[FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Mar 22 16:50:46 EDT 2024
"Unique in a qualified manner"?
FWIW, I prompted (Indra's Net edition) and sent my DALL-E images before
I read Dave's entry into this fray...
I have beat GPT and Gemini around the head and shoulders a bit at times
to try to get it to expose it's own East/West (or hopefully more subtle
and gradated) distribution of knowledge/training/??? but mostly I'd say
it reports (given I have the same intrinsic myopias) on "Western" views
of "Eastern" thought.
I do wonder if DaveW or anyone else here with more interest or
qualifications than I has explored the bi(multi?)modal distribution in
the LLMs?
I know EricS at the very least has some significant grounding in
linguistics (and semiotics?) and perhaps perspective on the socio
cultural implications of language constructions, etc. which might be
evidenced in LLMs as-trained by our tech-billionaire (wannabes?)
On 3/22/24 12:07 PM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Are you saying it's unique to a degree? ;-)
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________
> CEO Founder, Simtable.com
> stephen.guerin at simtable.com
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> Harvard Visualization Research and Teaching Lab
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> On Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 9:31 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
> wrote:
>
> this is 'unique' only if you exclude Vedic, Buddhist, Taoist, ...
> thought.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2024, at 9:54 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
>> Prompt:
>> Express a unique concept. Make it as profound as possible
>>
>> https://chat.openai.com/share/649bd4ca-f856-451e-83a2-01fc2cfe47fb
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 6:50 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I guess the question returns to one's criteria for assuming
>> decoupling between the very [small|fast] and the very
>> [large|slow]. Or in this case, the inner vs. the outer:
>>
>> Susie Alegre on how digital technology undermines free thought
>> https://freethinker.co.uk/2024/03/interview-susie-alegre/
>>
>> It would be reasonable for Frank to argue that we can
>> generate the space of possible context definitions,
>> inductively, from the set of token definitions, much like an
>> LLM might. Ideally, you could then measure the expressiveness
>> of those inferred contexts/languages and choose the largest
>> (most complete; by induction, each context/language *should*
>> be self-consistent so we shouldn't have to worry about that).
>>
>> And if that's how things work (I'm not saying it is), then
>> those "attractors" with the finest granularity (very slow to
>> emerge, very resistant to dissolution) would be the least
>> novel. Novelty (uniqueness) might then be defined in terms of
>> fragility, short half-life, missable opportunity. But that
>> would also argue that novelty is either less *real* or that
>> the universe/context/language is very *open* and the path
>> from fragile to robust obtains like some kind of Hebbian
>> reinforcement, use it or lose it, win the hearts and minds or
>> dissipate to nothing.
>>
>> I.e. there is no such thing as free thought. Thought can't
>> decouple from social manipulation.
>>
>> On 3/21/24 13:38, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> > In the LLM example, completions from some starting state or
>> none, have specific probabilities. An incomplete yet-unseen
>> (unique) utterance would be completed based on prior
>> probabilities of individual tokens.
>> >
>> > I agree that raw materialist uniqueness won't necessarily
>> or often override constraints of a situation. For example,
>> if an employer instructs an employee how to put a small,
>> lightweight product in a box, label it, and send it to a
>> customer by UPS, the individual differences metabolism of the
>> employees aren't likely to matter much when shipping more
>> small, lightweight objects to other customers. It could be
>> the case for a professor and student too. The attractors
>> come from the instruction or the curriculum. One choice
>> constrains the next.
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> > Sent: Thursday, March 21, 2024 11:50 AM
>> > To: friam at redfish.com
>> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the inequities of uniquity
>> >
>> > 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
>>
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