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What confuses me about your argument is that you are treating a child as an individual without context. The human brain, however, has reviewed bajillions of baj
by jessep 11y ago
What confuses me about your argument is that you are treating a child as an individual without context. The human brain, however, has reviewed bajillions of bajillabytes of training data over the course of its evolution.
The brain is already wired to have certain types of perceptions, so by the time a baby is born that child is just looking for that entity that fits the mommy definition, not trying to define a that it will have a caregiver and the optimal strategy is to bond to that caregiver.
Anyway, there are lots of examples where what you are saying holds, kids drawing general conclusions from limited data, but we also have to remember that the human brain is not a blank slate, it is already highly specialized at the time of birth.
- ajross 11y ago> The brain is already wired to have certain types of perceptions, so by the time a baby is born [...] A structure that evolved over time, amusingly, essentially by exactly the kind of "trying stuff at random" algorithm the grandparent is complaining about.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoI guess the current generation of neural nets also arose by trying stuff at random, then? I kind of thought the people who invented them, Geoff Hinton no less, would be prepared to admit they may have had to do a liiittle bit of thinking.
- ksdale 11y agoI believe his point isn't that no thinking was involved in creating neural nets, but that our own ability to think is the result of a long line of random adjustments to optimize the human body for survival, the implication being that giving an entity a goal and letting it attempt a wide range of things randomly to achieve that goal isn't that silly of a method.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoYes, I get that, but I think it is silly if you don't have a few billions of years and a few billions of species with a few trillions of individuals to optimise over (like evolution had). If you have fewer resources you have got to get smart and in fact, that's exactly how people work with algorithms: they try to avoid using brute force. Well ish. Machine learning algorithms are cutting it very close to brute force most of the time.
- thaw13579 11y agoConsider this... the genome is ~725MB, and 99% percent is shared with chimpanzees, leaving ~7.25 MB for human-specific traits. While I'm sure that the mother instinct is strong (and probably encoded in that 99%), it's truly amazing how little storage that is! Edit: My point is not about imprinting (which I don't claim is restricted to humans). I'm claiming that what we consider "human-specific" occupies remarkably little genetic memory. To understand how human language acquisition works with so little genetic context, we need to study humans and not NLP algorithms.
- euyyn 11y agoIt also takes us about two years to learn to walk and say stuff that makes sense. The devil knows how many bajillabytes of information a human brain inputs over the course of two years.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- naveen99 11y agoThe input is quantifiable. Our eyes see Less than a gigabyte / sec. The other senses even less. I would say a baby processes less than a petabyte of sensory data in a year. We are approaching computability of lifetimes of sensory data...