Although I'm not actually that familiar with TikTok, there has been controversy over its AI gathering data from its user's phones to recommend videos and such, do you have any familiarity with this controversy? — Judaka

I'm afraid I don't know much about TikTok.

Knowledge can be a means to power, but rarely does it amount to much, and I'm not too sure what the actual concern is. Could you give a context? Does TikTok, or gambling apps using AI, or stuff like that, represent your concern well, or is it something else? — Judaka

I disagree about the power of knowledge rarely amounting to much. The colonization of much of the world by relatively small European nations, is something I see as having been a function of knowledge conferring power. The knowledge of how to make a nuke has conferred power since WWII. Trump's knowledge of how to manipulate the thinking of wide swaths of the US populace...

In the case of knowledge coming from AI, it is not so much that there is anything specific I am concerned about, so much as I am concerned about AIs ability to yield totally surprising results, e.g. recognize factors relevant to predicting the development of schizophrenia.

As an example nightmare scenario, suppose an AI was trained on statements by manipulative bullshit artists like Trump, as well as the statements of those who drank the kool-aid and those who didn't. Perhaps such training of an AI would result in the AI recognizing a ways to be an order of magnitude more effective at manipulating people's thinking than Trump is.

:up:

AI tests into top 1% for original creative thinking:

...The researchers submitted eight responses generated by ChatGPT, the application powered by the GPT-4 artificial intelligence engine. They also submitted answers from a control group of 24 UM students taking Guzik's entrepreneurship and personal finance classes. These scores were compared with 2,700 college students nationally who took the TTCT in 2016. All submissions were scored by Scholastic Testing Service, which didn't know AI was involved.

The results placed ChatGPT in elite company for creativity. The AI application was in the top percentile for fluency -- the ability to generate a large volume of ideas -- and for originality -- the ability to come up with new ideas. The AI slipped a bit -- to the 97th percentile -- for flexibility, the ability to generate different types and categories of ideas...

I've never heard a perspective like this. Can you give an example showing the cause for your concern? — Judaka

I don't know of any cases of modern AI having been used nefariously. So if that is what you are asking for then no.

I can give you an illustrative excerpt, to convey the sort of 'superhuman' pattern recognition that I am concerned about:

In 2015, a research group at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was inspired to apply deep learning to the hospital’s vast database of patient records. This data set features hundreds of variables on patients, drawn from their test results, doctor visits, and so on. The resulting program, which the researchers named Deep Patient, was trained using data from about 700,000 individuals, and when tested on new records, it proved incredibly good at predicting disease. Without any expert instruction, Deep Patient had discovered patterns hidden in the hospital data that seemed to indicate when people were on the way to a wide range of ailments, including cancer of the liver. There are a lot of methods that are “pretty good” at predicting disease from a patient’s records, says Joel Dudley, who leads the Mount Sinai team. But, he adds, “this was just way better.”

At the same time, Deep Patient is a bit puzzling. It appears to anticipate the onset of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia surprisingly well. But since schizophrenia is notoriously difficult for physicians to predict, Dudley wondered how this was possible. He still doesn’t know. The new tool offers no clue as to how it does this. If something like Deep Patient is actually going to help doctors, it will ideally give them the rationale for its prediction, to reassure them that it is accurate and to justify, say, a change in the drugs someone is being prescribed. “We can build these models,” Dudley says ruefully, “but we don’t know how they work.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

Currently there is no true AI, there is simulated AI. However, even simulated AI can replace numerous workers in middle management and low level creative fields. This can/will have a devastating impact on employment and thus the economy as well as social stability. — LuckyR

What do you see as the distinction between "true AI" and "simulated AI"?

My biggest concern about AI, is its ability to acquire knowledge that humans aren't up to acquiring due to the enormous amount of data AI can process without getting bored and deciding there must be a more meaningful way of being.

Knowledge is power, and individuals or small groups with sole possession of AI determined knowledge can use such power unscrupulously.

What government are you assuming to be Jabberwock's?

I agree. Do you see a contradiction between what I said and what you said?

I think there is a lot that is interesting about human acts that is independent of whatever moral judgementalness might pass through people's minds.

Let's suppose that when Einstein presented his theories of relativity it was intentional. Why is the defining characteristic of those acts by Einstein his intentions rather than the increase in human understanding?

Blinking and breathing are not acts in the philosophical sense. — Leontiskos

In that case I assume the following sentence says the same as what you wrote:

Every intentional human act involves an intention, and the intention is the primary defining characteristic of an act.

So the first proposition is a tautology, and I'm not seeing any good reason to believe the second proposition. Why think the intention is the primary defining characteristic of all acts?

Very well said.

Every properly human act involves an intention, and the intention is the primary defining characteristic of an act. — Leontiskos

Medical doctors expect properly functioning humans to have the patellar spinal reflex.

I blink and snore without intention. There are all sorts of things humans do without intention.

I'm fine with waiting until I've read more of what you have to say, before deciding that I have something that I want to try to communicate to you.

To date, it is unclear that cellular automata, neural networks, or the like can do anything that Universal Turing Machines cannot. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn't mean to suggest that I think neural nets can do things that a Turing machine couldn't do in principle. Remember I was talking about "the way human thought really works".

We don't have thinking based on Turing machines. We have thinking based on neural networks, and understanding the nature of the more analogish sort of information processing that occurs in neural networks is conducive to improving one's understanding of oneself.

For example Peter Tse's book The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation discusses aspects of understanding free will, in light of scientific understanding of the way we think. It's not the sort of free will that many people want to believe in, but there is a lot of pragmatic value in understanding it.

I don't claim any expertise on the thread topic, but is there a reason to think that the 'wisdom of crowds' doesn't merit serious consideration here?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge.[1] An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.[2]

:fire:

Why no popcorn emoji?

Beware the jabberwock my son...

According to wikiquote that statement that you are propagating, as being from Heisenberg, is misattributed.

Yes. And ever changing. If psychology is affected by culture (and I'm certain it is) then what was true yesterday in psychology might not be true today. We're playing catch up. — Isaac

Good point about the moving target. Furthermore, I'd think propagation of psychological understanding itself contributes to the target moving.

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something. — Srap Tasmaner

For me at work, it is often a matter of a 'picture' rather than a narrative, and I am trying to bring my mental image of how an electronic gizmo works into better compliance with how thing work in the world. If my mental image is out of compliance with the way things actually work in the world, the world may well inform me of this with flames, puffs of smoke, or minor explosions. (Although more typical is that the circuit just doesn't work as expected.)

That said, I agree with most of what you said, inasmuch as I am interpreting it correctly.

Pattern recognition. Thats a huge part of what the brain does and it’s so dedicated to finding patterns that it will even see patterns that aren’t there, optical illusions etc. — DingoJones

:up:

In case anyone is interested the following link will take you to a forum thread where I make use of evolutionary psychology based thinking:

Does being in a blaming state of mind amount to Monkey Mindedness?

I'm afraid it starts off quite inchoate, and there is a lot of context behind some comments that I'm not going to try to fill in. Still, perhaps some will recognize some usefulness to it.

But beyond the general idea of it, it seems very speculative, and it seems inherently so - I don't see a path out of the speculation for most hypotheses in the evo-psych realm.

I think that pretty much sums up what I think of evo psych - the basic tenet of it is pretty much obviously true, but any specific hypothesis is probably untestable, unverifiable, unsatisfiable. — flannel jesus

Perhaps it is important to mention that what can be learned about human nature from evolutionary psychology is only a portion of a large complex picture.

I don't know of any evolutionary psychologists, who if asked, "Nature or nurture?", are going to respond with 100% nature. or even 50% nature. EP is most appropriately understood as simply a part of a very complex picture.

I tend to frame the effect of reason in terms effects on our priors, so reasoning is still post hoc, but has an effect. Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit. — Isaac

:up:

I'd likely have said "intuitions" rather than "priors" but there is a lot of overlap at the very least.

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time. I can see how it might cash out like that on a human scale (one decision at a time), but at a deeper neurological scale, my commitments to an active inference model of cognition don't allow for such an intervention. We only get to improve for next time. — Isaac

I don't recall getting such an impression from Kahneman, but because Kahneman seems to have come to his conclusions from a more psychological than neurpsychological direction I wouldn't be too surprised if he made such a mistake.

In any case, I very much agree that shifting our fast thinking (or deep learning) generally takes a substantial amount of time. Though there can be sudden epiphanies, where a new paradigm 'snaps into focus', the subconscious development of the intuitions underlying the new paradigm may have been taking place over the course of many years.

It appears like the cellular responses (so-called learning) took five times longer to occur in living tissue than it took in prior studies inanimate mass, "in vitro". That is very clear evidence that the relationship between stimulus and effect, is not direct. The cause of this five-fold delay (clear evidence that there is not a direct cause/effect relation) is simply dismissed as "noise" in the living brain.

Furthermore, it is noted that the the subjects upon which the manipulation is carried out are unconscious, and so it is implied that "attention" could add so much extra "noise" that the entire process modeled by the laboratory manipulation might be completely irrelevant to actual learning carried out by an attentive, conscious subject. Read the following:

"It is important to note that these findings were obtained in anaesthetized animals, and remain to be confirmed in the awake state. Indeed, factors such as attention are likely to influence cellular learning processes (Markram et al., 2012). — Metaphysician Undercover

How is is it that you learned about these confounding factors?

From the "devious" scientists.

Noam Chomsky argued:

"You find that people cooperate, you say, 'Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.' You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that's obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."[43][44]
— Chomsky — schopenhauer1

So you look deeper and learn about how our closest living relatives live in relatively small cooperative bands in territories bordering on the territories of other small bands of chimps, and while there is cooperation within a band there is 'murderous' hostility towards chimps from neighboring bands. Then you look at the way humans behave.

Us and Them

Most of them were published subsequent to 2005, from what I can see. David Chalmer's article was published in 1996. I think much of the literature reflects that, as it was an influential article and put the idea on the agenda, so to speak. — Wayfarer

Again you are demonstrating that you don't know much about neuroscience. Off the top of my head, the Libet experiment made use of first person report more than a decade before Chalmer's paper was published. Split brain studies making use of first person report go back to the 1960s.

Did Chalmers write any papers as an infant?

That's very deceptive use of equivocation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Unless you are able to present some evidence, that animal learning does not supervene on cellular learning it's a bit ludicrous to call it very deceptive use of equivocation.

It looks to me like you simply have a bias against science.

Did you read the article that this thread is about? Do you have any idea of what the issue being discussed is? — Wayfarer

What was it you said about being condescending?

Yes I read the article and a variety of things have been discussed. Are you trying to gaslight people into thinking that the subject of the thread is what you say it is?

I think you equivocate. Neural networks of AI are said to be "trained". But we weren't talking AI, we were talking about biological neurons, involved in a person reading. — Metaphysician Undercover

Would you elaborate on how it is that you think I am equivocating?

Perhaps the article, Neuroscience: How to train a neuron will help.

OK, I should have written 'excludes consideration of the first-person perspective....' — Wayfarer

But neuroscience does consider first person perspectives and is learning much about them. You can Google "neuroscience first person perspective" and see for yourself. Instead you are making up stories about a science you don't demonstrate much understanding of.

Yes, similar to that, but not quite the same. An individual is trained, a person or some other being. We do not train a part of a person. I find that to be an absurd usage of the term to say that a person trains a part of one's body, like saying that a man trains his penis when to have an erection and when not to.

Anyway, it's off topic and I see that discussion with you on this subject would probably be pointless, as you seem to be indoctrinated. — Metaphysician Undercover

Dude, it's just a matter of the vocabulary used in discussion of neural networks. It has a fairly specific meaning in that context. You may be closed minded towards looking into the subject and developing an understanding of how training is used in the context of that subject, but don't mistake whatever your hangup is, for me being indoctrinated.

Understandable, I think understanding human motivation and the human condition is valid. I do it all the time. Evo-psych basis for things is harder to prove. — schopenhauer1

Science doesn't prove things. In many cases science can provide pretty overwhelming evidence in support of a theory, but that isn't sufficient to consider a theory proven. Psych theories are certainly less accurate than theories about things which are much less complex than human beings, but that's not surprising.

I personally use psychology to tune up my intuitions about myself and other people, while taking it all with a grain of salt.

Eek, that doesn't seem like good science. — schopenhauer1

No, it's not science. It's just living in the world and paying attention.

Absolutely. The thing about psychological theories is that everyone has them, you have to have, otherwise your strategies when interacting with others are random. We don't just throw darts blindfold when deciding how to respond, we have a theory about what our actions/speech is going to do, how it's going to work. That's a psychological theory. — Isaac

Exactly. Furthermore, it seems worth pointing out that everyone has one, but some are based on looking into the evidence and some aren't. (Not that I need to tell you that.)

If psychology fails, it is its methodology that's at fault, not it's objectives. — Isaac

"If psychology fails" to me, seems a question that would come out of an excessively dichotomous way of looking at psychology. I'd think a more relevant question is whether there is progress in psychology. From my perspective its pretty undeniable that progress is ongoing in psychology. We are fantastically complex creatures though, so of course progress takes time.

Have a great trip! We'll be here when you get back. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not leaving until Saturday, and now I'm done with trip prep for the day. So perhaps I'll get somewhat caught up with responding to you before I go.

I take it seriously, on the basis of looking at a lot of the relevant science. I've also made many empirical observations of my own. I've been testing my intuitions on the subject for a long time. Furthermore, I make use of my understanding that we are social primates - including here on TPF. Sometimes subtly and other times not so subtly.

thread where I'm pissing on the law of non-contradiction: — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, just did some pissing of my own. I need to throw my Kindle in the toilet now, and try to break my TPF addiction.

The LNC however does affirm that it is not possible to hold a belief that A with .90 probability while at the same time holding a belief that A with .10 probability. — javra

This looks like magical thinking about the LNC to me. Humans aren't binary logic machines.

Something else I want to bring up for consideration, is that issues in communication are not so simple as being a matter of differing sets of intuitions. Another important factor is variation in the constellations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses people have.

I have visuo-spatial strengths, and often I have the experience of thinking, "How can you not see that?", because it is difficult for me to imagine what it is like to lack the visuo-spatial abilities I take for granted. On the other hand I have weaknesses in processing speed, and would be a horrible umpire, with people yelling at me, " How can you not see that?"

So an aspect of communicating skillfully for me, is to develop some sense of where an individual's cognitive strengths and weaknesses lie. With at least some sense of an individual's cognitive strengths and weaknesses, I can try to capitalize on the strengths of the individual and work around the weaknesses to improve communication. Perhaps we all do this subconsciously to some extent, and pragmatically we don't tend to have much other option than to go with our intuitons on such matters. I just wanted to point out this complicating factor, because I'm a complicator and that's what I do. :wink:

"Okay, everyone, you all need to move back now, that's it, move on back now, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS!" Just ever so slightly lost his cool as this grizzly ambled toward us, it was awesome. — Srap Tasmaner

That is awesome.

I just got the bear spray I ordered last Friday. I'm hoping we get to see grizzlies in the wild. The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, has been called the Serengeti of North America. Spending at least one day there watching wildlife is part of the plan. Yellowstone (and Grand Teton NP) is so huge that I suspect two weeks isn't going to seem like enough time.