Terminator Responses

Via Instapundit, H+ magazine has a bunch of interesting responses to the latest Terminator movie.

I'd never heard of Josh Halls before and am now very interested in his book Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine.

Chris Frith on the Brain Science Podcast

I enjoyed another episode of the Brain Science Podcast this morning.

I loved this line in particular (emphasis mine):

Perception is not a passive process because, as I said, the only way
you can find out about the world is through the errors in your model. And the
very best way to do that is to actually act upon the world, so that you say, given
my model this is what ought to happen if I do this, and then you can find out
whether it does happen and adjust your model accordingly

And if you, like me, are getting confused by all the different things you hear about dopamine then this exchange quite helpful:

GC: And in the imaging work we see, is that one of the ways we know the
dopamine systems are involved here? That when we correctly predict what’s
going to happen, that gives us a good positive dopamine signal?
CF: Oh, no, no. Quite the other way around. The dopamine signal is a
prediction error. So, basically if something unexpectedly nice happens, then you
get a shot of dopamine; and so, the dopamine neurons become more active. And
if you expect something nice to happen and it does happen, there’s no response;
because there’s not an error. If we expect it to happen and it doesn’t happen,
then the activity goes down. So, that’s a negative error.

Chris Frith's Books is Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World.

Another interesting point that came up in the podcast is that many imaging studies are validating results that psychologists "knew" from more introspective experimentation, and making old news into news again.

Semantic Web

Via ReadWriteWeb I find a good three-part read on the semantic web making the rounds from Semantics Incorporated:

Part 1: Tying Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Linked Data Together --- Part 1/3: Web 3.0 Will Not Solve Information Overload
Part 2: Tying Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Linked Data Together - Part 2/3: Linked Data is a Medium
Part 3:Tying Web 3.0, the Semantic Web and Linked Data Together - Part 3/3: Structuring Chaos


My favorite paragraph occurs in the third installment:

What’s the endgame for the Semantic Web? I’d propose that it is a web where any information you input is immediately cleaned up, pre-structured and pre-connected to the rest. There is a variant of this vision that would see any information input remaining in its raw format until one needs it, at which point it is structured and connected on the fly, using the perspective of the person who queried to shape the structure and the connections. The problem with this vision obviously is that unless you have scouting agents that can query the whole web instantaneously for every query, and structure and link data on the fly -- and I think we can safely say that’s not going to happen anytime soon -- you need some pre-defined structure and connections so you know what the information is about and where it is. We need to meet those agents half-way.

Neologism Watch: Group Formation

A key idea in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is that the cost of group formation has fallen precipitously, so we have an explosion of new groups.

Sooner or later a group identity starts to define itself in opposition to other groups. So if there are more and and more groups, and each individual identifies with more and more groups, sooner or later more and more people are going to be in groups that are mutually opposed to each other.

And we're going to need a word for this.

I've been waiting to post this until I had a good example. Well this morning I was reading Life of Pi and found what I've been looking for. As a teenager, the main character Pi is fascinated by religions and spends a lot of time in a church, a temple, and a mosque. The leaders of each house of worship think he is devoted to their religion, and his parents know nothing about any of it. Then one day the boy, his parents, and all three religious leaders run in to each other on the street and it all comes out in the open. All manner of inter-group animosity comes rushing to the surface. The poor boy wants to focus on the unity of all the religions but not one of the groups is so happy with him anymore.

'Cognitive dissonance' is a phrase that would describe the individual, internal nature of this confusion but what's a good word for the group dynamic?

Practice, Practice, Practice

There's an interesting discussion of "practice" among O'Reilly authors on the O'Reilly Radar.


My favorite quote from the whole long discussion is by Brett McLaughlin:

Practice must, over time, simulate deeper understanding. Good practice, over time, connects ideas. Bad practice, over time, only creates muscle/mind memory. Practice structured correctly will eventually create a fluidity with the mechanical components of [insert discipline here], and free the mind up to consider the bigger picture.

More good follow-up on the topic from Simon St. Laurent including:

Frankly, I think that "mastery" is usually the wrong goal, a strange habit in our culture of setting ourselves up to fail. Mastery happens, but we need to remember - and value - the intermediate steps. Most of us will never be the Outliers Malcolm Gladwell describes as "The Story of Success".

The opposite of the "success" he describes, though, isn't failure. It includes a wide range of competencies, of people getting things done, without necessarily hitting "the big-time". You don't have to become an outlier to be a success - and you shouldn't let that get in the way of practicing.

Personally I find "practice" vaguely humiliating. It exposes the gap between understanding a concept and being able to fully express it. I'll read something and think I understand it perfectly only to fail the first practical test of applying a concept. But that doesn't mean there is no part of me that understands the concept, just that there are more parts that do not. Instead of thinking rather simply that "I know something" it is more appropriate to think of the percentage of my being that has now embodied a concept. After a lot of practice over the last month, "I know how to play the first Goldberg Variation". But do I? I know the notes, I've got good fingerings worked out, and if I start at a reasonably tempo and am relaxed I can probably get through it. But if I'm a little nervous or distracted, I'll screw it up bigtime. Furthermore, if I pose myself the challenge to play the left hand and improvise with the right hand I'll crash and burn. So maybe I should say that after tons of practice I've embodied about a 20% knowledge of the first Goldberg Variation. Lots more practice to go.

Megan McCardle on Villains

Megan McCardle is still one of my very favorite bloggers. Here are a few choice quotes from her today on the search for the villains behind the financial crisis:

Nature is not a novelist. Reality does not come packaged in narrative form, and rarely gifts us with either true heroes, or true villains.

And later:

A failure this massive can only occur if massive numbers of people had their hands in it somehow. If you want to find a villain, there's probably one handy at the nearest reflective surface.

Long Now Seminar: Peter Diamandis

The Long Now Seminar's Podcasts are almost all worth a long careful listen. The latest I heard (MP3) features the founder of the X-Prize Foundation talking about the amazing art of using prizes as leverage to encourage audacious innovations. Here is a thorough written summary.

Towards the end there is a long list of potential future prizes and the audience is asked to pick their three favorites.

It's an interesting list. I'm going to pick some relatively mundane, though not unambitious ones:

* Develop a teaching system that allows an increase learning rates by an order of magnitude.
* Create an AI that can engage and educate children to their highest potential
* Eradicate poverty for > 90% of the human population

The first two are extremely non-mutually-exclusive, but I personally am more interested in pursuing the "teaching system" as it is agnostic about how it is to be implemented. Maybe it's an AI, maybe AAI (Artificial Artifical Intelligence), maybe something else entirely.

With 2 young children, I have a low cost experimental platform for testing. Time to get to work.

More on the X-Prize Foundation's thoughts on education here.

Doctors Without Borders in Myanmar

Doctors Without Borders is on the ground in Myanmar. They can be supported here.