FICLO Forever

hairballEdward Snowden set off a maelstrom with his revelation concerning the covert use of phone records and possibly a greater range of information. For those of us in the Big Data technology universe, the technologies and algorithms involved are utterly prosaic: given the target of an investigation who is under scrutiny after court review, just query their known associates via a database of phone records. Slightly more interesting is to spread out in that connectivity network and identify associates of associates, or associates of associates who share common features. Still, it is a matching problem over small neighborhoods in large graphs, and that ain’t hard.

The technological simplicity of the system is not really at issue, though, other than to note that just as information wants to be free—and technology makes that easier than ever—private information seems to be increasingly easy to acquire, distribute, and mine. But let’s consider a policy fix to at least one of the ethical dilemmas that is posed by what Snowden revealed. We might characterize this by saying that the large-scale, covert acquisition and mining of citizen data by the US government violates the Fourth Amendment. Specifically, going back in the jurisprudence a bit, when we expect privacy and when there is no probable cause to violate that privacy, then the acquisition of that information violates our rights under the Fourth. That is the common meme that is floating around concerning Snowden’s revelations, though it is at odds with widespread sentiment that we may need to give up some rights of privacy to help fight terrorism.

I’m not going to argue here about the correctness of these contending constructs, however. Nor will I address the issue of whether Snowden should have faced the music, fled, or whether he simply violated a rule and an oath requiring secrecy.… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 6

Teleology CoverartThrough that winter, as I recall, Harry became even more involved with the church. I kept my mouth shut about his choices. Mom, sensing that I might be feeling left out, pushed me to get involved in a mentoring program for gifted students after I opened up with my theories about evolutionary simulation and meaning.

My first meeting with my assigned mentor went pretty well, though he intimidated me by not responding immediately to most of what I described. Dr. Korporlik was Serbo-Croatian by ethnicity and had worked for years as a computer scientist and mathematician at the nearby Department of Energy laboratory, Los Alamos, after coming to the US via German laboratories. He was now at a local think tank—the Rio Grande Group—that specialized in studying complex systems. I knew next to nothing about RGG when my school counselor set up my appointment to meet Korporlik. On a crisp November night, Mom drove me to their office building near the downtown plaza. She planned on doing some grocery shopping and left me with instructions to call her if I finished before the allocated hour was up.

Korporlik introduced himself and said he worked on problems in computer science mostly, but that those problems had parallels in biology, and asked what I thought about school.

“It’s OK,” I said.

“Good grades, I think?” he responded.

“Yeah, I get pretty much all As unless I get too bored and then I sometimes get lazy,” I said.

“Yes, it is a common problem. The schools here could be more challenging, yes?” He said rapidly. His accent was fairly thick with chirpy Germanic overtones.

“I guess so. I don’t mind it being easy, I guess.… Read the rest

Towards an Epistemology of Uncertainty (the “I Don’t Know” club)

space-timeToday there was an acute overlay of reinforcing ideas when I encountered Sylvia McLain’s piece in Occam’s Corner on The Guardian drawing out Niall Ferguson for deriving Keynesianism from Keynes’ gayness. And just when I was digesting Lee Smolin’s new book, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe.

The intersection was a tutorial in the limits of expansive scientism and in the conclusions that led to unexpected outcomes. We get to euthanasia and forced sterilization down that path–or just a perception of senility when it comes to Ferguson. The fix to this kind of programme is fairly simple: doubt. I doubt that there is any coherent model that connects sexual orientation to economic theory. I doubt that selective breeding and euthanasia can do anything more than lead to inbreeding depression. Or, for Smolin, I doubt that the scientific conclusions that we have reached so far are the end of the road.

That wasn’t too hard, was it?

The I Don’t Know club is pretty easy to join. All one needs is intellectual honesty and earnesty.… Read the rest

Singularity and its Discontents

Kimmel botIf a machine-based process can outperform a human being is it significant? That weighty question hung in the background as I reviewed Jürgen Schmidhuber’s work on traffic sign classification. Similar results have emerged from IBM’s Watson competition and even on the TOEFL test. In each case, machines beat people.

But is that fact significant? There are a couple of ways we can look at these kinds of comparisons. First, we can draw analogies to other capabilities that were not accessible by mechanical aid and show that the fact that they outperformed humans was not overly profound. The wheel quickly outperformed human legs for moving heavy objects. The cup outperformed the hands for drinking water. This then invites the realization that the extension of these physical comparisons leads to extraordinary juxtapositions: the airline really outperformed human legs for transport, etc. And this, in turn, justifies the claim that since we are now just outperforming human mental processes, we can only expect exponential improvements moving forward.

But this may be a category mistake in more than the obvious differentiator of the mental and the physical. Instead, the category mismatch is between levels of complexity. The number of parts in a Boeing 747 is 6 million versus one moving human as the baseline (we could enumerate the cells and organelles, etc., but then we would need to enumerate the crystal lattices of the aircraft steel, so that level of granularity is a wash). The number of memory addresses in a big server computer is 64 x 10^9 or higher, with disk storage in the TBs (10^12). Meanwhile, the human brain has 100 x 10^9 neurons and 10^14 connections. So, with just 2 orders of magnitude between computers and brains versus 6 between humans and planes, we find ourselves approaching Kurzweil’s argument that we have to wait until 2040.… Read the rest

Methodical Play

imageMy fourteen-year-old interviewed a physicist yesterday. I had the privilege of being home over the weekend and listened in; my travel schedule has lately been brutal, with the only saving grace being moments like right now en route to Chicago when I can collapse into reading and writing for a few whitenoise-washed moments. And the physicist who was once his grandfather said some remarkable things:

  • Physics consists of empirical layers of untruth
  • The scientific method is never used as formulated
  • Schools, while valuable, won’t teach how to be a scientist
  • The institutions of physics don’t support the creativity required to be a scientist

Yet there was no sense of anger or disillusionment in these statements, just a framing of the distinctions between the modern social model surrounding what scientists do and the complex reality of how they really do their work.

The positives were that play is both the essential ingredient and the missing determinant of the real “scientific method.” Mess around, try to explain, mess around some more. And what is all that play getting this remarkable octogenarian? Possible insights into the unification of electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force. The interview journey passed from alignment of quarks to the beams of neutron stars, igniting the imaginations of all the minds on the call.

But if there is no real large-scale method to this madness, what might we conclude about the rationality of the process of science? I would advocate that the algorithmic model of inference is perhaps the best (and least biased) way of approaching the issue of scientific method. By constantly reshuffling the available parameters and testing the compressibility of models, play is indistinguishable from science when the play pivots on best explanation.… Read the rest

Curiouser and Curiouser

georgeJürgen Schmidhuber’s work on algorithmic information theory and curiosity is worth a few takes, if not more, for the researcher has done something that is both flawed and rather brilliant at the same time. The flaws emerge when we start to look deeply into the motivations for ideas like beauty (is symmetry and noncomplex encoding enough to explain sexual attraction? Well-understood evolutionary psychology is probably a better bet), but the core of his argument is worth considering.

If induction is an essential component of learning (and we might suppose it is for argument’s sake), then why continue to examine different parameterizations of possible models for induction? Why be creative about how to explain things, like we expect and even idolize of scientists?

So let us assume that induction is explained by the compression of patterns into better and better models using an information theoretic-style approach. Given this, Schmidhuber makes the startling leap that better compression and better models are best achieved by information harvesting behavior that involves finding novelty in the environment. Thus curiosity. Thus the implementation of action in support of ideas.

I proposed a similar model to explain aesthetic preferences for mid-ordered complex systems of notes, brush-strokes, etc. around 1994, but Schmidhuber’s approach has the benefit of not just characterizing the limitations and properties of aesthetic systems, but also justifying them. We find interest because we are programmed to find novelty, and we are programmed to find novelty because we want to optimize our predictive apparatus. The best optimization is actively seeking along the contours of the perceivable (and quantifiable) universe, and isolating the unknown patterns to improve our current model.… Read the rest

Minimizing Existential Toaster Threats

tesla2Philosophy in the modern world has strived for a sense of relevance as the sciences (“natural philosophy”) have become dominant. But philosophy may have found a footing in the complicated space between technological advances and defining human virtues with efforts to address and understand change and its impact on human existence. These efforts have included the ethics of biological manipulation and, critically, existential threats to humanity, including climate change, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering.

I mention all this because I’m really writing about cars but need to fit the discussion somehow into the theme of this blog. So the existential threat of climate change means we need to pollute less and burn less fossil fuels. More tactically, however, my wife and I also needed to buy a new toaster because our five-year-old Oster four-burner unit was failing. There was therefore only one solution to this dilemma: take the brand new Tesla S 70 miles away to the foothills of the Sierra on a test drive and, yes, to buy a new toaster.

I had taken delivery of our Tesla S Performance 85 with Tech Package a week before but didn’t really have any opportunity to drive it because of work obligations that kept me firmly planted in front of a computer monitor. I had driven it briefly but it mostly sat charging in the garage (at the slowish pace of a 120V circuit; Tesla did not deliver my dual charger station in time and I haven’t had the 100A circuit installed to support it either), so when Saturday came, I realized that it was an opportunity to justify a longish trek to test the drivability of the car and to seek out and use the Tesla “supercharger” stations that promise rapid charging in 30 minutes to an hour.… Read the rest

Chinese Feudal Wasps

waspsIn Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, the author points out that Chinese feudalism was not at all like European feudalism. In the latter, vassals were often unrelated to lords and the relationship between them was consensual and renewed annually. Only later did patriarchal lineages become important in preserving the line of descent among the lords. But that was not the case in China where extensive networks of blood relations dominated the lord-vassal relationship; the feudalism was more like tribalism and clans than the European model, but with Confucianism layered on top.

So when E.O. Wilson, still intellectually agile in his twilight years, describes the divide between kin selection and multi-level selection in the New York Times, we start to see a similar pattern of explanation for both models at far more basic level than just in the happenstances of Chinese versus European cultures. Kin selection predicts that genetic co-representation can lead an individual to self-sacrifice in an evolutionary sense (from loss of breeding possibilities in Hymenoptera like bees and ants, through to sacrificial behavior like standing watch against predators and thus becoming a target, too). This is the traditional explanation and the one that fits well for the Chinese model. But we also have the multi-level selection model that posits that selection operates at the group level, too. In kin selection there is no good explanation for the European feudal tradition unless the vassals are inbred with their lords, which seems unlikely in such a large, diverse cohort. Consolidating power among the lords and intermarrying practices possibly did result in inbreeding depression later on, but the overall model was one based on social ties that were not based on genetic familiarity.… Read the rest

Novelty and the Novel

stillsuitMy 14-year-old is obsessed with Frank Herbert’s Dune right now, marveling over the complexity and otherworldly ornamentation that Herbert imbued in his strange hyper-future (or past maybe, who knows). Dune might read as an allegory about Middle Eastern oil or about psychotropic drugs or nothing at all, but regardless of any deeper layers in its palimpsest,  it is so surprising to a first reader—especially a young one—that it still has the power to fuel daydreams (I obsessed over building a stillsuit at my son’s age, imagining being able to spend days in the harsh New Mexico summer without the need for water).

So it may be surprising that I found myself agreeing with Ian McEwan in The New Republic where he calls into doubt the validity of fiction, though ultimately he rediscovers his love of fiction in Nabakov’s “Caress [of the] divine details” and in John Updike’s controlled descriptions. He comes back again to fiction but not at the expense of wanting nonfiction that brings him new ideas. We are information harvesting machines and the novelty generation rate of nonfiction (there is always the history you do not know much less the cosmology you can’t understand) is just much greater than that of fiction.

But perhaps there is a détente in the middle where fiction and nonfiction commingle. The historical novel is perhaps the best example. The only fear being that the history is too much bent to the requirements of drama and conflict to be at all accurate. Likewise, there might be modern hard science fiction that provides an accurate and deep glimpse into the hermeneutics of real scientific research, and possible scientific futures. Then, at least, there is information beyond the craft of writing embedded within them.… Read the rest

A Paradigm of Guessing

boxesThe most interesting thing I’ve read this week comes from Jurgen Schmidhuber’s paper, Algorithmic Theories of Everything, which should be provocative enough to pique the most jaded of interests. And the quote is from way into the paper:

The first number is 2, the second is 4, the third is 6, the fourth is 8. What is the fifth? The correct answer is “250,” because the nth number is n 5 −5n^4 −15n^3 + 125n^2 −224n+ 120. In certain IQ tests, however, the answer “250” will not yield maximal score, because it does not seem to be the “simplest” answer consistent with the data (compare [73]). And physicists and others favor “simple” explanations of observations.

And this is the beginning and the end of logical positivism. How can we assign truth to inductive judgments without crossing from fact to value, and what should that value system be?… Read the rest