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1879 These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar wit

1879 These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with the science that has come before, either to know what was discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten knowledge that could still have value. A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so much re-hashing since they were being discussed in 1879.

ryanklee 3y ago
Absolutely agreed. I find it embarrassing how STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years, and now that LLMs are center stage, so is the near-universal unpreparedness of interested parties and stakeholders to wrestle with issues of cognition, consciousness, and ethics. This, despite literally thousands of years of prior studies on these matters. Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant literature, and a strong preference to just making shit up as if it's the first time anyone has anything interesting to say on these matters. Again, embarrassing. The industry is totally unprepared on an intellectual basis to wrestle with these issues.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  Are the STEM educated thinkers publishing AI doomsday think pieces or is it the supposedly enlightened non-STEM journalists?
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Doesn't have to be 'doomsday'. Plenty of 'stem' thinkers expound on 'what is consciousness' by re-hashing old ideas as if they just occurred to them. It goes back to the old quote ~ "Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicist" And then the follow up, "physicists then proceed to re-invent bad philosophy"(unknown). The math behind the stealth bomber sat on a bookshelf for decades before someone realized what it could be used for. In STEM education, there should be some attempt at a 'rear view mirror', to know what has come before. AI is just the latest obvious area.
    - practicemaths 3y ago
      I suppose for meeting Gen. Ed. requirements more history and philosophy classes with a focus on where certain Math and Science comes from could be great. Additionally math courses for the non-stem majors that focus more on the history and importance of something, say the quadratic formula, instead of applying it/remembering it without much context from where it came from could help out a lot of non-stem majors with their math requirement. However I think it boils down to interest and a degree of time whether or not someone in a stem field feels compelled or not to pay attention and learn where their math tools come from or the experiments that built the respective sciences. That is, I've found while stem classes may not focus on the above, they do cover it and for the more enthusiastic and self motivated student right there in their books to read about. I've also found professor's that love this stuff too, which I've found pleasure in them sharing these stories when they can.
  - pineaux 3y ago
    I¹ get it. The STEM educated people are better at technical stuff like math and logic, thus they must be a lot more enlightened than these non-STEM journalists that walk around in the darkness of the intellectual void. We smart, They stupid. /s You should ask yourself where this arrogance stems (so punny) from. Although you could argue that the liberal arts/humanities are stifled by leftist worldviews, which is true, I also believe that the study of the humanities is the one thing that created the societal structures -like democracy and education- that we cherish today and I believe they will be crucial for a nice non-authoritarian future. And the ideological pressure to discredit the humanities is something that I believe comes from a pro-authoritarian, conservative side of the political field. ¹STEM-educated (molecular biology, with a focus on computational analysis)
    - VirusNewbie 3y ago
      I find it very suspicious that people who avoid learning rhetoric, or formal logic, or axiomatic thinking in general, are able to draw useful conclusions from studying humanities.
      - ryanklee 3y ago
        I think you are putting words in GP's mouth. They never said anything about avoiding learning formal logic or math. The context of that statement was a sarcastic position.
        VirusNewbie 3y ago
        You misunderstood, I was criticizing the majority of people who study humanities in college, because they don’t have the requisite skills to make valid conclusions about what they are learning.
        ryanklee 3y ago
        And you think that those individuals are representative of the value of the field of humanities? Sorry, but that's just a red herring. I mean, I'm suspicious of individuals who can't hack it in general, too, but not sure how that's relevant.
- thriftwy 3y ago
  LLMs should requalify Liberal Arts education. The people who can ask questions and understand answers are quite relevant now, seeing how STEM worldview is in many ways no longer relevant. SDEs should double down on soft skills now, since these are as useful with LLMs as with people.
- dnissley 3y ago
  > STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years What does this refer to?
  - tempodox 3y ago
    History, for instance, is not part of STEM.
    - robotresearcher 3y ago
      Have you heard of Newton, Pascal, Maxwell, Leibniz, Pythagoras, Einstein, Aristotle, Curie, and Turing? Do you know what they did and a little about their lives? They were likely all dead before you were born. Do you know some things about the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Bletchley Park, the Apollo Project, the Gutenberg press, the invention of carbon steel? That’s history.
      - ryanklee 3y ago
        He is referencing the field of History, not history.
        robotresearcher 3y ago
        I do not understand the distinction. I’ll go further. If I said ‘he was referencing Science, not science’ would that make any sense? I was a CS professor for a long time. Like many of my STEM colleagues, I taught the history of the ideas in my discipline as an intrinsic and important part of the curriculum. It’s also good pedagogy, since the long process of getting closer to the truth or developing more powerful technology is part of the toolbox we are trying to impart.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        ryanklee 3y ago
        The commenter's point is that History as an academic discipline organized by institutions is part of the humanities departments. It's not a deeper point. Of course science has its own history and that history is examined (sometimes) in the course of scientific education. That's not what's at issue. What's at issue is that History as a subject and other Humanities disciplines are systematically devalued in STEM disciplines and by scientific cultural mouthpieces and participants in STEM endeavors.
- johngossman 3y ago
  This made me go look up whether STEM includes psychology and medicine. Wikipedia says "depends how you ask." In any case, William James trained to be a doctor and is considered the father of American psychology. If you've read any of his stuff, he was certainly not science illiterate. Which is not to say I disagree with your point. However, it turns out a lot of people, especially the really smart ones we've all heard about, aren't easily characterized as STEM or non-STEM. That includes all the AI researchers I know.
- zo1 3y ago
  This is because the humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with mumbo jumbo. Technical people don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole. Besides, science used to be very much a "thinkers" only thing, because only those people went into studies instead of just being laborers. These were people that would question and ponder the things you mention. These days, STEM is filled with factory widget repeaters that are taught to regurgitate the syllabus and apply it in context so they can be good workers.
  - ryanklee 3y ago
    > humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with mumbo jumbo This is exactly the kind of opinion that results from improper familiarization with the various sub-fields of the humanities. Is there bullshit? Yes. Is it typical? Absolutely not.
bbor 3y ago
Very true! I think it’s eye opening that almost every one of Chomsky’s lectures on such topics (I.e. “what kind of creatures are we?”) start with a discussion of what Newton, Galileo, or Descartes has to say about it. The great thinkers of the past aren’t necessarily outdated, in some ways they might still have things to teach us from beyond the grave that we didn’t really appreciate when they were alive.
082349872349872 3y ago
> These arguments aren't new. True; the 1768-1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata were implemented specifically because writing, music, and art were at the time accomplishments that distinguished upper classes from lower. (their biggest weakness is that being analogue instead of digital, their programming is very sensitive to environmental changes)
retrac 3y ago
I recently stumbled across a speech from 1855 by an American physician [1], and I suppose proto-electrical-engineer, talking about the telegraph. In it, he makes a direct analogy between the telegraph and the animal nervous system. (People were aware by then, that the nervous system was partly electrical in nature.) The complexity of the nervous system and its ability to coordinate across distance, allows it to support more complex and bigger organisms, whether that organism is biological or political. Continuing with his analogy, the railroads and canals are the arteries and veins, supplying the raw materials and finished products, etc. More tenuously, he also appears to make a kind of proto-evolutionary analogy (Darwin hadn't published but Lamarck had published decades before, by this point). And I even detect small hints of an antecedent to the concept of emergent complexity, and the notion of shared structures across biology, sociology, etc. > The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this nation and of modern society by no figure of speech, by no distant analogy. Its wires spread like nerves over the surface of the land, interlinking distant parts, and making possible a perpetually higher co-operation among men, and higher social forms than have hitherto existed. [...] > We are thus conducted to the result of the highest philosophy: that society in its form of organization, is human, and that it presents in its progressive development continually higher analogies with the laws of individual being. [...] [1] https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765-bk https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765...
- wwweston 3y ago
  I wonder if Channing would be gratified to see the telegraph analogy survived to find new expression in 1970s popular culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivk_irrH1WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivk_irrH1WY which means that there's probably a bunch of Gen Xers with this song still in their head somewhere (and since it's pretty catchy, some of HNs audience now).
lisper 3y ago
> These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. Sure, but it is also important not to lend too much credence to these arguments, because they were devised from a position of ignorance. In particular, in 1879 we didn't have neurobiology, nor the theory of computation and complexity, and we barely had evolution. OoS had been published just 20 years before, and molecular biology was many decades in the future. There is value in studying Ptolemy and Aristotle too, but mainly to understand how they got things wrong.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I agree. You can't take something from 1800's as gospel, like that was the final word and we shall not progress. Just saying, shouldn't ignore it either. It is ok to study Plato or Leibniz, and realize it is historical background, and might spur new thoughts. We don't worship Plato as if that was the end of all thought. But lets not forget it, ignore it like it didn't happen, like all ideas today are new.
- maksimur 3y ago
  Agree with you except that the value in studying ancient thinkers and intellectuals is also in recognising patterns and seeing how they probably recognised patterns too.
  - lisper 3y ago
    Yes, I totally agree. I'm just saying that one should be skeptical about their conclusions because they didn't have access to much of the knowledge we have today. (William James in particular I have seen cited by religious people in support of religious arguments. He may have been a really smart guy, and there might be a lot to learn by studying him, but he just didn't know the things we know today -- no one did in his day -- and so it's not surprising that he got a lot of things wrong, including his answer to the titular question. We are in fact automata. Very, very sophisticated automata, but automata nonetheless.)
rococode 3y ago
> forgotten knowledge that could still have value It's always fun to mention that many of the foundational ideas in the modern wave of machine learning & neural networks stem from work done in the 50s and 60s: perceptrons, backpropagation, stochastic approximation, etc. were all explored in depth back then. It was only after compute power scaled up enough to apply these techniques practically that they became revolutionary. Really makes you wonder what things people are working on right now that will also need to wait 30 years.

ryanklee 3y ago

Absolutely agreed. I find it embarrassing how STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years, and now that LLMs are center stage, so is the near-universal unpreparedness of interested parties and stakeholders to wrestle with issues of cognition, consciousness, and ethics. This, despite literally thousands of years of prior studies on these matters. Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant literature, and a strong preference to just making shit up as if it's the first time anyone has anything interesting to say on these matters. Again, embarrassing. The industry is totally unprepared on an intellectual basis to wrestle with these issues.

doublepg23 3y ago
Are the STEM educated thinkers publishing AI doomsday think pieces or is it the supposedly enlightened non-STEM journalists?
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Doesn't have to be 'doomsday'. Plenty of 'stem' thinkers expound on 'what is consciousness' by re-hashing old ideas as if they just occurred to them. It goes back to the old quote ~ "Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicist" And then the follow up, "physicists then proceed to re-invent bad philosophy"(unknown). The math behind the stealth bomber sat on a bookshelf for decades before someone realized what it could be used for. In STEM education, there should be some attempt at a 'rear view mirror', to know what has come before. AI is just the latest obvious area.
  - practicemaths 3y ago
    I suppose for meeting Gen. Ed. requirements more history and philosophy classes with a focus on where certain Math and Science comes from could be great. Additionally math courses for the non-stem majors that focus more on the history and importance of something, say the quadratic formula, instead of applying it/remembering it without much context from where it came from could help out a lot of non-stem majors with their math requirement. However I think it boils down to interest and a degree of time whether or not someone in a stem field feels compelled or not to pay attention and learn where their math tools come from or the experiments that built the respective sciences. That is, I've found while stem classes may not focus on the above, they do cover it and for the more enthusiastic and self motivated student right there in their books to read about. I've also found professor's that love this stuff too, which I've found pleasure in them sharing these stories when they can.
- pineaux 3y ago
  I¹ get it. The STEM educated people are better at technical stuff like math and logic, thus they must be a lot more enlightened than these non-STEM journalists that walk around in the darkness of the intellectual void. We smart, They stupid. /s You should ask yourself where this arrogance stems (so punny) from. Although you could argue that the liberal arts/humanities are stifled by leftist worldviews, which is true, I also believe that the study of the humanities is the one thing that created the societal structures -like democracy and education- that we cherish today and I believe they will be crucial for a nice non-authoritarian future. And the ideological pressure to discredit the humanities is something that I believe comes from a pro-authoritarian, conservative side of the political field. ¹STEM-educated (molecular biology, with a focus on computational analysis)
  - VirusNewbie 3y ago
    I find it very suspicious that people who avoid learning rhetoric, or formal logic, or axiomatic thinking in general, are able to draw useful conclusions from studying humanities.
    - ryanklee 3y ago
      I think you are putting words in GP's mouth. They never said anything about avoiding learning formal logic or math. The context of that statement was a sarcastic position.
      - VirusNewbie 3y ago
        You misunderstood, I was criticizing the majority of people who study humanities in college, because they don’t have the requisite skills to make valid conclusions about what they are learning.
        ryanklee 3y ago
        And you think that those individuals are representative of the value of the field of humanities? Sorry, but that's just a red herring. I mean, I'm suspicious of individuals who can't hack it in general, too, but not sure how that's relevant.
thriftwy 3y ago
LLMs should requalify Liberal Arts education. The people who can ask questions and understand answers are quite relevant now, seeing how STEM worldview is in many ways no longer relevant. SDEs should double down on soft skills now, since these are as useful with LLMs as with people.
dnissley 3y ago
> STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years What does this refer to?
- tempodox 3y ago
  History, for instance, is not part of STEM.
  - robotresearcher 3y ago
    Have you heard of Newton, Pascal, Maxwell, Leibniz, Pythagoras, Einstein, Aristotle, Curie, and Turing? Do you know what they did and a little about their lives? They were likely all dead before you were born. Do you know some things about the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, Bletchley Park, the Apollo Project, the Gutenberg press, the invention of carbon steel? That’s history.
    - ryanklee 3y ago
      He is referencing the field of History, not history.
      - robotresearcher 3y ago
        I do not understand the distinction. I’ll go further. If I said ‘he was referencing Science, not science’ would that make any sense? I was a CS professor for a long time. Like many of my STEM colleagues, I taught the history of the ideas in my discipline as an intrinsic and important part of the curriculum. It’s also good pedagogy, since the long process of getting closer to the truth or developing more powerful technology is part of the toolbox we are trying to impart.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        ryanklee 3y ago
        The commenter's point is that History as an academic discipline organized by institutions is part of the humanities departments. It's not a deeper point. Of course science has its own history and that history is examined (sometimes) in the course of scientific education. That's not what's at issue. What's at issue is that History as a subject and other Humanities disciplines are systematically devalued in STEM disciplines and by scientific cultural mouthpieces and participants in STEM endeavors.
johngossman 3y ago
This made me go look up whether STEM includes psychology and medicine. Wikipedia says "depends how you ask." In any case, William James trained to be a doctor and is considered the father of American psychology. If you've read any of his stuff, he was certainly not science illiterate. Which is not to say I disagree with your point. However, it turns out a lot of people, especially the really smart ones we've all heard about, aren't easily characterized as STEM or non-STEM. That includes all the AI researchers I know.
zo1 3y ago
This is because the humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with mumbo jumbo. Technical people don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole. Besides, science used to be very much a "thinkers" only thing, because only those people went into studies instead of just being laborers. These were people that would question and ponder the things you mention. These days, STEM is filled with factory widget repeaters that are taught to regurgitate the syllabus and apply it in context so they can be good workers.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  > humanities got taken over in some sense and filled with mumbo jumbo This is exactly the kind of opinion that results from improper familiarization with the various sub-fields of the humanities. Is there bullshit? Yes. Is it typical? Absolutely not.

bbor 3y ago

Very true! I think it’s eye opening that almost every one of Chomsky’s lectures on such topics (I.e. “what kind of creatures are we?”) start with a discussion of what Newton, Galileo, or Descartes has to say about it. The great thinkers of the past aren’t necessarily outdated, in some ways they might still have things to teach us from beyond the grave that we didn’t really appreciate when they were alive.

082349872349872 3y ago

> These arguments aren't new. True; the 1768-1774 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata were implemented specifically because writing, music, and art were at the time accomplishments that distinguished upper classes from lower. (their biggest weakness is that being analogue instead of digital, their programming is very sensitive to environmental changes)

retrac 3y ago

I recently stumbled across a speech from 1855 by an American physician [1], and I suppose proto-electrical-engineer, talking about the telegraph. In it, he makes a direct analogy between the telegraph and the animal nervous system. (People were aware by then, that the nervous system was partly electrical in nature.) The complexity of the nervous system and its ability to coordinate across distance, allows it to support more complex and bigger organisms, whether that organism is biological or political. Continuing with his analogy, the railroads and canals are the arteries and veins, supplying the raw materials and finished products, etc. More tenuously, he also appears to make a kind of proto-evolutionary analogy (Darwin hadn't published but Lamarck had published decades before, by this point). And I even detect small hints of an antecedent to the concept of emergent complexity, and the notion of shared structures across biology, sociology, etc. > The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this nation and of modern society by no figure of speech, by no distant analogy. Its wires spread like nerves over the surface of the land, interlinking distant parts, and making possible a perpetually higher co-operation among men, and higher social forms than have hitherto existed. [...] > We are thus conducted to the result of the highest philosophy: that society in its form of organization, is human, and that it presents in its progressive development continually higher analogies with the laws of individual being. [...] [1] https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765-bk https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765...

wwweston 3y ago
I wonder if Channing would be gratified to see the telegraph analogy survived to find new expression in 1970s popular culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivk_irrH1WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivk_irrH1WY which means that there's probably a bunch of Gen Xers with this song still in their head somewhere (and since it's pretty catchy, some of HNs audience now).

lisper 3y ago

> These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. Sure, but it is also important not to lend too much credence to these arguments, because they were devised from a position of ignorance. In particular, in 1879 we didn't have neurobiology, nor the theory of computation and complexity, and we barely had evolution. OoS had been published just 20 years before, and molecular biology was many decades in the future. There is value in studying Ptolemy and Aristotle too, but mainly to understand how they got things wrong.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
I agree. You can't take something from 1800's as gospel, like that was the final word and we shall not progress. Just saying, shouldn't ignore it either. It is ok to study Plato or Leibniz, and realize it is historical background, and might spur new thoughts. We don't worship Plato as if that was the end of all thought. But lets not forget it, ignore it like it didn't happen, like all ideas today are new.
maksimur 3y ago
Agree with you except that the value in studying ancient thinkers and intellectuals is also in recognising patterns and seeing how they probably recognised patterns too.
- lisper 3y ago
  Yes, I totally agree. I'm just saying that one should be skeptical about their conclusions because they didn't have access to much of the knowledge we have today. (William James in particular I have seen cited by religious people in support of religious arguments. He may have been a really smart guy, and there might be a lot to learn by studying him, but he just didn't know the things we know today -- no one did in his day -- and so it's not surprising that he got a lot of things wrong, including his answer to the titular question. We are in fact automata. Very, very sophisticated automata, but automata nonetheless.)

rococode 3y ago

> forgotten knowledge that could still have value It's always fun to mention that many of the foundational ideas in the modern wave of machine learning & neural networks stem from work done in the 50s and 60s: perceptrons, backpropagation, stochastic approximation, etc. were all explored in depth back then. It was only after compute power scaled up enough to apply these techniques practically that they became revolutionary. Really makes you wonder what things people are working on right now that will also need to wait 30 years.