Artsy Women

January 8, 2016January 8, 2016 Mark Davis1 Comment

Victoire Lemoine A pervasive commitment to ambiguity. That’s the most compelling sentence I can think of to describe the best epistemological stance concerning the modern world. We have, at best, some fairly well-established local systems that are reliable. We have consistency that may, admittedly, only pertain to some local system that is relatively smooth or has a modicum of support for the most general hypotheses that we can generate.

It’s not nihilistic to believe these things. It’s prudent and, when carefully managed, it’s productive.

And with such prudence we can tear down the semantic drapery that commands attention at every turn, from the grotesqueries of the political sphere that seek to command us through emotive hyperbole to the witchdoctors of religious canons who want us to immanentize some silly Middle Eastern eschaton or shoot up a family-planning clinic.

It is all nonsense. We are perpetuating and inventing constructs that cling to our contingent neurologies like mold, impervious to the broadest implications and best thinking we can muster. That’s normal, I suppose, for that is the sub rosa history of our species. But only beneath the firmament, while there is hope above and inventiveness and the creation of a new honor that derives from fairness and not from reactive disgust.

In opposition to the structures that we know and live with—that we tolerate—there is both clarity in this cocksure target and a certainty that, at least, we can deconstruct the self-righteousness and build a new sensibility to (at least) equality if not some more grand vision.

I picked up Laura Marling’s Short Movie last week and propagated it to various cars. It is only OK, but it joins a rather large collection of recent female musicians in my music archive.… Read the rest

A Soliloquy for Volcanoes and Nearest Neighbors

December 18, 2015 Mark DavisLeave a comment

A German kid caught me talking to myself yesterday. It was my fault, really. I was trying to break a hypnotic trance-like repetition of exactly what I was going to say to the tramper’s hut warden about two hours away. OK, more specifically, I had left the Waihohonu camp site in Tongariro National Park at 7:30AM and was planning to walk out that day. To put this into perspective, it’s 28.8 km (17.9 miles) with elevation changes of around 900m, including a ridiculous final assault above red crater at something like 60 degrees along a stinking volcanic ridge line. And, to make things extra lovely, there was hail, then snow, then torrential downpours punctuated by hail again—a lovely tramp in the New Zealand summer—all in a full pack.

But anyway, enough bragging about my questionable judgement. I was driven by thoughts of a hot shower and the duck l’orange at Chateau Tongariro while my hands numbed to unfeeling arresting myself with trekking poles down through muddy canyons. I was talking to myself. I was trying to stop repeating to myself why I didn’t want my campsite for the night that I had reserved. This is the opposite of glorious runner’s high. This is when all the extra blood from one’s brain is obsessed with either making leg muscles go or watching how the feet will fall. I also had the hood of my rain fly up over my little Marmot ball cap. I was in full regalia, too, with the shifting rub of my Gortex rain pants a constant presence throughout the day. I didn’t notice him easing up on me as I carried on about one-shot learning as some kind of trance-breaking ritual.… Read the rest

Lucifer on the Beach

December 10, 2015December 10, 2015 Mark Davis1 Comment

I picked up a whitebait pizza while stopped along the West Coast of New Zealand tonight. Whitebait are tiny little swarming immature fish that can be scooped out of estuarial river flows using big-mouthed nets. They run, they dart, and it is illegal to change river exit points to try to channel them for capture. Hence, whitebait is semi-precious, commanding NZD70-130/kg, which explains why there was a size limit on my pizza: only the small one was available.

By the time I was finished the sky had aged from cinereal to iron in a satire of the vivid, watch-me colors of CNN International flashing Donald Trump’s linguistic indirection across the television. I crept out, setting my headlamp to red LEDs designed to minimally interfere with night vision. Just up away from the coast, hidden in the impossible tangle of cold rainforest, there was a glow worm dell. A few tourists conjured with flashlights facing the ground to avoid upsetting the tiny arachnocampa luminosa that clung to the walls inside the dark garden. They were like faint stars composed into irrelevant constellations, with only the human mind to blame for any observed patterns.

And the light, what light, like white-light LEDs recently invented, but a light that doesn’t flicker or change, and is steady under the calmest observation. Driven by luciferin and luciferase, these tiny creatures lure a few scant light-seeking creatures to their doom and as food for absorption until they emerge to mate, briefly, lay eggs, and then die.

Lucifer again, named properly from the Latin as the light bringer, the chemical basis for bioluminescence was largely isolated in the middle of the 20th Century. Yet there is this biblical stigma hanging over the term—one that really makes no sense at all.… Read the rest

The IQ of Machines

September 13, 2015September 13, 2015 Mark Davis1 Comment

Perhaps idiosyncratic to some is my focus in the previous post on the theoretical background to machine learning that derives predominantly from algorithmic information theory and, in particular, Solomonoff’s theory of induction. I do note that there are other theories that can be brought to bear, including Vapnik’s Structural Risk Minimization and Valiant’s PAC-learning theory. Moreover, perceptrons and vector quantization methods and so forth derive from completely separate principals that can then be cast into more fundamental problems in informational geometry and physics.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is then perhaps the hard problem on the horizon that I disclaim as having had significant progress in the past twenty years of so. That is not to say that I am not an enthusiastic student of the topic and field, just that I don’t see risk levels from intelligent AIs rising to what we should consider a real threat. This topic of how to grade threats deserves deeper treatment, of course, and is at the heart of everything from so-called “nanny state” interventions in food and product safety to how to construct policy around global warming. Luckily–and unlike both those topics–killer AIs don’t threaten us at all quite yet.

But what about simply characterizing what AGIs might look like and how we can even tell when they arise? Mildly interesting is Simon Legg and Joel Veness’ idea of an Artificial Intelligence Quotient or AIQ that they expand on in An Approximation of the Universal Intelligence Measure. This measure is derived from, voilà, exactly the kind of algorithmic information theory (AIT) and compression arguments that I lead with in the slide deck. Is this the only theory around for AGI? Pretty much, but different perspectives tend to lead to slightly different focuses.… Read the rest

A Critique of Pure Randomness

March 28, 2015March 29, 2015 Mark DavisLeave a comment

The notion of randomness brings about many interesting considerations. For statisticians, randomness is a series of events with chances that are governed by a distribution function. In everyday parlance, equally-likely means random, while an even more common semantics is based on both how unlikely and how unmotivated an event might be (“That was soooo random!”) In physics, there are only certain physical phenomena that can be said to be truly random, including the probability of a given nucleus decomposing into other nuclei via fission. The exact position of a quantum thingy is equally random when it’s momentum is nailed down, and vice-versa. Vacuums have a certain chance of spontaneously creating matter, too, and that chance appears to be perfectly random. In algorithmic information theory, a random sequence of bits is a sequence that can’t be represented by a smaller descriptive algorithm–it is incompressible. Strangely enough, we simulate random number generators using a compact algorithm that has a complicated series of steps that lead to an almost impossible to follow trajectory through a deterministic space of possibilities; it’s acceptible to be random enough that the algorithm parameters can’t be easily reverse engineered and the next “random” number guessed.

One area where we often speak of randomness is in biological evolution. Random mutations lead to change and to deleterious effects like dead-end evolutionary experiments. Or so we hypothesized. The exact mechanism of the transmission of inheritance and of mutations were unknown to Darwin, but soon in the evolutionary synthesis notions like random genetic drift and the role of ionizing radiation and other external factors became exciting candidates for the explanation of the variation required for evolution to function. Amusingly, arguing largely from a stance that might be called a fallacy of incredulity, creationists have often seized on a logical disconnect they perceive between the appearance of purpose both in our lives and in the mechanisms of biological existence, and the assumption of underlying randomness and non-directedness as evidence for the paucity of arguments from randomness.… Read the rest

On Killing Kids

November 27, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Mark S. Smith’s The Early History of God is a remarkable piece of scholarship. I was recently asked what I read for fun and had to admit that I have been on a trajectory towards reading books that have, on average, more footnotes than text. J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans kindly moves the notes to the end of the volume. Smith’s Chapter 5, Yahwistic Cult Practices, and particularly Section 3, The mlk sacrifice, are illuminating on the widespread belief that killing children could propitiate the gods. This practice was likely widespread among the Western Semitic peoples, including the Israelites and Canaanites (Smith’s preference for Western Semitic is to lump the two together ca. 1200 BC because they appear to have been culturally the same, possibly made distinct after the compilation of OT following the Exile).

I recently argued with some young street preachers about violence and horror in Yahweh’s name and by His command while waiting outside a rock shop in Old Sacramento. Human sacrifice came up, too, with the apologetics being that, despite the fact that everyone was bad back then, the Chosen People did not perform human sacrifice and therefore they were marginally better than the other people around them. They passed quickly on the topic of slavery, which was wise for rhetorical purposes, because slavery was widespread and acceptable. I didn’t remember the particulars of the examples of human sacrifice in OT, but recalled them broadly to which they responded that there were translation and interpretation errors with “burnt offering” and “fire offerings of first borns” that, of course, immediately contradicted their assertion of acceptance and perfection of the scriptures.

More interesting, though, is the question of why might human sacrifice be so pervasive, whether among Yahwists and Carthiginians or Aztecs?… Read the rest

Just So Disruptive

July 10, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

The “just so” story is a pejorative for cultural or physical traits that drive an evolutionary explanation. Things are “just so” when the explanation is unfalsifiable and theoretically fitted to current observations. Less controversial and pejorative is the essential character of evolutionary process where there is no doubt that genetic alternatives will mostly fail. The ones that survive this crucible are disruptive to the status quo, sure, but these disruptions tend to be geographically or sexually isolated from the main population anyway, so they are more an expansion than a disruption; little competition is tooth-and-claw, mostly species survive versus the environment, not one another.

Jill Lapore of Harvard subjects business theory to a similar crucible in the New Yorker, questioning Clayton Christensen’s classic argument in The Innovator’s Dilemma that businesses are unwilling to adapt to changing markets because they are making rational business decisions to maximize profits. After analyzing core business cases from Christensen’s books, Lapore concludes that the argument holds little water and that its predictions are both poor and inapplicable to other areas like journalism and college education.

Central to her critique is her analysis of the “just so” nature of disruptive innovation:

Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges.

… Read the rest

Trees of Lives

June 23, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

With a brief respite between vacationing in the canyons of Colorado and leaving tomorrow for Australia, I’ve open-sourced an eight-year-old computer program for converting one’s DNA sequences into an artistic rendering. The input to the program are the allelic patterns from standard DNA analysis services that use the Short Tandem Repeat Polymorphisms from forensic analysis, as well as poetry reflecting one’s ethnic heritage. The output is generative art: a tree that overlays the sequences with the poetry and a background rendered from the sequences.

Generative art is perhaps one of the greatest aesthetic achievements of the late 20th Century. Generative art is, fundamentally, a recognition that the core of our humanity can be understood and converted into meaningful aesthetic products–it is the parallel of effective procedures in cognitive science, and developed in lock-step with the constructive efforts to reproduce and simulate human cognition.

To use Tree of Lives, install Java 1.8, unzip the package, and edit the supplied markconfig.txt to enter in your STRs and the allele variant numbers in sequence per line 15 of the configuration file. Lines 16+ are for lines of poetry that will be rendered on the limbs of the tree. Other configuration parameters can be discerned by examining com.treeoflives.CTreeConfig.java, and involve colors, paths, etc. Execute the program with:

java -cp treeoflives.jar:iText-4.2.0-com.itextpdf.jar com.treeoflives.CAlleleRenderer markconfig.txt

… Read the rest

Humbly Evolving in a Non-Simulated Universe

February 18, 2014February 18, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

The New York Times seems to be catching up to me, first with an interview of Alvin Plantinga by Gary Cutting in The Stone on February 9th, and then with notes on Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis in the Sunday Times.

I didn’t see anything new in the Plantinga interview, but reviewed my previous argument that adaptive fidelity combined with adaptive plasticity must raise the probability of rationality at a rate that is much greater than the contributions that would be “deceptive” or even mildly cognitively or perceptually biased. Worth reading is Branden Fitelsen and Eliot Sober’s very detailed analysis of Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), here. Most interesting are the beginning paragraphs of Section 3, which I reproduce here because it is a critical addition that should surprise no one but often does:

Although Plantinga’s arguments don’t work, he has raised a question that needs to be answered by people who believe evolutionary theory and who also believe that this theory says that our cognitive abilities are in various ways imperfect. Evolutionary theory does say that a device that is reliable in the environment in which it evolved may be highly unreliable when used in a novel environment. It is perfectly possible that our mental machinery should work well on simple perceptual tasks, but be much less reliable when applied to theoretical matters. We hasten to add that this is possible, not inevitable. It may be that the cognitive procedures that work well in one domain also work well in another; Modus Ponens may be useful for avoiding tigers and for doing quantum physics.

Anyhow, if evolutionary theory does say that our ability to theorize about the world is apt to be rather unreliable, how are evolutionists to apply this point to their own theoretical beliefs, including their belief in evolution?

… Read the rest

Parsimonious Portmanteaus

January 27, 2014 Mark DavisLeave a comment

Meaning is a problem. We think we might know what something means but we keep being surprised by the facts, research, and logical difficulties that surround the notion of meaning. Putnam’s Representation and Reality runs through a few different ways of thinking about meaning, though without reaching any definitive conclusions beyond what meaning can’t be.

Children are a useful touchstone concerning meaning because we know that they acquire linguistic skills and consequently at least an operational understanding of meaning. And how they do so is rather interesting: first, presume that whole objects are the first topics for naming; next, assume that syntactic differences lead to semantic differences (“the dog” refers to the class of dogs while “Fido” refers to the instance); finally, prefer that linguistic differences point to semantic differences. Paul Bloom slices and dices the research in his Précis of How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, calling into question many core assumptions about the learning of words and meaning.

These preferences become useful if we want to try to formulate an algorithm that assigns meaning to objects or groups of objects. Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, for example, assumes that words are signals from underlying probabilistic topic models and then derives those models by estimating all of the probabilities from the available signals. The outcome lacks labels, however: the “meaning” is expressed purely in terms of co-occurrences of terms. Reconciling an approach like PLSA with the observations about children’s meaning acquisition presents some difficulties. The process seems too slow, for example, which was always a complaint about connectionist architectures of artificial neural networks as well. As Bloom points out, kids don’t make many errors concerning meaning and when they do, they rapidly compensate.… Read the rest