3 ms·

It is a little tough to slog through now, though I'm sure it would've been pretty enthralling in '67. I liked this from the conclusion quite a bit, though: A c

It is a little tough to slog through now, though I'm sure it would've been pretty enthralling in '67. I liked this from the conclusion quite a bit, though: A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it. I also liked what seems to be a pretty central point of the article (which I admittedly only skimmed): just because some medium (e.g. computer programming) has very precise requirements (e.g. in terms of syntax) for the forms expressions can take on, does not imply that the content of what can be expressed is similarly constrained.

theoh 11y ago
Tacit knowledge is a useful concept not mentioned by Minsky. I don't think programming is really a good way of expressing a "poorly understood and sloppily formulated idea" of this type: a third party's visual experience and verbal description of a skillful but complex human action such as shearing a sheep. The old philosophical distinction between the discursive and the intuitive is key here. Can you systematically write a program which exactly replicates your intuitive responses to some set of possible situations? I'd say it's difficult or impossible, because of the complexity of the brain and our lack of perfect introspection into what goes on in our minds. Not sure Minsky really has a lot to offer a contemporary AGI readership. His work feels more than a little mechanistic.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Maybe you're familiar with Dreyfus's critique of "cognitivism" in AI, as explained in his book What Computers Can't Do. His recent article "Why Heideggerian AI Failed" is also relevant... and his book on Heidegger, Being-in-the-World, which has some philosophical background for his anti-cognitivism.
  - theoh 11y ago
    I wasn't familiar with Dreyfus' work. Thanks. Recently I noticed a parallel between Antoine de Saint-Exupery's comments on technology and Heidegger's notions of presentness-at-hand and readiness-to-hand. It's in his essay "The Tool", which also includes the famous line about perfection being achieved when there is "nothing left to take away." Saint-Exupery has a profoundly romantic attitude to technology: I'm not sure about the order of publication but it is a fact that Heidegger applauded Saint-Exupery's Petit Prince, and apparently Sartre felt the two men's philosophies were related. http://www.wesjones.com/wind%20sand%20stars/wind%20sand%20stars%20-%2003%20-%20the%20tool.xml http://www.wesjones.com/wind%20sand%20stars/wind%20sand%20st... (Apparently the controls of the Lockheed Lightning, the aircraft type in which Saint-Exupery died, were too complex for his taste, turning the pilot into an "accountant" rather than receding from conscious attention, as the primitive instruments of earlier, simpler planes had. Saint-Exupery clearly saw the purpose of "the tool" as facilitating his experience (and responding to his personal "authority") as a free spirit of the air, without much thought given to the constraining military command hierarchy or the pilot's job of killing.)
    - mbrock 11y ago
      Thanks for the link! I didn't know that was the context for that famous quote, and it was a nice read. It seems that we so seldom get to experience that kind of perfection in software, which is always tangled up and half nonsense. It really is a wonder that anything works. To me, the ideal of "abstraction" in software has to do with this search for unity, on a conceptual level. Unix with its files and processes seems to come pretty close to being this kind of dependable, understandable, cohesive abstraction... which is why I love shell scripting so much. Sure, it's not the most beautiful language, but the basic building blocks make sense in some almost timeless way. Digressing further, I'd really love to work on a cleaner shell language. Like, Perl is an exploration of what happens if you write your scripts in a souped-up awk, but what I really want is a bash for us new kids, with good support for nested data structures, functional patterns, some more clever ways of representing background processes and FIFOs, modules and packages, etc etc. I forget how I got from Heidegger to FIFOs, but yeah, a ready-to-hand shell that works well with common tasks like serving HTTP and building JSON and stuff. I love the Unix philosophy but people aren't really learning shell these days... something like it seems like a way forward... composing simple programs... ah!
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I disagree. The content and expression become constrained because a description of the problem domain has to be forced to fit inside them. Usually you can only make this happen with a drastically over-simplified model. One of the tragedies of AI and CS is that it's easy to delude yourself that you've understood something because you can make a toy model of it - when in fact non-toy models that are comprehensive enough to be useful to a domain expert tend to be sprawling, irregular, complicated, and not very coherent. The problem leads to a kind of paradox: Most human behaviour can't be simulated with an algorithm that's simple enough for humans to understand. Violins turn out to be a good example. It's trivially easy to sample a violin sound. But sampling is nowhere close to being able to model the musical data bandwidth in a performance by a real string quartet.
- skybrian 11y ago
  This isn't limited to CS. It's true of all science. And yet, building models is better than not building them. "All models are wrong but some are useful" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

theoh 11y ago

Tacit knowledge is a useful concept not mentioned by Minsky. I don't think programming is really a good way of expressing a "poorly understood and sloppily formulated idea" of this type: a third party's visual experience and verbal description of a skillful but complex human action such as shearing a sheep. The old philosophical distinction between the discursive and the intuitive is key here. Can you systematically write a program which exactly replicates your intuitive responses to some set of possible situations? I'd say it's difficult or impossible, because of the complexity of the brain and our lack of perfect introspection into what goes on in our minds. Not sure Minsky really has a lot to offer a contemporary AGI readership. His work feels more than a little mechanistic.

mbrock 11y ago
Maybe you're familiar with Dreyfus's critique of "cognitivism" in AI, as explained in his book What Computers Can't Do. His recent article "Why Heideggerian AI Failed" is also relevant... and his book on Heidegger, Being-in-the-World, which has some philosophical background for his anti-cognitivism.
- theoh 11y ago
  I wasn't familiar with Dreyfus' work. Thanks. Recently I noticed a parallel between Antoine de Saint-Exupery's comments on technology and Heidegger's notions of presentness-at-hand and readiness-to-hand. It's in his essay "The Tool", which also includes the famous line about perfection being achieved when there is "nothing left to take away." Saint-Exupery has a profoundly romantic attitude to technology: I'm not sure about the order of publication but it is a fact that Heidegger applauded Saint-Exupery's Petit Prince, and apparently Sartre felt the two men's philosophies were related. http://www.wesjones.com/wind%20sand%20stars/wind%20sand%20stars%20-%2003%20-%20the%20tool.xml http://www.wesjones.com/wind%20sand%20stars/wind%20sand%20st... (Apparently the controls of the Lockheed Lightning, the aircraft type in which Saint-Exupery died, were too complex for his taste, turning the pilot into an "accountant" rather than receding from conscious attention, as the primitive instruments of earlier, simpler planes had. Saint-Exupery clearly saw the purpose of "the tool" as facilitating his experience (and responding to his personal "authority") as a free spirit of the air, without much thought given to the constraining military command hierarchy or the pilot's job of killing.)
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Thanks for the link! I didn't know that was the context for that famous quote, and it was a nice read. It seems that we so seldom get to experience that kind of perfection in software, which is always tangled up and half nonsense. It really is a wonder that anything works. To me, the ideal of "abstraction" in software has to do with this search for unity, on a conceptual level. Unix with its files and processes seems to come pretty close to being this kind of dependable, understandable, cohesive abstraction... which is why I love shell scripting so much. Sure, it's not the most beautiful language, but the basic building blocks make sense in some almost timeless way. Digressing further, I'd really love to work on a cleaner shell language. Like, Perl is an exploration of what happens if you write your scripts in a souped-up awk, but what I really want is a bash for us new kids, with good support for nested data structures, functional patterns, some more clever ways of representing background processes and FIFOs, modules and packages, etc etc. I forget how I got from Heidegger to FIFOs, but yeah, a ready-to-hand shell that works well with common tasks like serving HTTP and building JSON and stuff. I love the Unix philosophy but people aren't really learning shell these days... something like it seems like a way forward... composing simple programs... ah!

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

I disagree. The content and expression become constrained because a description of the problem domain has to be forced to fit inside them. Usually you can only make this happen with a drastically over-simplified model. One of the tragedies of AI and CS is that it's easy to delude yourself that you've understood something because you can make a toy model of it - when in fact non-toy models that are comprehensive enough to be useful to a domain expert tend to be sprawling, irregular, complicated, and not very coherent. The problem leads to a kind of paradox: Most human behaviour can't be simulated with an algorithm that's simple enough for humans to understand. Violins turn out to be a good example. It's trivially easy to sample a violin sound. But sampling is nowhere close to being able to model the musical data bandwidth in a performance by a real string quartet.

skybrian 11y ago
This isn't limited to CS. It's true of all science. And yet, building models is better than not building them. "All models are wrong but some are useful" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong