implies that 
with the information venues/vectors like streaming video (TV, Movies, Clips, 
attendant advertising) and social media (FB/Insta/Twit...) the understanding 
and tools are already in place to significantly manipulate public opinion.  
Based on my anecdotal experience about people's *certainty*, this article is 
very on-point.   And this doesn't even reference the technology of "deep 
fakes".   >

What would be some fun deep fakes?   He’s decided the wall was all a big 
mistake and that now families in the south will be required to give up their 
living room floor and extra bedrooms for families that cross the border?   The 
especially vulnerable, like gender-conflicted teens are at the front of the 
line.Once a week will be (mandatory) take your visitor to work day, where 
you train them to do your job.   Another good one might be the announcement of 
a  white people tax, which will pay reparations to native Americans and black 
people. There’s a long list of fun taxes to announce, like 5 dollars per 
gallon for gasoline for each mpg less than 25mpg.Oh, and how about tax 
incentives for mixed race couples in order to diversify the gene pool.   
Concurrent with this, all other dependent tax deductions will be eliminated.   
In fact, because of global warming, all children of non-mixed races couples 
will be subject to a $20,000 a year tax.  Churches will no longer be tax exempt.

Marcus

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Re: [FRIAM] Celeste Kidd - How to Know

[Steven A Smith]

REC -

Good find!

I am not closely following the development and results of GAN work, but
it seems like this kind of study explicates at least ONE GOOD REASON for
worrying about AI changing the nature of the world as we know it (even
if it isn't a precise existential threat).   Convolved with Carl's
offering around "weaponizing complexity", it feels more and more
believable (recursion unintended) that the wielders of strong AI/ML will
have the upper hand in any tactical and possibly strategic domain
(warfare, public opinion, markets, etc.).   

I don't know how deeply technical the presumed election-manipulation of
2016 (now 2020) is, but it *does* seem like the work you reference here
implies that with the information venues/vectors like streaming video
(TV, Movies, Clips, attendant advertising) and social media
(FB/Insta/Twit...) the understanding and tools are already in place to
significantly manipulate public opinion.  Based on my anecdotal
experience about people's *certainty*, this article is very on-point.  
And this doesn't even reference the technology of "deep fakes".   

- Steve


On 12/27/19 8:21 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> This talk was mentioned on hacker news this week and inspired my
> babbling at Saveur this
> morning.  https://slideslive.com/38921495/how-to-know.  The talk was
> delivered at Neural IPS on December 9 and discusses recent research on
> how people come to believe they know something.
>
> This
> paper https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/opmi_a_00017 describes
> the Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment on people becoming certain they
> understood the boolean rule they were being taught by examples.
>
> -- rec --
>
>
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

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