Recursive Diktats

July 6, 2018July 6, 2018 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Here is an experiment in poetry that is completely self-contained, encoded as a URL using an Ex-Googler’s itty.bitty website that composes HTML or ASCII content into a URL fragment using Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression. Building a chain of self-contained references is not for the faint of heart, but basically involves back-tracking from the end. Each compressed HTML fragment is then embedded in the previous stanza, and so forth.

And the topic is, as it must be, language itself.

Here’s the raw, self-contained URL as a link, too:

https://itty.bitty.site/#/?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

And here is the same as a QR Code:

… Read the rest

Incompressibility and the Mathematics of Ethical Magnetism

June 22, 2018June 22, 2018 Mark DavisLeave a comment

One of the most intriguing aspects of the current U.S. border crisis is the way that human rights and American decency get articulated in the public sphere of discourse. An initial pull is raw emotion and empathy, then there are counterweights where the long-term consequences of existing policies are weighed against the exigent effects of the policy, and then there are crackpot theories of “crisis actors” and whatnot as bizarro-world distractions. But, if we accept the general thesis of our enlightenment values carrying us ever forward into increasing rights for all, reduced violence and war, and the closing of the curtain on the long human history of despair, poverty, and hunger, we must also ask more generally how this comes to be. Steven Pinker certainly has rounded up some social theories, but what kind of meta-ethics might be at work that seems to push human civilization towards these positive outcomes?

Per the last post, I take the position that we can potentially formulate meaningful sentences about what “ought” to be done, and that those meaningful sentences are, in fact, meaningful precisely because they are grounded in the semantics we derive from real world interactions. How does this work? Well, we can invoke the so-called Cornell Realists argument that the semantics of a word like “ought” is not as flexible as Moore’s Open Question argument suggests. Indeed, if we instead look at the natural world and the theories that we have built up about it (generally “scientific theories” but, also, perhaps “folk scientific ideas” or “developing scientific theories”), certain concepts take on the character of being so-called “joints of reality.” That is, they are less changeable than other concepts and become referential magnets that have an elite status among the concepts we use for the world.… Read the rest

Bolt, Volt, and Tesla: The Experience and Ethics of Electrified Transportation

June 1, 2018June 4, 2018 Mark DavisLeave a comment

I have now owned a triumvirate of electric/hybrid vehicles since 2012. The quest began with a Chevy Volt in 2012 that we still own but that is used by our son in college. I recently worked with him to replace tires and windshield wipers on the vehicle, which is otherwise still rolling along despite a mild fender bender when he slid into another vehicle on a snowy night. The Bolt is the newest member of the grouping, serving as my wife’s daily driver but only accumulating 1500 miles since arriving via flatbed last October. And then there are the Teslas. The first, a Model S P85, was around number 4000 off the Fremont assembly line in early 2013, with the second taking its place in early 2016.

So has it been worth it? Yes, absolutely, but with caveats, operationally and ethically, as you will see.

First, the vehicles have been paired with photovoltaic systems, a 10kW system with microinverters in Cali and now an 8kW system at our remodeled southwestern abode. This helps to offset any concerns that grid electricity may be less clean than modern, high-efficiency gasoline engines.

Second, there is range anxiety. As the name implies, it’s the fear of running out of charge that is just like running out of gas but with far fewer places to recharge than are available in the modern ecosystem of gas stations throughout the nation. Mostly, when doing everyday errand-running and brief trips out of town, range anxiety is not an issue. Freeways are manageable in the Tesla now that superchargers are available for large swaths of the United States, including recent arrivals near the relatively desolate area where I now live.… Read the rest

New Agile Governance

May 5, 2018May 6, 2018 Mark DavisLeave a comment

John Dickerson, in his excellent Atlantic article, The Presidency: The Hardest Job in the World, combines historical analysis with quotes and insights from presidents and past advisers to develop both a critique of the expectations of the role of president and how to achieve better results. The analysis lands on a few recommendations including improving the on-boarding process for new presidents and simplifying the role itself. Having and trusting one’s cabinet leads to better delegation of the impossible responsibilities of the role. Maybe outsourcing the ceremonial aspects of the job to the VP or First Lady would allow the president to concentrate on policymaking and national security flare ups.

While all are reasonable suggestions, resetting expectations about the role of the executive branch should be balanced against reforming the legislative branch in parallel. If both are to be empowered to serve the public’s will with grace and intellect, they face concomitant challenges in overcoming the partisanship and influences of monied interests that have made them unresponsive to the people. Polls show that the public wants reduced health care costs, reasonable gun regulations, humane immigration policies, and an opening of rights for gays and marijuana consumers. But none of these are delivered because they are too complex or politically toxic for Congress to successfully navigate.

Maybe the methodology is wrong. Not in the sense of the Constitution being wrong or in need of updating, but in the sense of how decision making and information gathering is managed through the legislative and executive branches. I’d like to propose an alternative that I will label New Agile Governance (NAG) for simplicity. NAG is based on the simple idea that tracks what Dickerson attributes to H.R.… Read the rest

Running, Ancient Roman Science, Arizona Dive Bars, and Lightning Machine Learning

April 29, 2018August 18, 2020 Mark DavisLeave a comment

I just returned from running in Chiricahua National Monument, Sedona, Painted Desert, and Petrified Forest National Park, taking advantage of the late spring before the heat becomes too intense. Even so, though I got to Massai Point in Chiricahua through 90+ degree canyons and had around a liter of water left, I still had to slow down and walk out after running short of liquid nourishment two-thirds down. There is an eerie, uncertain nausea that hits when hydration runs low under high stress. Cliffs and steep ravines take on a wolfish quality. The mind works to control feet against stumbling and the lips get serrated edges of parched skin that bite off without relieving the dryness.

I would remember that days later as I prepped to overnight with a wilderness permit in Petrified Forest only to discover that my Osprey Exos pack frame had somehow been bent, likely due to excessive manhandling by airport checked baggage weeks earlier. I considered my options and drove eighty miles to Flagstaff to replace the pack, then back again.

I arrived in time to join Dr. Richard Carrier in an unexpected dive bar in Holbrook, Arizona as the sunlight turned to amber and a platoon of Navajo pool sharks descended on the place for billiards and beers. I had read that Dr. Carrier would be stopping there and it was convenient to my next excursion, so I picked up signed copies of his new book, The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, as well as his classic, On the Historicity of Jesus, that remains part of the controversial samizdat of so-called “Jesus mythicism.”

If there is a distinguishing characteristic of OHJ it is the application of Bayesian Theory to the problems of historical method.… Read the rest

Quintessence of Rust

March 16, 2018March 16, 2018 Mark DavisLeave a comment

¡Reconquista! is making the rounds looking for representation. This is a first for me. I’ve been strongly attracted to the idea of disintermediating publishing, music, film, transportation, business, and anything else that happens by; my Silicon Valley persona sees disruption as a virtue, for better or worse. But why not learn from the mainstream model for the trajectory of books and ideas?

Meanwhile, nothing sits still. I’m journeying through Steven Pinker’s latest data dump, Enlightenment Now. My bookshelf crawls with his books, including Learnability and Cognition, Language Learnability and Cognitive Development, The Stuff of Thought, Words and Rules, and The Language Instinct, while my Kindle app holds The Better Angels of Our Nature and the new tome. I also have a novel by his wife, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, though I have never read any of her more scholarly materials on Spinoza.

Enlightenment Now (shouldn’t it have an exclamation point?) gives an upbeat shine to these days of social media anger and the jeremiads of fracturing America. Pinker is a polished writer who should be required reading, if only for his clarity and perseverance in structuring support for mature theses. There is some overlap with Better Angels, but it’s easy to skip past the repetition and still find new insights.

And I have a new science fiction/cyberpunk series under development, tentatively titled Quintessence of Rust. Robots, androids, transhumans, AIs, and a future world where reality, virtual existences, and constructed fictions all vie for political and social relevance. Early experimentation with alternative voices and story arc tuning have shown positive results. There is even some concept art executed with an iPad Pro + Pencil combined with Procreate (amused a firm would choose that name!).… Read the rest

Black and Gray Boxes with Autonomous Meta-Cognition

January 27, 2018January 28, 2018 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Vijay Pande of VC Andreessen Horowitz (who passed on my startups twice but, hey, it’s just business!) has a relevant article in New York Times concerning fears of the “black box” of deep learning and related methods: is the lack of explainability and limited capacity for interrogation of the underlying decision making a deal-breaker for applications to critical areas like medical diagnosis or parole decisions? His point is simple, and related to the previous post’s suggestion of the potential limitations of our capacity to truly understand many aspects of human cognition. Even the doctor may only be able to point to a nebulous collection of clinical experiences when it comes to certain observational aspects of their jobs, like in reading images for indicators of cancer. At least the algorithm has been trained on a significantly larger collection of data than the doctor could ever encounter in a professional lifetime.

So the human is almost as much a black box (maybe a gray box?) as the algorithm. One difference that needs to be considered, however, is that the deep learning algorithm might make unexpected errors when confronted with unexpected inputs. The classic example from the early history of artificial neural networks involved a DARPA test of detecting military tanks in photographs. The apocryphal to legendary formulation of the story is that there was a difference in the cloud cover between the tank images and the non-tank images. The end result was that the system performed spectacularly on the training and test data sets but then failed miserably on new data that lacked the cloud cover factor. I recalled this slightly differently recently and substituted film grain for the cloudiness. In any case, it became a discussion point about the limits of data-driven learning that showed how radically incorrect solutions could be created without careful understanding of how the systems work.… Read the rest

Deep Simulation in the Southern Hemisphere

December 27, 2017December 27, 2017 Mark DavisLeave a comment

I’m unusually behind in my postings due to travel. I’ve been prepping for and now deep inside a fresh pass through New Zealand after two years away. The complexity of the place seems to have a certain draw for me that has lured me back, yet again, to backcountry tramping amongst the volcanoes and glaciers, and to leasurely beachfront restaurants painted with eruptions of summer flowers fueled by the regular rains.

I recently wrote a technical proposal that rounded up a number of the most recent advances in deep learning neural networks. In each case, like with Google’s transformer architecture, there is a modest enhancement that is based on a realization of a deficit in the performance of one of two broad types of networks, recurrent and convolutional.

An old question is whether we learn anything about human cognition if we just simulate it using some kind of automatically learning mechanism. That is, if we use a model acquired through some kind of supervised or unsupervised learning, can we say we know anything about the original mind and its processes?

We can at least say that the learning methodology appears to be capable of achieving the technical result we were looking for. But it also might mean something a bit different: that there is not much more interesting going on in the original mind. In this radical corner sits the idea that cognitive processes in people are tactical responses left over from early human evolution. All you can learn from them is that they may be biased and tilted towards that early human condition, but beyond that things just are the way they turned out.

If we take this position, then, we might have to discard certain aspects of the social sciences.… Read the rest

The Universal Roots of Fantasyland

November 10, 2017November 28, 2017 Mark Davis1 Comment

Intellectual history and cultural criticism always teeters on the brink of totalism. So it was when Christopher Hitchens was forced to defend the hyperbolic subtitle of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The complaint was always the same: everything, really? Or when Neil Postman downplayed the early tremors of the internet in his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death. Email couldn’t be anything more than another movement towards entertainment and celebrity. So it is no surprise that Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Wrong: A 500-Year History is open to similar charges.

Andersen’s thesis is easily digestible: we built a country on fantasies. From the earliest charismatic stirrings of the Puritans to the patent medicines of the 19th century, through to the counterculture of the 1960s, and now with an incoherent insult comedian and showman as president, America has thrived on inventing wild, fantastical narratives that coalesce into movements. Andersen’s detailed analysis is breathtaking as he pulls together everything from linguistic drift to the psychology of magical thinking to justify his thesis.

Yet his thesis might be too narrow. It is not a uniquely American phenomenon. When Andersen mentions cosplay, he fails to identify its Japanese contributions, including the word itself. In the California Gold Rush, he sees economic fantasies driving a generation to unmoor themselves from their merely average lives. Yet the conquistadores had sought to enrich themselves, God, and country while Americans were forming their shining cities on hills. And in mid-19th-century Europe, while the Americans panned in the Sierra, romanticism was throwing off the oppressive yoke of Enlightenment rationality as the West became increasingly exposed to enigmatic Asian cultures. By the 20th century, Weimar Berlin was a hotbed of cultural fantasies that dovetailed with the rise of Nazism and a fantastical theory of race, German volk culture, and Indo-European mysticism.… Read the rest