Author: Mark Davis

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

The Retiring Mind, Part V: Listening and Ground Truth

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Human hearing is limited in the range of frequencies that we can discern. Generally, at the high end, that limit is around 20kHz, which is a very high pitch indeed. But, as we age, our high frequency perception reduces as well, until we may very well have difficulty hearing 8kHz or understanding human utterances in old age. You can test your own approximate limits with a simple YouTube video that raises pitches quickly up through the spectrum. I’m capping out at just north of 13.5kHz using a cheap speaker attached to my monitor, and with normal but quiet ambient background noise.

The original design of the Compact Disc by Phillips and Sony used the 20kHz limit as guidance for the encoding of the digital information on the disks. Specifically, the input analog waveform was sampled at a resolution of 16 bits 44.1kHz, which gives a maximum volume range of 2^16 (96dB) and supports the Nyquist sampling theorem that requires double the maximum frequency of the input stream in order to reconstruct that stream.

And CDs were very good, exceeding the capabilities of vinyl or cassettes, and approaching the best magnetic tape capabilities of the time. They also had some interesting side-effects in terms of mastering by freeing bass frequencies that had to be shifted towards the central channel on vinyl in order to avoid shortening recordings unduly because of the larger groove sizes needed to render low frequencies.

But now, with streaming, we can increase our resolution still further. Qobuz and Tidal offer Hi-Res audio formats that can range up to 24 bit resolution at 192kHz sample rates. Tidal also promotes MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) format that may use lossy compression but preserves aspects of the original master recording.… Read the rest

Pro-Individualism, Pro-Social, Anti-Cousin

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I tend towards the skeptical in the face of monocausal explanatory frameworks, especially for ideas as big as human history and the factors that shaped it. The risk of being wrong is far too high while the payoff in terms of anything more than cocktail banter is too low, be it as a shaper of modern policy or bearer of moral prerogatives.

So the widely covered discussion of Schulz, et. al.’s AAAS Science paper, “The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation” (paywall) is a curiosity that admits to cautious reading at the very least. The hypothesis is that Catholic Church prohibitions on consanguine marriage that began in the medieval period in Western Europe explain globally unusual aspects of the psychology of the people of those regions. By banning cousin marriage even out to the 6th degree in many cases, the Church forced people away from tribal ideas and more towards neolocal family structures. That, in turn, led to pro-social attitudes based on social trust rather than family power, and towards more individualistic and independent psychologies overall.

The methodology of the study is fairly complex: look at the correlations between consanguine marriages patterns and psychological attitudes, then try to explain those correlations away with a wide range of alternative data patterns, like the availability of irrigation or proximity to Roman roads, and so forth. Data experiments that look at Eastern Orthodox versus Western Church differences, or even between northern and southern Italy are used to test the theory further.

In the end, or at least until other data supervenes, the hypothesis stands as showing that reducing cousin or similar marriages is a “causal channel” for these patterns of individualism and social trust.… Read the rest

Forever Uncanny

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Quanta has a fair round up of recent advances in deep learning. Most interesting is the recent performance on natural language understanding tests that are close to or exceed mean human performance. Inevitably, John Searle’s Chinese Room argument is brought up, though the author of the Quanta article suggests that inferring the Chinese translational rule book from the data itself is slightly different from the original thought experiment. In the Chinese Room there is a person who knows no Chinese but has a collection of translational reference books. She receives texts through a slot and dutifully looks up the translation of the text and passes out the result. “Is this intelligence?” is the question and it serves as a challenge to the Strong AI hypothesis. With statistical machine translation methods (and their alternative mechanistic implementation, deep learning), the rule books have been inferred by looking at translated texts (“parallel” texts as we say in the field). By looking at a large enough corpus of parallel texts, greater coverage of translated variants is achieved as well as some inference of pragmatic issues in translation and corner cases.

As a practical matter, it should be noted that modern, professional translators often use translation memory systems that contain idiomatic—or just challenging—phrases that they can reference when translating new texts. The understanding resides in the original translator’s head, we suppose, and in the correct application of the rule to the new text by checking for applicability according to, well, some other criteria that the translator brings to bear on the task.

In the General Language Understand Evaluation (GLUE) tests described in the Quanta article, the systems are inferring how to answer Wh-style queries (who, what, where, when, and how) as well as identify similar texts.… Read the rest

Educational Funding Opportunities!

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My wife and I are pleased to announce the fifth year of the James Davis and Wirt Atmar Memorial Current Use Scholarship at New Mexico State University. This scholarship provides around five students in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) with tuition to help them achieve their educational dreams.

You can find the scholarship through the slightly hard-to-navigate NMSU Scholarship portal (Search for “davis” or “atmar”).… Read the rest

The Illiberal, Openness, and Oppression

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Continuing on with my fascination with intellectual conservatism (just removed denigrating scare quotes at the last minute), Sohrab Ahmari vs. David French is a curious anomaly to me, though it may have been always lurking below the surface. Certainly, going back to the Moral Majority, the desire of conservatives to have their version of Christianity play a greater role in US governance has been with us in terms of voting patterns and cultural preferences, but the notion that among the intelligentsia there was a desire for some kind of Christian Dominionism or at least greater control of the public square is not a perspective I’ve encountered. Instead, there were more targeted approaches like criticizing Roe v. Wade on the basis of constitutional arguments and legal ideas, or working towards expanding tax-dollar flows to home schoolers or other select (I originally wrote “fringe” here, but need to work on my neutral voice language that ebbs and flows) religious ideas. The religious deserved to not be disregarded in the face of cultural drift.

It’s worth noting that using the US Constitution as a touchstone for bolstering protections for the religious seems to most of us as a secular appeal rather than a scriptural or theological one. Such an approach squares nicely with our increasing defense of the rights and freedoms of groups previously marginalized or discriminated against. Yet part of the right (Ahmari and a pastor named Doug Wilson, at least; French is their foe) sees a desire for greater cultural and political control as actually rooted in that legal basis. After all, if reason is intrinsically derived from their god, then the reason in the American Experiment is always and inextricably tied to that god.… Read the rest

Bereitschaftspotential and the Rehabilitation of Free Will

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The question of whether we, as people, have free will or not is both abstract and occasionally deeply relevant. We certainly act as if we have something like libertarian free will, and we have built entire systems of justice around this idea, where people are responsible for choices they make that result in harms to others. But that may be somewhat illusory for several reasons. First, if we take a hard deterministic view of the universe as a clockwork-like collection of physical interactions, our wills are just a mindless outcome of a calculation of sorts, driven by a wetware calculator with a state completely determined by molecular history. Second, there has been, until very recently, some experimental evidence that our decision-making occurs before we achieve a conscious realization of the decision itself.

But this latter claim appears to be without merit, as reported in this Atlantic article. Instead, what was previously believed to be signals of brain activity that were related to choice (Bereitschaftspotential) may just be associated with general waves of neural activity. The new experimental evidence puts the timing of action in line with conscious awareness of the decision. More experimental work is needed—as always—but the tentative result suggests a more tightly coupled pairing of conscious awareness with decision making.

Indeed, the results of this newer experimental result gets closer to my suggested model of how modular systems combined with perceptual and environmental uncertainty can combine to produce what is effectively free will (or at least a functional model for a compatibilist position). Jettisoning the Chaitin-Kolmogorov complexity part of that argument and just focusing on the minimal requirements for decision making in the face of uncertainty, we know we need a thresholding apparatus that fires various responses given a multivariate statistical topology.… Read the rest

A Great, Modern Rambling

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I read across the political spectrum. I would say I read religiously across the political spectrum, but that is using the term in a secondary and impoverished way, which is part of my point in this particular post. When an author has no clearly defined thesis there is a tendency to ramble, or to fall back on form in the absence of content, or to play to the expectations of the audience through deliberate obscurity.

It is by a chance intersection that I encountered two ideologically conservative pieces that suffer from this tendency in the same week, but it could also be that everyone on the right is exasperated by the often vacuous—and always narcissistic—current happenings within the political parties that represent them. I sympathize with them if that’s their defense, and will also agree that the far left can be equally exhausting.

It has become de rigueur for the right’s commentariat to claim that this is not what they expect from the Party of Lincoln or, given a spat with National Review, that the magazine lacks the heft of Bill Buckley’s original ideals. If all of conservatism has become tainted by reactionaries and semi-populists, the very idea of intellectual conservatism huddles against an ever-present and threatening cloud.

So we start with Andrew Sullivan’s rambling in New York Magazine. Sullivan likes to praise the intellectual heft of those he argues against. Maybe he just likes to be pleasant and this is his way of signaling a commonality of purpose, or perhaps it’s to gird his own rejoinders as having equal weight. In this piece, it’s hard to discern why. The entire argument is a typology or map of what a center-right conservative is and is not.… Read the rest

Deep Learning with Quantum Decoherence

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Getting back to metaphors in science, Wojciech Zurek’s so-called Quantum Darwinism is in the news due to a series of experimental tests. In Quantum Darwinism (QD), the collapse of the wave function (more properly the “extinction” of states) is a result of decoherence from environmental entanglement. There is a kind of replication in QD, where pointer states are multiplied, and then a kind of environmental selection as well. There is no variation per se, however, though some might argue that the pointer states imprinted by the environment are variants of the originals. Still, it makes the metaphor a bit thin at the edges, but it is close enough for the core idea to fit most of the floor-plan of Darwinism. Indeed, some champion it as part of a more general model for everything. Even selection among viable multiverse bubbles has a similar feel to it: some survive while others perish.

I’ve been simultaneously studying quantum computing and complexity theories that are getting impressively well developed. Richard Cleve’s An Introduction to Quantum Complexity Theory and John Watrous’s Quantum Computational Complexity are notable in their bridging from traditional computational complexity to this newer world of quantum computing using qubits, wave functions, and even decoherence gates.

Decoherence sucks for quantum computing in general, but there may be a way to make use of it. For instance, an artificial neural network (ANN) also has some interesting Darwinian-like properties to it. The initial weight distribution in an ANN is typically a random real value. This is designed to simulate the relative strength of neural connections. Real neural connections are much more complex than this, doing interesting cyclic behavior, saturating and suppressing based on neurotransmitter availability, and so forth, but assuming just a straightforward pattern of connectivity has allowed for significant progress.… Read the rest

Bullshit, Metaphors, and Political Precision

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Given this natural condition of uncertainty in the meaning of words, and their critical role in communication, to say the least, we can certainly expect that as we move away from the sciences towards other areas of human endeavor we have even greater vagueness in trying to express complex ideas. Politics is an easy example. America’s current American president is a babbling bullshitter, to use the explanatory framework of the essay, On Bullshit, and he is easy to characterize as an idiot, like when he conflates Western liberalism with something going on exclusively in modern California.

In this particular case, we have to track down what “liberal” means and meant at various times, then try to suss out how that meaning is working today. At one time, the term was simply expressive of freedom with minimal government interference. Libertarians still carry a version of that meaning forward, but liberalism also came to mean something akin to a political focus on government spending to right perceived economic and social disparities (to achieve “freedom from want and despair,” via FDR). And then it began to be used as a pejorative related to that same focus.

As linguist John McWhorter points out, abstract ideas—and perhaps especially political ones—are so freighted with their pragmatic and historical background that the best we can say is that we are actively working out what a given term means. McWhorter suggests that older terms like “socialist” are impossible to put to work effectively; a newer term like “progressive” is more desirable because it carries less baggage.

An even stronger case is made by George Lakoff where he claims central metaphors that look something like Freudian abstractions govern political perspectives.… Read the rest