[FRIAM] "analogies we live by"

Wed Jul 23 22:31:14 EDT 2025

As I understand it, Deep Research services are semantically triggered/expanded/pruned recursive search. The easy thing for such an agent to do, would be misrepresent the meaning of a paper and cite it even though it wasn’t relevant, and thus giving the reader the superficial impression there was background for a claim even though it wasn’t stated it was relevant. A vague abstract note in the bibtex would be a way to do that. Chalk it up to a misunderstanding. That would be both the lazy and not overtly fraudulent way to do it. In contrast, what I observed was that the LLM librarian sent back a bundle of grounded correct references and then it folded-in just one fictional one that happened to have no URL and spoke most directly to my research question. One fictional case out of fifty real references, about. It would be a simple matter for these vendors to post-process the references with the algorithm I mentioned, but perhaps (human) customers do want a very efficient BS machine? 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu>
Date: Wednesday, July 23, 2025 at 5:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "analogies we live by" 

So I just sat through a (long) day of presentations by various masters and earlier-level graduate students. There is such a striking range between the ones who are super-scrupulous to say things to which they are sure they can supply a meaning, and those who know you can get away with a lot of bullshit, and are happy to do so. Both practicing for their adult lives.

It makes me think the next generation will be our generation of Turing tests.

Everybody recognizes the common one, transacted in language about whatever. My take isn’t that it shows us the machines are intelligent; more immediately, it shows us how little exchange we rely on to ascribe reality to other people. A relatively thin glib discourse is enough to throw it all into confusion. Society has (to whatever degree) held together before now when we could get away with that because they all _were_ real. A little bit of solvent may denature all that. 

When I listen to the glib scientists, they sound _exactly_ like your description below of making up abstracts and papers that sound ideal. We have given those real-people Turing-test credit where (of course we all know; but who has time?) we shouldn’t. But now the stakes will rise again, and we can get slapped harder for being lazy.

TIme allocation is about to change, I think, 

Eric

> On Jul 24, 2025, at 6:39, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> Btw, one can ask Claude, after use of Deep Research mode, to build a bibtex bibliography and include URLs in the notes. Once that is assembled, ask Claude to check the URLs and their titles one at a time -- it will fetch each paper and do the check, and show you it is doing it. I have not seen Claude trip over itself this way, but I have caught ChatGPT be too motivated. I find it very interesting that it ChatGPT will craft plausible, but entirely fictional, papers that sound ideal. Reasonable sounding page number ranges, reasonable sounding journals, author names, even abstract info that is right on the mark. Something amazing is going on inside these LLMs. Just put aside for the moment it is terrifying.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Santafe
> Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2025 1:30 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "analogies we live by"
> 
> Thanks for this, Glen, and also the list from Claude a little later. The latter feels like designing a symposium: who would you bring, and around what narrative would you explain why you have them in the same place at the same time. Really quite an enjoyable activity in its early stages, before the slog hits of getting an actual meeting to work. Alison Gopnik is the only other name in that list I know besides Andy Clark, so at least one other isn’t hallucinated. 
> 
>> On Jul 22, 2025, at 0:23, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I wanted to reply to this days ago, in one tiny point, 
> 
>> • the brain as a sensory organ: current activity = streaming in 
>> through the senses • a resonance from current activity to a 
>> counterfactual active role
> 
> I would not have equated current activity with reception and response to sensory input streams. Doing so would be a reversion to the very old “passive” conception of perception, which I think has now long been corrected with the notion that perception is active, interrogative, and constructive. 
> 
> The latter, mainly, argues for something that both to me and in common-language usage seems obvious, but that I suspect strict behaviorists would want to deny (if only to see if they could, lawyer-like, defend such a position): that mental activity has its own autonomous streams, whether ongoing synthesis and following of “inner narrative” (the thing the meditators want to shut off somehow), or just maintaining whatever internal sense of integration and identity-centeredness a current state of mind has. That state is one of the other inputs, to the active engagement with sensory inputs that constitutes a lot of perception (e.g. building the visual field, or selecting voices to attend to in a conversation). 
> 
> Somebody, some years ago, gave me some explanatory book on Vedic categories of things related to cognition and consciousness, I think because he was annoyed at my constant complaining and hoped that this would quiet me down. So I dutifully read it. I was struck that it was sent to me, to show me that there was substance to this “truth that dispenses with all philosophy and concepts”, and I read it as a very elaborate philosophical system and conceptual typology.
> 
> Anyway, the reason I mention it (and I can’t remember the title of the book now, to link here), is that they say that system considers the internal mind-state or sequence to be just-another of the senses, peer to and parallel to the standard-five input streams (sight, sound, touch, taste/smell, proprioception). Since, for each of the standard senses, they want to go on with an object/subject/interaction decomposition into terms, they try to build out a comparable decomposition when arguing that internal thought-states are just a version of senses. (Matrices seem to be very important to system-building philosophers, across times and cultures.)
> 
> Don’t want to endorse or reject somebody’s particular description of some other group’s large philosophical system, for which I cannot speak from any knowledge of my own, but I did find that an interesting bit of evidence, that a system that had had to organically evolve and become accepted, had chosen this way to handle the autonomy of inner life from immediate-passive reaction to sense-delivered events.
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
> 
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