I don’t think the kind of “native” generalization from a fixed distribution I’m talking about there exists, it’s kind of a phenomenal illusion because it feels that way from the inside but almost certainly isn’t how it works. Rather humans generalize their values through institutional processes to collapse uncertainty by e.g. sampling a judicial ruling and then people update on the ruling with new social norms as a platform for further discourse and collapse of uncertainty as novel situations arise.
Or in the case of something like music, which does seem to work from a fixed set of intrinsic value heuristics, the actual kinds of music which gets expressed in practice within the space of music relies on the existing corpus of music that people are used to. Supposedly early rock and roll shows caused riots, which seems unimaginable now. What happens is people get used to a certain kind of music, then some musicians begin cultivating a new kind of music on the edge of the existing distribution using their general quality heuristics at the edge of what is recognizable to them. This works because the k-complexity of the heuristics you judge the music with is smaller and therefore fits more times into a redundant encoding than actual pieces of music so as you go out of distribution (functionally similar to applying a noise pass to the representation) your ability to recognize something interesting degrades more slowly than your ability to generate interesting music-shaped things. So you correct the errors to denoise a new kind of music into existence and move the center of the distribution by adding it to the cultural corpus.
I don’t think the kind of “native” generalization from a fixed distribution I’m talking about there exists, it’s kind of a phenomenal illusion because it feels that way from the inside but almost certainly isn’t how it works. Rather humans generalize their values through institutional processes to collapse uncertainty by e.g. sampling a judicial ruling and then people update on the ruling with new social norms as a platform for further discourse and collapse of uncertainty as novel situations arise.
Or in the case of something like music, which does seem to work from a fixed set of intrinsic value heuristics, the actual kinds of music which gets expressed in practice within the space of music relies on the existing corpus of music that people are used to. Supposedly early rock and roll shows caused riots, which seems unimaginable now. What happens is people get used to a certain kind of music, then some musicians begin cultivating a new kind of music on the edge of the existing distribution using their general quality heuristics at the edge of what is recognizable to them. This works because the k-complexity of the heuristics you judge the music with is smaller and therefore fits more times into a redundant encoding than actual pieces of music so as you go out of distribution (functionally similar to applying a noise pass to the representation) your ability to recognize something interesting degrades more slowly than your ability to generate interesting music-shaped things. So you correct the errors to denoise a new kind of music into existence and move the center of the distribution by adding it to the cultural corpus.