Category: Philosophy

Critical Surveillance in the Showman State

Mark Davis1 Comment

I’ve been watching the steady stream of citizen-captured videos of bad actors in our little democracy. From racist police murders, to super-Karens, to anti-Antifa gun toters exercising intimidation, the mobile phone capture is revealing—and the internet is amplifying—the angry and ugly aspects of society that were once just local phenomena. Traditional media could promote them, but only when the events fit the channel restrictions on content, time, relevance, and taste. Now the channels are constantly expanding and the nascent ugliness is too.

Positive effects of this newfound awareness include policy changes like the requirements of body cameras for police, though some have argued that such videos violate the privacy of the subjects of police enforcement as often as they mitigate illegal behavior on the part of the police. Still, there is no going back. I purchased Google Glass during the beta period and experimented with the unit. I still own it and it still boots up. When they first came out there were reports of violent actions by people who were unhappy being subject to potentially always-on video recording. Now we have “Hey Siri, I’m being pulled over” audio triggers that are designed to enhance one’s recourse in the event of police misbehavior. Meanwhile, drones and license plate scanners by private companies can be subscribed to by police to be able to locate cars anywhere in metro areas quickly and efficiently, while at the same time the legality of attached GPS transponders for tracking suspects is constantly under judicial scrutiny. And facial recognition systems are racially biased, resulting in false-positive arrests of racial minorities (and likely others, too).

There is an entire field of Continental Philosophy that derives from Marxist theory and that goes by the title “critical theory.”… Read the rest

One Shot, Few Shot, Radical Shot

Mark Davis1 Comment

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

Mark Davis1 Comment

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

Mark Davis1 Comment

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

Ethical Grounding and Numeracy

Mark Davis1 Comment

I recently discovered the YouTube videos of Paulogia. He’s a former Christian who likes to take on young Earth creationists, apologists, and some historical issues related to the faith. I’m generally drawn to the latter since the other two categories seem a bit silly to me, but I liked his recent rebuttal of some apologist/philosopher arguments concerning the idea that ethics must be ontologically grounded in something. The argument is of the sort stoned high schoolers engage in—but certainly more carefully attended to—as I commented on the video.

So rather than pick on definitional minutiae, let’s take an expansive view of ethical reasoning and try to apply it to contemporary problems in society. For instance, while all societies have generally condemned murder in one way or another, how do we approach something like whether governmental control or regulation of environmental pollution and interaction is necessary or obligatory?

For the apologist/philosophers in the video, they seem to argue that scriptural claims places a grounding of ethics in a person’s “heart,” but then leave open how that gets translated into some kind of decision-making. At one point, one of the guys says he tends towards virtue ethics, while the other notes that some might see deontological ethics as the proper extension of that ontologically- and theistically-grounded impetus.

Let’s take a minimalist and observational approach to ethical behavior. We can perhaps tease out a few observations and then try to fit an explanatory theory onto that.

  1. Moral and ethical perspectives are and have been varied across people and time.
  2. There seems to be some central commonalities about interpersonal and group ideas about what is ethical and moral.
  3. Those commonalities have reflections in the natural world and among non-human species.
… Read the rest

Overcoming Projection and Fear in the 2020s

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The end of 2019 has come with a soul-searching of sorts. While the politics of America is in an unexpected tribal divergence given the recent good economic performance combined with a world not in major conflicts, there are also undercurrents of religious change that many see as threatening to the established order. Religion in America is on the decline for the last decade, with young people, especially, indicating that they have no particular affiliation, and with the rise of atheism and related thinking in print and online.

Let’s take a look at some of the most recent journalism on the topic. We will start with an example of how, I believe, it contributes to this decline, then segue to some sage survey work and science concerning how people regard these ideas.

The Washington Times is almost always filled with sloppy journalism, editorials, scholarship, and thinking, but here we have quotes suggesting that lack of religious affiliation is “pagan.” (Wrong: paganism was and remains highly religious). Or editorialization that overthrowing “blue laws” is linked to the decline of religious adherence (or, perhaps, a better separation of church and state). Shakespeare’s jokes require biblical understanding? Perhaps some, but many others required (pagan) mythological and historical understanding. The hit list goes on and on: evangelization like in the Age of Exploration? Swords out, anyone?

But this kind of sloppiness reflects mostly a desire to denigrate religious skepticism and project onto it the fears of the religious themselves, at least according to this survey from the Public Religion Reseach Institute, as reported in the Washington Post, which is the anti-Times for some. The Christian religious right sustains a fear of losing their religious freedoms that is not actually desired by atheists or the non-affiliated.… 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

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