4 ms·

Counterpoint: The mechanism of action of a large proportion of very important drugs is a stone-cold mystery. If you have major surgery, you'll probably be anaes

Counterpoint: The mechanism of action of a large proportion of very important drugs is a stone-cold mystery. If you have major surgery, you'll probably be anaesthetised with a drug that induces unconsciousness for no known reason. We know that the drug will render you unconscious, we know that the overwhelming majority of patients will remain unconscious for the duration of the procedure, we know that the overwhelming majority of patients will regain consciousness with no ill effects after the procedure, but we only have vague educated guesses as to why. We don't know why acetaminophen relieves pain, we don't know why lithium stabilises mood in people with bipolar, we don't know how antidepressants actually relieve depression. Would we like to know how these drugs work? Certainly, as it might help us to develop better drugs. Do we need to know how these drugs work? Absolutely not - given a choice between a mystery drug and having surgery without anaesthesia, I'm choosing the mystery drug every time. Human beings are black-box algorithms; we can concoct plausible explanations for our behaviour, but there is abundant evidence that we don't actually know our own minds. I think our discomfort with black-box algorithms is essentially a reflection of our discomfort at the unknowability of the human mind. These algorithms work, but we don't really know what's happening on the inside, just like literally everyone you've ever met.

hhs 7y ago
You write: “Human beings are black-box algorithms; we can concoct plausible explanations for our behaviour, but there is abundant evidence that we don't actually know our own minds. I think our discomfort with black-box algorithms is essentially a reflection of our discomfort at the unknowability of the human mind.” I tend to agree, and if you look from a species perspective there are boundaries to what other animals can also do. For instance, an ant can only do so much; they can do basic thinking and processing but they lack complex physiological structures and reasoning abilities, as far as we know, to concoct plausible explanations for their behavior. Humans can come up with explanations but it’s still hard for them to tap in deeper and ask those why questions. On a scale of species reasoning ability complexity, I’m curious if there are other animals that have the capacity to engage with nuanced why questions. Any zoologists out there?
- deanCommie 7y ago
  I think that question inherently requires us to identify some subjectively fuzzy definitions for what are "why questions". It would be similar to how we have been adjusting our definition of what it means to feel pain. (particularly in the context of claims that entire animal species do not feel it, so there are no qualms about preparing them as food in ways that would be considered inhumanely cruel with others - see lobsters, crabs) Chimps recognize themselves in the mirror. So they have some theory of mind. Dogs don't, but unlike chimps, can follow pointing directions. So they have some theory of OUR mind. My dog is stubborn and doesn't follow some directions right away. I will sometimes see her pause, consider, and ignore the command. If I then remind her in a generic way that I am serious (like a stern generic "hey"), she will then come back and do the command. So it's more complex than a direct cause and effect. That also sounds like a "why" question that has gone through her head...
  - hhs 7y ago
    Good to think about, thanks.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I don't think you can say that reasoning is quite true or false. The main thing about that argument is it compares apples and oranges. Human beings construct beliefs about each other's processes and provide reasons for actions which are far from scientifically accurate but which are crucial for us to operate together as a species - and our ability to operate together as a species has been key to our success, despite the many limits we have to our ability to operate. Which is to say we don't experience each other as black boxes (regardless of whether we really are these). We experience each are partial unknowns - people often do unexpected things but we often construct plausible after-the-fact explanations and those who consisting do things without any explanation make us nervous.
joe_the_user 7y ago
Would we like to know how these drugs work? Certainly, as it might help us to develop better drugs. Do we need to know how these drugs work? Absolutely not - given a choice between a mystery drug and having surgery without anaesthesia, I'm choosing the mystery drug every time. Phrasing the need for understanding is a bit tricky. Certainly, a person can live with, must live with, some knowledge-without-understanding in their life. But a proliferation of things beyond our understanding in many ways undermines our position, our feeling of power in the world. It seems like the broad progress of humanity, since the age of ... reason, has come through an increase in both raw data and broad understanding. And while understanding is tricky thing to describe, it seems like the rise of AI is actually helpful in describing what it isn't. Understanding is a kind of knowledge that humans can take into many domains and apply in many ways - mathematics is a prototypical example - the laws of physics, put in mathematics, can applied in a multitude of ways. In contrast, trends extracted from raw data may give us successful predictions and not tell us the reason. Suppose we have a psychiatric drug that is a pure "black box", we know that consuming this drug changes a person's behavior in somewhat predictable fashion. But it doesn't tell you whether this consumption returns someone to "normal" or simply suppresses a person's other abilities - if we're treating symptoms, we learn nothing of mental illness (given our real minds remain black boxes too). Moreover, it's not true that we deal with other people as black boxes. Rather, "folks psychology", our implicit understanding of each other's motivations, is a key part of our interpersonal relations [1]. This process may not be correct in scientific terms but this doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a key component of our experience. And overall, the proliferation of knowledge-without-understanding produces the problem of lack of broad control of the world, akin to a tool chest. Edit: Ironically, "tool box reasoning", the ability to have a group of tools available and use them as appropriate and in combination, is a pretty uniquely human ability one that gives a person a wide range of options in the world. It is itself very much a black box on a meta-level but we know quite well exists (so suppose that's a useful piece of general black box knowledge). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology
dredmorbius 7y ago
In looking at technological mechanisms, and coming up with a fairly coherent fundamental list of nine, two of those are what I call process knowledge, generally, expertise in some technical domain, and structured knowledge, generally, scientific expertise. I've arrived at those terms after spending a lot of time thinking and studying just what "technology" and "science" are. One of the most influential definitions I've come across is John Stuart Mill's: technology is the study of means, while science is the study of causes. That's ... not fully bulletproof, but it's a very good start. Technology (from Greek, techne, is an art or skill or craft, a way of achieving some ends. While science is knowledge, especially of fundamental causes, principles, mechanisms, or dynamics. Technology tells you what to do (and/or use, or apply, or manipulate). You don't have to know why it works, as in the example of your anesthesia, only that it works. It's knowledge, but a thinner level of knowledge than science provides. Science tells you why a thing works. You may still not be able to influence it (we understand, generally, plate tectonics and stellar fusion, we control neither), but the understanding gives predictability around such phenomena. Plate tectonics tells us where earth movements may occur, with what frequency and severity, and the like. Understanding stellar fusion makes sense of the brightness, colours, frequency distribution, mass, and other propreties of stars, as well as of the occurrence of events on their lifecycles. Jonathan Zittrain recently wrote of a characteristic of AI models that hasa been bothering him: that they provide solutions without explanation. The thing about an AI classifier is that nobody can tell how the classifier itself works. We can throw test data at it and evaluate the outputs, but there's no apparent causal link between input and output. AI is non-explanatory knowledge. Whether that means it's technology rather than science, or some new domain that's not technology or science (as much as semantic distinctions has meaning), I'm not sure. Though the question's one I'd started asking a couple of years ago myself. TFA is describing this phenomenon in two aspects: first, that the causal function of proteins themselves isn't understood, and may be beyond our modelling capabilities, and secondly that the AI-driven predictions over folding topologies provides accurate predictions but no causal mechanism. Another space this resembles is inferrential statistics, which AI is in many regards an outgrowth of. Correlation is useful information, but it is not causation. Multi-stage gradient-desent AI is to a large extent more complext statistics ... but is that all it is, or is it something more, but still short of causal or explanatory mechanism? An emergent property of complex stats themselves?

hhs 7y ago

You write: “Human beings are black-box algorithms; we can concoct plausible explanations for our behaviour, but there is abundant evidence that we don't actually know our own minds. I think our discomfort with black-box algorithms is essentially a reflection of our discomfort at the unknowability of the human mind.” I tend to agree, and if you look from a species perspective there are boundaries to what other animals can also do. For instance, an ant can only do so much; they can do basic thinking and processing but they lack complex physiological structures and reasoning abilities, as far as we know, to concoct plausible explanations for their behavior. Humans can come up with explanations but it’s still hard for them to tap in deeper and ask those why questions. On a scale of species reasoning ability complexity, I’m curious if there are other animals that have the capacity to engage with nuanced why questions. Any zoologists out there?

deanCommie 7y ago
I think that question inherently requires us to identify some subjectively fuzzy definitions for what are "why questions". It would be similar to how we have been adjusting our definition of what it means to feel pain. (particularly in the context of claims that entire animal species do not feel it, so there are no qualms about preparing them as food in ways that would be considered inhumanely cruel with others - see lobsters, crabs) Chimps recognize themselves in the mirror. So they have some theory of mind. Dogs don't, but unlike chimps, can follow pointing directions. So they have some theory of OUR mind. My dog is stubborn and doesn't follow some directions right away. I will sometimes see her pause, consider, and ignore the command. If I then remind her in a generic way that I am serious (like a stern generic "hey"), she will then come back and do the command. So it's more complex than a direct cause and effect. That also sounds like a "why" question that has gone through her head...
- hhs 7y ago
  Good to think about, thanks.
joe_the_user 7y ago
I don't think you can say that reasoning is quite true or false. The main thing about that argument is it compares apples and oranges. Human beings construct beliefs about each other's processes and provide reasons for actions which are far from scientifically accurate but which are crucial for us to operate together as a species - and our ability to operate together as a species has been key to our success, despite the many limits we have to our ability to operate. Which is to say we don't experience each other as black boxes (regardless of whether we really are these). We experience each are partial unknowns - people often do unexpected things but we often construct plausible after-the-fact explanations and those who consisting do things without any explanation make us nervous.

joe_the_user 7y ago

Would we like to know how these drugs work? Certainly, as it might help us to develop better drugs. Do we need to know how these drugs work? Absolutely not - given a choice between a mystery drug and having surgery without anaesthesia, I'm choosing the mystery drug every time. Phrasing the need for understanding is a bit tricky. Certainly, a person can live with, must live with, some knowledge-without-understanding in their life. But a proliferation of things beyond our understanding in many ways undermines our position, our feeling of power in the world. It seems like the broad progress of humanity, since the age of ... reason, has come through an increase in both raw data and broad understanding. And while understanding is tricky thing to describe, it seems like the rise of AI is actually helpful in describing what it isn't. Understanding is a kind of knowledge that humans can take into many domains and apply in many ways - mathematics is a prototypical example - the laws of physics, put in mathematics, can applied in a multitude of ways. In contrast, trends extracted from raw data may give us successful predictions and not tell us the reason. Suppose we have a psychiatric drug that is a pure "black box", we know that consuming this drug changes a person's behavior in somewhat predictable fashion. But it doesn't tell you whether this consumption returns someone to "normal" or simply suppresses a person's other abilities - if we're treating symptoms, we learn nothing of mental illness (given our real minds remain black boxes too). Moreover, it's not true that we deal with other people as black boxes. Rather, "folks psychology", our implicit understanding of each other's motivations, is a key part of our interpersonal relations [1]. This process may not be correct in scientific terms but this doesn't mean it can be dismissed as a key component of our experience. And overall, the proliferation of knowledge-without-understanding produces the problem of lack of broad control of the world, akin to a tool chest. Edit: Ironically, "tool box reasoning", the ability to have a group of tools available and use them as appropriate and in combination, is a pretty uniquely human ability one that gives a person a wide range of options in the world. It is itself very much a black box on a meta-level but we know quite well exists (so suppose that's a useful piece of general black box knowledge). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_psychology

dredmorbius 7y ago

In looking at technological mechanisms, and coming up with a fairly coherent fundamental list of nine, two of those are what I call process knowledge, generally, expertise in some technical domain, and structured knowledge, generally, scientific expertise. I've arrived at those terms after spending a lot of time thinking and studying just what "technology" and "science" are. One of the most influential definitions I've come across is John Stuart Mill's: technology is the study of means, while science is the study of causes. That's ... not fully bulletproof, but it's a very good start. Technology (from Greek, techne, is an art or skill or craft, a way of achieving some ends. While science is knowledge, especially of fundamental causes, principles, mechanisms, or dynamics. Technology tells you what to do (and/or use, or apply, or manipulate). You don't have to know why it works, as in the example of your anesthesia, only that it works. It's knowledge, but a thinner level of knowledge than science provides. Science tells you why a thing works. You may still not be able to influence it (we understand, generally, plate tectonics and stellar fusion, we control neither), but the understanding gives predictability around such phenomena. Plate tectonics tells us where earth movements may occur, with what frequency and severity, and the like. Understanding stellar fusion makes sense of the brightness, colours, frequency distribution, mass, and other propreties of stars, as well as of the occurrence of events on their lifecycles. Jonathan Zittrain recently wrote of a characteristic of AI models that hasa been bothering him: that they provide solutions without explanation. The thing about an AI classifier is that nobody can tell how the classifier itself works. We can throw test data at it and evaluate the outputs, but there's no apparent causal link between input and output. AI is non-explanatory knowledge. Whether that means it's technology rather than science, or some new domain that's not technology or science (as much as semantic distinctions has meaning), I'm not sure. Though the question's one I'd started asking a couple of years ago myself. TFA is describing this phenomenon in two aspects: first, that the causal function of proteins themselves isn't understood, and may be beyond our modelling capabilities, and secondly that the AI-driven predictions over folding topologies provides accurate predictions but no causal mechanism. Another space this resembles is inferrential statistics, which AI is in many regards an outgrowth of. Correlation is useful information, but it is not causation. Multi-stage gradient-desent AI is to a large extent more complext statistics ... but is that all it is, or is it something more, but still short of causal or explanatory mechanism? An emergent property of complex stats themselves?