Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

One Shot, Few Shot, Radical Shot

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Exunoplura is back up after a sad excursion through the challenges of hosting providers. To be blunt, they mostly suck. Between systems that just don’t work right (SSL certificate provisioning in this case) and bad to counterproductive support experiences, it’s enough to make one want to host it oneself. But hosting is mostly, as they say of war, long boring periods punctuated by moments of terror as things go frustratingly sideways. But we are back up again after two hosting provider side-trips!

Honestly, I’d like to see an AI agent effectively navigate through these technological challenges. Where even human performance is fleeting and imperfect, the notion that an AI could learn how to deal with the uncertain corners of the process strikes me as currently unthinkable. But there are some interesting recent developments worth noting and discussing in the journey towards what is named “general AI” or a framework that is as flexible as people can be, rather than narrowly tied to a specific task like visually inspecting welds or answering a few questions about weather, music, and so forth.

First, there is the work by the OpenAI folks on massive language models being tested against one-shot or few-shot learning problems. In each of these learning problems, the number of presentations of the training data cases is limited, rather than presenting huge numbers of exemplars and “fine tuning” the response of the model. What is a language model? Well, it varies across different approaches, but typically is a weighted context of words of varying length, with the weights reflecting the probabilities of those words in those contexts over a massive collection of text corpora. For the OpenAI model, GPT-3, the total number of parameters (words/contexts and their counts) is an astonishing 175 billion using 45 Tb of text to train the model.… Read the rest

Flailing in the Think Tanks

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Despite my best efforts to find some depth in modern intellectual conservatism, instead about the best we get is just about the worst imaginable. Much discussed is the Atlantic piece by Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule who argues for what he calls “common good constitutionalism” that asserts that an authoritarian assurance in defining a moral basis for legal decisions is best for all of us. Individual concepts of life and liberty be damned:

…that each individual may ‘define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ should be not only rejected but stamped as abominable, beyond the realm of the acceptable forever after. So too should the libertarian assumptions central to free-speech law and free-speech ideology—that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech, that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,”  and so on—fall under the ax. Libertarian conceptions of property rights and economic rights will also have to go, insofar as they bar the state from enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources.

Vermeule’s opening salvo is that the doctrine of originalism that conservative legal thinkers have hewed to has shown little progress in reversing the trend towards greater and more expansive liberties. These freedoms, without paternalistic guidance, take us down the slippery slope of moral turpitude. We need stronger hands at the tiller who can properly control the minds of the mob for their own good. In reality, though, Vermeule is just a “Catholic integralist” in disguise, which is to say he is promoting a kind of theocracy where law is subservient to the best guesses of Catholicism.… Read the rest

Originality, History, and Twee Cliché

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The American composer John Adams recently complained during a stay-at-home streaming interview from his composing shack on California’s Lost Coast that Baroque composers had it easy. Their compositions had to conform to about four patterns. But for a modern composer every single piece has to be an original invention. It is daunting, intellectually and emotionally. I’ve noticed this in my own search for new voices in writing, whether my own or those of others.

I’ve been an enthusiast in the past, from the crystalline inward revelations of Goethe in translation to the angry unreliable narrators of 90s transgressive fiction. I reveled in Nabokov’s multilingual estrangement and in Pynchon’s anachronistic dialect in Mason & Dixon. In essays there are the hollowed-out abstractions that form an evocative background in writing about art and architecture, the verbose polysyllabic scrums of political writers at the fringes of liberalism and conservatism who are trying to trace out a living intellectual history, and even the conceptual ambiguity of Continental Philosophy that seems to purposefully undermine its own analytical efforts at clarification.

Martin Amis, in his collection of essays, The Rub of Time, has one central message: don’t do cliché. His second message is don’t write memoirs because they are just crude weapons for attacking your historical enemies, from family to critics. Yet there is a feeling, in retrospect, that the reverse-time narration of Time’s Arrow or the end-reveal of London Fields are a bit gimmicky. The writing is more accessible than a Pynchon, but the mechanics are more akin to short stories from 60s sci-fi, just labored at with greater literary travail.

So, yes, I’ve been an enthusiast in the past but am a critic now.… Read the rest

The Abnormal Normal

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Another day, another COVID-19 conspiracy theory making the rounds. First there was the Chinese bioweapons idea, then the 5G radiation theory that led to tower vandalism, and now the Plandemic video. Washington Post covers the latter while complaining that tech companies are incompetently ineffectual in stopping the spread of these mind viruses that accompany the biological ones. Meanwhile, a scientist who appears in the video is reviewed and debunked in AAAS Science based on materials she provided them. I’m still interested in these “sequences” in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve spent some time in there and may need to again.

The WaPo article ends with a suggestion that we all need to be more skeptical of dumb shit, though I’m guessing that that message will probably not reach the majority of believers or propagators of Plandemic-style conspiracy thinking. So it goes with all the other magical nonsense that percolates through our ordinary lives, confined as they are to only flights of fancy and hopeful aspirations for a better world.

Broadly, though, it does appear that susceptibility to conspiracy theories correlates with certain mental traits that linger at the edge of mental illnesses. Evita March and Jordan Springer got 230 mostly undergraduate students to answer online questionnaires that polled them on mental traits of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, trait narcissism, and trait psychopathy. They also evaluated their belief in odd/magical ideas. Their paper, Belief in conspiracy theories: The predictive role of schizotypy, Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy, shows significant correlations with belief in conspiracies. Interestingly, they suggest that the urge to manipulate others in Machiavellianism and psychopathy may, in turn, lead to an innate fear of being manipulated oneself.

Mental illness and certain psychological traits have always been a bit of an evolutionary mystery.… Read the rest

Ensembles Against Abominables

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It seems obvious to me that when we face existential threats we should make the best possible decisions. I do this with respect to investment decisions, as well. I don’t rely on “guts” or feelings or luck or hope or faith or hunches or trends. All of those ideas are proxies for some sense of incompleteness in our understanding of probabilities and future outcomes.

So how can we cope with those kinds of uncertainties given existential threats? The core methodology is based on ensembles of predictions. We don’t actually want to trust an expert per se, but want instead to trust a basket of expert opinions—an ensemble of predictions. Ideally, those experts who have been more effective in the past should be given greater weight than those who have made poorer predictions. We most certainly should not rely on gut calls by abominable narcissists in what Chauncey Devega at Salon disturbingly characterizes as a “pathological kakistocracy.”

Investment decision-making takes exactly this form, when carried out rationally. Index funds adjust their security holdings in relationship to an index like the S&P 500. Since stock markets have risen since their inceptions with, of course, set backs along the way, an index is a reliable ensemble approach to growth. Ensembles smooth predictions and smooth out brittleness.

Ensemble methods are also core to predictive improvements in machine learning. While a single decision tree trained on data may overweight portions of the data set, an ensemble of trees (which we call a forest, of course) smoothes the decision making by having each tree become only a part of the final vote for a prediction. The training of the individual trees is based on a randomized subset of the data, allowing for specialization of stands of trees, but preserving overall effectiveness of the system.… Read the rest

Tusker Long

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I’m now well into my technically-challenging new novel, Tusker Long, and so it’s time to produce some concept art. Tusker Long combines historical essays, traditional narrative, quasi-scientific analysis, and epic poetry to convey the story of a civilization not unlike what our own might become were we grafted and merged with animals. Central to the novel is a spiritual system that revolves around ancestor worship, bestiaries, and transmogrification. Some art may help conjure up the feeling.

 

 

 … Read the rest

A Personal Computing Revolution

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I’m writing this on a 2018 iPad Pro (11” with 512GB storage and LTE). I’m also using an external Apple Magic Keyboard 2 and Magic Trackpad 2. The iPad is plugged into an LG USB-C monitor at my sit-stand desk overlooking a forested canyon in Sedona. And it is, well, almost perfect. Almost, but there are remaining limitations (I’ll get to them), though they are well-balanced by the capabilities and I suspect will be remedied soon.

Overall, though, it feels like a compute revolution where a small, extremely light (1 pound or so) device is all I need to occupy much of my day. I’ll point out that I am not by nature an Apple fanboi. I have an HP laptop that dual boots Ubuntu Linux and Windows in addition to a Macbook Pro with Parallels hosting two Linux distributions for testing and continuing education purposes. I know I can live my online life in Chrome on Linux well enough, using Microsoft Office 365, Google Mail, 1Password, Qobuz, Netflix, etc. while still being able to build enterprise and startup software ecosystems via the Eclipse IDE, Java J2EE, Python, MySQL, AWS, Azure, etc. Did I forget anyone in there? Oh, of course there are Bitbucket, git, maven, Confluence, and all those helpers. All are just perfect on Linux once you fight your way through the package managers and occasional consults of Stack Overflow. I think I first installed Linux on a laptop in 1993, and it remains not for the weak of geek, but is constantly improving.

But what are the positives of the iPad Pro? First is the lightness and more-than-sufficient power. Photo editing via Affinity Photo is actually faster than on my Macbook Pro (2016) and video editing works well though without quite the professional completeness of a Final Cut.… Read the rest

A Pause in Attention

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I routinely take a pause in what I am doing to reflect on my goals and what I’ve learned. I’m sure you do too. I had been listening to the recorded works of Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, but am now on to Sir Edward Elgar and Josef Suk. Billie Eilish and Vampire Weekend didn’t last long. I gave up on my deep learning startup to pursue another, less abstract technology. I revamped this site. I put trail running on pause and have been lifting weights more. I shifted writing efforts to a new series centered on manipulating animal physiologies for war and espionage.

These pauses feel like taking an expansive stretch after sitting still for a long period; a reset of the mental apparatus that repositions the mind for a new phase. For me, one take away from recent events, up to and including the great pause of the coronavirus pandemic, is a reconsideration of the amount of silly and pointless content we absorb. Just a few examples: The drama of Twitter feuds among the glitterati and the political class, cancel culture, and shaming. The endless technology, photography, audiophile, fashion, and food reporting and communal commenting that serves to channel our engagement with products and services. Even the lightweight philosophizing that goes with critiques of tradition or society has the same basic set of drivers.

What’s shared among them is the desire for attention, an intellectual posturing to attract and maintain the gaze of others. But it does have a counterpoint, I believe, in a grounding in facts, reason, and a careful attention to novelty. The latter may be a bit hard to pin down, though. It is easy to mistake randomness or chaos for novelty.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes, Unredacted

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NOTE: The following is the unredacted first chapter of Against Superheroes, reported here for completeness of the historical record. Footnotes as per the original.

Z3 begins with a fragment from Sinister’s earliest recollections of the initial transformation:

The fear began with the realization that my right arm was becoming unusually heavy. The weight of the bracelet had not changed dramatically, but it seemed that my arm was thickening and I feared I would lower my arm and the combined artifact would slip off, risking possible damage on the tile floor, and so I reflexively swung my left arm to stabilize my wrist. The blank, formless face of the figure was less tarnished than the rest and the dim bathroom light dancing across the visage gave it a strangely animated swirling quality. Soon the weight in my arm moved through my shoulders and into my neck. I staggered and dropped to my knees.

All Z collectives know this passage, but we disagree with Z2’s reading in Peregrinations of Mythic Specialness1 that the inclusion of the specific details concerning the type of light amongst the picturesque imagery in the passage is a deliberate effort on the part of later redactors to try to concretize a mythic passage. It is equally possible to simply conclude that the author was not concerned with the overall flow of the writing but instead intended to convey facts while capturing aspects of his internal state.

Thus, Z3 opens with the strongest hypothesis to date concerning the historicity of Sinister: we believe the evidence supports the conclusion that such a being did in fact exist and that his narrative connections to certain technologies similar to those present among the Collectives were an accurate portrayal of events that transpired, or at least rose to the greatest level of accuracy he could achieve.… Read the rest