[FRIAM] Conditional Association and the "natural order"

[Roger Critchlow]

There's an article in the NYTimes today about the issues adaptive fashion
companies have with Facebook automated ad rejections.  The model in the
wheelchair was showing a lot of skin as she demonstrated how the side
closure underpants worked, but it shouldn't take three weeks of emailing
back and forth to get the ad approved, and not the same thing everytime a
new ad was submitted.

It made me think that the primary bias in AI systems is that there is _an_
answer that is correct, and with sufficient input data and compute
resources, the loss minimization will converge to that correct answer.

That in turn reminds me of these discussions about the Truth versus the
many truths under different contingencies, in different contexts, from
different points of view, according to one or another person's lived
experience, and so on.

I'm thinking to file these issues all under #AttentionEcologyDisorder.
When the varieties of reality threaten to exceed one's capacity, one
simplifies by picking one variety and discarding the rest.  And then making
an argument for why the variety one picked deserves to be privileged over
all the others.

This also reminds me of Marcus' accusation that I find FRIAM boring.  Au
contraire, it's much too interesting and it takes too much time to deal
with it.

-- rec --

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 1:34 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

> I can't find the clip now, but I'm reminded of scene in a drama (Queen of
> the South?) where a journalist is confronted by a bad guy who proposes
> "Let's find out whether the pen is indeed mightier than the sword."  He
> stabs the journalist in the stomach and he dies.   That kind of sets my
> threshold of tolerance for open-ended bullshit about the impossibility of
> truth.   Because that guy was dead.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2021 9:28 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Conditional Association and the "natural order"
>
> Yes, I agree. But as with all aphorisms, yours is also vague. I like
> EricS' allusion to reductionism in "the whole meaning of something should
> be carried in the form of its expressions". This approximates the
> "monistic" sense of Truth often targeted by rationalists, idealists, and
> (naive) realists. But you've often argued for a subjective science (for
> lack of a better term) ... and I think that's worth calling "truth", too.
> Here, Emerson's "foolish" qualifier is important. Is there a stability of
> the mind? A repeatability/reproducibility to particular methods? Can you,
> by psychedelic drugs, meditation, exercise, etc. *move* that stable locus
> ... from, say, debilitating neuroticism to calm enlightenment? Etc.
>
> And if that's the case, then we can call that stable locus Truth. And then
> truth is plural. Or we can call that locus something like a point in a
> space (neuroticism to enlightenment) and we could call the *space* "truth".
> And if that's the case, then we can talk about intra-personal truth versus
> inter-personal truth. To what extent does one's truth-space change as they
> age? To what extent do identical twins' truth-spaces intersect? Etc.
>
> But of course we could simply jump to where you already are and say that
> the concept of truth is so vague and ambiguous as to be useless. We have
> plenty of other domain-specific words for concepts like "intrapersonal
> truth-space", that it's a bit silly to use them.
>
> On 2/11/21 7:12 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > Emerson: " A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
> >
> > Davew: "all consistencies are foolish. TRUTH is consistency. TRUTH is
> the hobgoblin of small minds."
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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