[FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity

[glen]

I was arguing with that same friend yesterday at the pub. I was trying to describe how some of us have more cognitive power than others (he's one of them). Part of it is "free" power, freed up by his upper middle class white good diet privilege. But if we allow that some of it might be genetic, then that's a starting point for deciding when novelty matters to the ephemerides of two otherwise analogical individuals (or projects if projects have an analog to genetics). Such things are well-described in twin studies. One twin suffers some PTSD the other doesn't and ... boom ... their otherwise lack of uniqueness blossoms into uniqueness.

His objection was that even identical twins are not identical. They were already unique ... like the Pauli Exclusion Principle or somesuch nonsense. Even though it's a bit of a ridiculous argument, I could apply it to your sense of avoiding non-novel attractors. No 2 attractors will be identical. And no 1 attractor will be unique. So those are moot issues. Distinctions without differences, maybe. Woit's rants are legendary. But some of us find happiness in wasteful sophistry.

What matters is *how* things are the same and how they differ. Their qualities and values (nearly) orthogonal to novelty.


On 3/21/24 11:29, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> If GPT systems capture some sense of "usual" context based on trillions of internet tokens, and that corpus is regarded approximately "global context", then it seems not so objectionable to call "unusual", new training items that contribute to fine-tuning loss.
> 
> It seems reasonable to worry that ubiquitous GPT systems reduce social entropy by encouraging copying instead of new thinking, but it could also have the reverse effect:  If I am immediately aware that an idea is not novel, I may avoid attractors that agents that wrongly believe they are "independent" will gravitate toward.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 7:49 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity
> 
> A friend of mine constantly reminds me that language is dynamic, not fixed in stone from a billion years ago. So, if you find others consistently using a term in a way that you think is wrong, then *you* are wrong in what you think. The older I get, the more difficult it gets.
> 
> But specifically, the technical sense of "unique" is vanishingly rare ... so rare as to be merely an ideal, unverifiable, nowhere, non-existent. So if the "unique" is imaginary, unreal, and doesn't exist, why not co-opt it for a more useful, banal purpose? Nothing is actually unique. So we'll use the token "unique" to mean (relatively) rare.
> 
> And "unusual" is even worse. Both tokens require one to describe the context, domain, or universe within which the discussion is happening. If you don't define your context, then the "definitions" you provide for the components of that context are not even wrong; they're nonsense. "Unusual" implies a usual. And a usual implies a perspective ... a mechanism of action for your sampling technique. So "unusual" presents even more of a linguistic *burden* than "unique".
> 
> On 3/20/24 13:14, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> What's wrong with "unusual"?  It avoids the problem.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 20, 2024, 1:55 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>      I'm hung up on the usage of qualified  "uniqueness"  as well, but in perhaps the opposite sense.
>>>
>>>      I agree with the premise that "unique" in it's purest, simplest form does seem to be inherently singular.  On the other hand, this mal(icious) propensity of qualifying uniqueness (uniqueish?) is so common, that I have to believe there is a concept there which people who use those terms are reaching for.  They are not wrong to reach for it, just annoying in the label they choose?
>>>
>>>      I had a round with GPT4 trying to discuss this, not because I think LLMs are the authority on *anything* but rather because the discussions I have with them can help me brainstorm my way around ideas with the LLM nominally representing "what a lot of people say" (if not think).   Careful prompting seems to be able to help narrow down  *all people* (in the training data) to different/interesting subsets of *lots of people* with certain characteristics.
>>>
>>>      GPT4 definitely wanted to allow for a wide range of gradated, speciated, spectral uses of "unique" and gave me plenty of commonly used examples which validates my position that "for something so obviously/technically incorrect, it sure is used a lot!"
>>>
>>>      We discussed uniqueness in the context of evolutionary biology and cladistics and homology and homoplasy.  We discussed it in terms of cluster analysis.  We discussed the distinction between objective and subjective, absolute and relative.
>>>
>>>      The closest thing to a conclusion I have at the moment is:
>>>
>>>       1. Most people do and will continue to treat "uniqueness" as a relative/spectral/subjective qualifier.
>>>       2. Many people like Frank and myself (half the time) will have an allergic reaction to this usage.
>>>       3. The common (mis)usage might be attributable to conflating "unique" with "distinct"?

-- 
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ