EE
MoritzG
Limits of and to (artificial) Intelligence
This sometimes helps to expose assumptions
“universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects.”
I do not think that the universe as a whole is one fabric of causes and effects. There are isolating layers of randomness and chaos upon which there are new layers of emergence. This is why we can model at all without having one unified model.
“Every causally separated group of events would essentially be its own reality.”
Places outside our solar system are their own realities in that sense. We have no effect there. Only maybe someone is there to amplify our radio signals.
When you are presented with a very unlikely outcome you have to accept it.
Had the teacher shown a dozen dice all showing the same number and asked how he did it, there would have been two answers:
2. You
Had the teacher presented a dozen of dice all showing the same number and asked how this could have happened they would have been wiser.
But the situation is similar. In pure theory this could happen naturally, in that case doubting it would be a case of gamblers fallacy or not knowing the Anthropic principle.If you encounter the impossible you should check your assumptions, but to say that a human like entity has caused this outcome is dangerous.
“autistic people … generally have very low intelligence. One study … autistic people had an IQ …”
Unless you positively define intelligence as measured by some IQ-Test, I oppose that statement.
The entire discussion around intelligence would profit, if people would stop casually equating the two.
One is a test that have seen different ones of and some where out right bad others flawed, the other is a concept that can be described, but is much more often used than understood by the public.
“cases of autism that are caused entirely or mostly by normal genetics are associated with unusually low IQ (80% confidence) ”
Only the research correlating genes and IQ-test results are objective.
All correlations between IQ and DIAGNOSED autism are skewed. People who are smart and have good enough speech skills, and thus are not too affected can hide their level of autism. People who are functional will not be diagnosed.
Lets assume, that autism is not an on/off deal but gradual and that there is a positive correlation with general intelligence, then the statistic will not include people who are below a high level of autism because they compensate.
[Question] Multiple conditions must be met to gain causal effect
I made up this story:
In a company there have been head injuries, so they brought in a medical student to investigate/research.
The researcher gathered all employees blood pressure, gender, age, and eye sight data.
The result was that mostly men were affected, with all other factors being what you would expect given the employees.
The company was forced by the insurance company to make helmets mandatory for all men due to their gender being a risk factor.
Because the engineers were all men they were over proportionally affected and did not like to wear the helmets, so they got together and demanded further research into what caused the injuries and how to remove the cause.
This time the secretary was tasked with the follow up because she knew Excel. She took her mail scale and measuring tape and went around asking everyone if they drank coffee or tea, measured the weight of the content of people’s pockets and how high they were with and without shoes. To be thorough she did this for every week day separately.
After importing the previous data, she found many correlations between attributes and other attributes variances but what stood out were the correlations between injuries to Friday, pocket weight, gender, height with shoes in ascending order. A histogram of injuries per “height without shoes”-class showed a sharp increase at 6 feet. Being taller than 6′ was clearly the cause.
After having presented her findings, one woman stood up and remarked: “But I am not 6′, and it happened to me!” Counting the women taller than 6′ the secretary found none.
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I could go on but I think you get it and we can save us the time. After more searching they found that their 6 foot door frames were the best thing to change and that some women had been wearing higher shoes on Fridays.
My point is that gender was not the cause and especially “too low doors” AND (“over 6′ tall” OR (“tall for a woman” AND “high shoes”)) was the problem. Neither being a tall woman nor high shoes alone would have been causal in this scenario.
I would have loved to include wheel chairs in this but found it too complicated.
There are two issues with it.
You can not figure out how something works by only looking at some aspect. Think of the blind people and elephant story.
But it still has a point because with a subsystem that makes predictions the understanding of a system by pure observation becomes impossible.
You seem to think that the economy and markets are random without memory or state. You are the one with a fallacy called: “the map is not the territory”.
In reality there are smart penguins and dumb penguins and penguin news papers. The professional penguins will tell other penguins how great it has been going so they can get out before the ledge breaks of and they all fall into the water.
To realize those booked earnings you have to sell without causing the crash, so you have to setup potential buyers first. That is why I consider articles about investing into something in major papers the last warning before the crash. When I read that the only smart thing to do, is to invest into … I know not too.
This reminds me of another issue. If you do make informed complicated decisions, the basis of these decisions might change over time. I struggle with that problem professionally. As an engineer I have to make complicated compromises/decisions. The trouble is that the situation changes all the time. The requirements and the means change. Without tracking why I made decisions there is no way to tell if those decisions still hold, because I do not even remember myself. The project becomes a zombie even before there are true legacy and hand-over issues. Usually decisions are incomprehensible later. We all know this and have though everyone else is an idiot, but often people had good reason to do it that way or lost track as described. Making changes to often reveals that there were reasons, but too late.
Privately you might find yourself in a place that you had reason to go into but those reasons went away without you noticing.
[Question] What types of compute/processing could we distinguish?
Straw_Vulcan is an example of an attack of two of the three types of thinkers on another.
The moral-thinkers try to show their superiority. In Star Trek this is ever present. In all the stories morality and principles always win over rational compromise. The captains usually favor the best possible short term outcome over risk minimization and the long term. As it is fiction this always works out.
The three thinking types as formalized/categorized (to my knowledge) by Rao Venkatesh of ribbonfarm.
https://fs.blog/venkatesh-rao/
Venkatesh Rao: The Three Types of Decision Makers [The Knowledge Project Ep. #7]
I can hardly express how useful I found this to make sense of the world.
The way you commented it is not clear what you are referring to. I did not understand your comment because I did not get “where you were coming from”.
I found this recent Dilbert cartoon to be a good summery of the issue with being smart in a complex random world:
[Question] Matrix Multiplication
The entire SIMD vector approach is good for many dot products but it is not the same as a systolic array for rank two on rank two multiplication.
If the job would be to multiply two 1024x1024 matrices then a systolic array of 256x256 MACs would be a good choice. It would work four times on 256x1024 by 1024x256 matrices for 1024+256 steps.
I found these two articles on AI’s mental health:
“Can Artificial Intelligences Suffer from Mental Illness? A Philosophical Matter to Consider”
Hutan Ashrafian
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5364237/
“Does my algorithm have a mental-health problem?”
Thomas T Hills is professor of psychology at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK.
https://aeon.co/ideas/made-in-our-own-image-why-algorithms-have-mental-health-problems