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In extreme cases, state-adopted nominal realities may be purely driven by motivations, and have little or no connection to reality. This essay was just a littl

In extreme cases, state-adopted nominal realities may be purely driven by motivations, and have little or no connection to reality. This essay was just a little too unfocused for my tastes. As an observer of many types of organizations of people, the predilection to spin is endemic. It's not just "in extreme cases" I scanned the article and kept trying to find some meat, some kind of clear and forceful statement that the author was supporting. Instead it seemed like he was saying a lot of good things, but lacked the intestinal fortitude or insight necessary to actually get anywhere. I was left with a version of "it may be a property of monolithic systems that their motivations are at odds with an accurate perception of reality." That's almost useful, but not quite. There are a lot of interesting places to go from that statement, but we didn't go there. Hell we could have started deconstructing Aristotle and talking about how the tension between the usefulness of categorization versus all abstractions are leaky creates holes in what is knowable. Or we could have moved forward to sociology and discussed the role of the individual in large groups. Or we could have talked AI. Lots of cool places to take this train of thought. That's a shame. It's obvious the author is well-educated and has thought this through. Sure wish he would have taken us somewhere a bit more interesting.

PaulHoule 14y ago
that's the trouble with discussion about A.I. all of the exciting stuff isn't in the fundamentals and principles, it's in the exact details of how you train model X to do task Y, and few practitioners are going to give away information that's so commercially valuable.
lnanek2 14y ago
Not sure why you care about people or states in an AI article. They were just examples of the technique being discussed being put to use in a system. Seems like a complete article to me. Here is the technique that can be used in AI and here are some examples of how it works in other systems.
NotEvenNothing 14y ago
This is something I struggle with in writing what amounts to a long argument in discrete chunks. I was already 1000 words over my limit, and had to find an artificial stopping place. But partly where this is headed is the thesis that our systems of government are not very similar to ones that would be designed from scratch for survival as an individual intelligence apparatus, and that by comparing the theory to practice we can (possibly) improve them. The flip side of i is that if we aren't going to be serious about survival, we should create bureaucracies and economies so that they fail gracefully. Or else we should adopt an evolutionary, rather than singular, strategy: colonize other planets.

PaulHoule 14y ago

that's the trouble with discussion about A.I. all of the exciting stuff isn't in the fundamentals and principles, it's in the exact details of how you train model X to do task Y, and few practitioners are going to give away information that's so commercially valuable.

lnanek2 14y ago

Not sure why you care about people or states in an AI article. They were just examples of the technique being discussed being put to use in a system. Seems like a complete article to me. Here is the technique that can be used in AI and here are some examples of how it works in other systems.

NotEvenNothing 14y ago

This is something I struggle with in writing what amounts to a long argument in discrete chunks. I was already 1000 words over my limit, and had to find an artificial stopping place. But partly where this is headed is the thesis that our systems of government are not very similar to ones that would be designed from scratch for survival as an individual intelligence apparatus, and that by comparing the theory to practice we can (possibly) improve them. The flip side of i is that if we aren't going to be serious about survival, we should create bureaucracies and economies so that they fail gracefully. Or else we should adopt an evolutionary, rather than singular, strategy: colonize other planets.