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This is certainly one of the things I am personally quite concerned about with AI: creating false equivalency with our own mental processes by adopting convenie

This is certainly one of the things I am personally quite concerned about with AI: creating false equivalency with our own mental processes by adopting convenient language. And I'll be clear that I mean more that I worry about the secondary stage where we will potentially make this mistake of trying to understand ourselves in terms of what we understand about AI -- as opposed to this first step where we try to understand AI in terms of what we understand (or at least have observed) in ourselves. Long before AI we've already been reverse applying metaphors we used to explain computing to describe our minds. I'm not completely rejecting the possibility that computational theory of mind holds, though I'm personally sceptical, but it seems to be quite vigorously embraced purely on its intuitional ease of adoption, rather than evidence. We must remember that "the map is not the territory", as they say.

ben_w 3y ago
We don't know what the territory is yet, and our map might as well be a crude 13th century globe that missed the Americas and Australia and has a lot of "here be dragons". We do risk Cargo Culting ourselves with these things. But also, the reason we even know about cargo cults is thanks to the few occasions they successfully got planes to land by looking close enough to airstrips. We need a better grasp of what we're doing, almost regardless of where we want to end up.
- komadori 3y ago
  Has a cargo cult really ever successfully caused a plane to land? Isn't the point that despite superficially imitating an sharp airstrip, "the planes never come"?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Now I'm worried I might be remembering works of fiction, but I'm sure I've read of two cases… The first was an emergency landing, an airfield was seen and after landing it turned out to be fake. The second was curiosity, an airfield visible from the air, not marked on any charts, they went down and again it turned out to be fake. But neither is showing up on DDG, so perhaps this is like the time I was fooled by the story of the medieval Mandelbrot set…
- pringk02 3y ago
  We are very much in agreement

ben_w 3y ago

We don't know what the territory is yet, and our map might as well be a crude 13th century globe that missed the Americas and Australia and has a lot of "here be dragons". We do risk Cargo Culting ourselves with these things. But also, the reason we even know about cargo cults is thanks to the few occasions they successfully got planes to land by looking close enough to airstrips. We need a better grasp of what we're doing, almost regardless of where we want to end up.

komadori 3y ago
Has a cargo cult really ever successfully caused a plane to land? Isn't the point that despite superficially imitating an sharp airstrip, "the planes never come"?
- ben_w 3y ago
  Now I'm worried I might be remembering works of fiction, but I'm sure I've read of two cases… The first was an emergency landing, an airfield was seen and after landing it turned out to be fake. The second was curiosity, an airfield visible from the air, not marked on any charts, they went down and again it turned out to be fake. But neither is showing up on DDG, so perhaps this is like the time I was fooled by the story of the medieval Mandelbrot set…
pringk02 3y ago
We are very much in agreement