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<p>Oh my! I heard nothing of it until now<br>
</p>
<p>We are heading back to our own Tornado Alley... flying into
Denver... (far western edge) and then Mary to Wisconsin which is
on the northeastern edge. I checked weather and it was suggested
that there might have been 6" (15cm) hail in Minnesota? I
see/hear Santa Fe has been under early monsoons and that is
calming the otherwise out-of-control Pecos fire(s) but that
California is starting to see more lightning caused fires (so far
a modest reprieve this year).</p>
<p>Zelazny/SciFi fans might check out the 1960s? "Damnation Alley"
or skip forward to Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"...<br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/28/22 7:18 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:202206280619.25S6JBpG042024@ame3.swcp.com">
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<div dir="auto">There was a Tornado in the Netherlands yesterday.
Hope you are OK? Very unusual for Europe. The weather is too
warm for this season. We have July temperatures in June.
Probably another sign of climate change</div>
<div dir="auto"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338">https://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338</a></div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto">-J.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div dir="auto" style="font-size:100%;color:#000000" align="left">
<div>-------- Original message --------</div>
<div>From: Steve Smith <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"><sasmyth@swcp.com></a> </div>
<div>Date: 6/26/22 09:16 (GMT+01:00) </div>
<div>To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com"><friam@redfish.com></a> </div>
<div>Subject: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin </div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<p>This is what made it through my semi-permeable filter-bubble
membrane first thing this morning (CET):<br>
</p>
<p>
<a
href="https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" moz-do-not-send="true">https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099</a></p>
<p>which became grist for the mill we have been grinding with here
of late. It highlights interesting things like how flawed (but
useful?) the Turing Test is. The TT represents precisely "the
glitch". I think this idea points in the general direction of
conscious empathy... if we recognize language fluency *as*
mental fluency, then it is more obvious that we would grant
others who present language fluency as being similar to
ourselves, possibly assuming that "other" is closer to "not
other" simply because of the familiar language that flows out of
us. <br>
</p>
<p>In my (limited) EU travels this season I have heard only a
half-dozen languages with half as many accents/dialects each...
In english-speaking ireland, a little gaelic slipped out here
and there but the accent referenced it with every lilt. This
was not unfamiliar to my ear, so I mostly heard it as "same",
but in Wales, the Welsh was not nearly (at all?) familiar and
the romanisation/anglification of the written Welsh was
overwhelmingly unfamiliar. When I read a sign, I felt like I
was left with a mouthful of consonants and diacritics that I had
to spit out just to clear my vocal passage to start on the next
phrase.</p>
<p> It gave me more sympathy for my non Southwest colleagues
struggling with the various anglifications of the
hispanification of a dozen different native American languages
(starting in my neighborhood with Tewa/Tiwa/Towa and expanding
out withe Keres and Dine' and Zuni ...) The (nearly
conventional/normalized) rendering of most of these languages is
for me familiar enough that I don't struggle or wince, but after
(especially Welsh)... "I get it". When confronted with each
British accent (I couldn't identify or distinguish many if any)
it took a few hours at least to become habituated enough to not
be disturbed (intrigued or put off, depending) by the unfamiliar
sound patterns and often idiomatic constructions. <br>
</p>
<p> I thought i would be able to "hear" French as comfortably as I
did Italian 10 years ago, but it seems the "Romance" connections
between Spanish and Italian and the plethora of Latin
words/phrases in science made it much more familiar than
French. The tiny bit of French I think I am habituated to are a
few Americanized stock phrases and maybe a very little bit of
dialogue from movies... After a week of hearing almost nothing
*but* French it no longer felt outrageously "Other" even if I
couldn't hardly parse a thing out of a
run-together-spoken-phrase. Mary and I observed one another
trying to speak English to someone who did not speak much if any
and we realized that we were both prone to repeat the same
sentence with a word choice or two changed, but more
emphatically (and therefore more run-together) each time. Not
helpful, and perhaps what the few French who bothered to speak
to us once it was established that we had no language in common,
were doing themselves. It was hard to recognize even
word-breaks in the word-salad coming at us. The little German
we were exposed to had a *different* set of familiar words and
sounds and I think the English and German might have a much
stronger phonemic overlap, making it not sound quite as
foreign... though I was left wanting to clear my throat after
hearing much spoken german... and then here in the Netherlands
with *many* English-speaking-with-Dutch-Accent we are much more
comfortable... and much of the written Dutch is familiar even
when the pronunciation is a git foreign.<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a
href="https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In trying to (re)find the first article, I ran across this
article which was a bit more interesting to me. The point they
make about human cognitive bias against anyone who speaks
differently (acutely illuminated by the once-familiar term "deaf
and dumb" or "dumb-mute" for those who could not speak (due to
deafness, aphasia, or perhaps some trauma? The line from the
Rock Opera "Tommy"s Pinball Wizard comes to mind: "That deaf,
dumb and blind kid, could sure play a mean pin ballll!" <br>
</p>
<p>A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was: "Don't
mistake an accent for a personality"...<br>
</p>
<p>It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in
discussing AI, etc. A* really. Intelligence, Reasoning, Life,
Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum. And yet it is useful (I think)
to note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at
the same time. Each is a facet or reflection of the other.
The second article seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or
I think more aptly "emotional knowledge". My very first (and
practically only) published "artpiece" was a visual study on
the distinction between "knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI
climbing the steep part of the hill toward a pinnacle (or more
likely series of false summits) of "knowing about" without
possibly getting at all any closer (at all) to "knowing". <br>
</p>
<p>This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is
learning anything more than imitation/emulation?"</p>
<p>Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech,
I find that a great deal of my daily interaction with other
people is, in fact, with their bureaucratic roles. I am seeking
a transaction... knowledge, information, material goods, a
service. And given the level of the mutual (mis)understanding
I've been enduring for over a month now in those transactions,
It now feels like a luxury to expect a service person to
articulate their preferences and basis of their preferences in a
given baked good, bit of unfamiliar produce, or even (gawdess
forbid) Beer! But it has trained me to "listen for emotional
content" more than substance. If I ask for a "Blonde" or a
"Bruun" or a "Trippel" or a "Wit" and they rattle off something
about one or more of them, I will choose one based on the level
of excitement in their voice-eye over any imagined information
content their response implied. I am sometimes disappointed
but almost always surprised. The vocabulary of European Beers
overlaps (up to language) what I am familiar with amongst
American Craft beers but my exploration is wider (through
clumsiness if nothing else). My best strategy is simply to
(try to) ask for "whatever is brewed locally". Also a good
strategy for food it seems.<br>
</p>
<br>
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