5 ms·

Exactitude in Science – Borges (1946) [pdf]

91 points by jxmorris12 9mo ago

RansomStark 9mo ago
I can't get enough of Borges. His way with words and way to highlight to absurdity of situations is first class. My favorite is the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. It's a critique of the classification used by the Institute of Bibliography which he considered nonsensical. He claims to have found the list in an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia: - those belonging to the Emperor - embalmed ones - trained ones - suckling pigs - mermaids - fabled ones - stray dogs - those included in this classification - those that tremble as if they were mad - innumerable ones - those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush - et cetera - those that have just broken the vase - those that from afar look like flies
- bobson381 9mo ago
  It's such a wonderful thing to be reminded of how silly it is to take language seriously. IMO it's prickles and goo[1] all the way down - and the prickles help us share meaning and exchange information, but there is no project of exactitude to be completed. The hubris it takes to maintain the view that we can just keep figuring things out if we are rational enough is also sometimes overwhelming to me. It's not that we can't understand things better through analysis, just that it sometimes seems foolish to me to try to get all of it through system-2 type behavior. We will always miss something crucial[2]. [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU [2]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
  - mkoubaa 9mo ago
    An algorithm written in a well specified language with precise semantics might have bugs. A "logical" argument made with natural language is orders of magnitude less precise
    - bobson381 9mo ago
      What I've always wondered, though, is whether that lack of precision is what allows for meaning to arise in the first place. In the gap between language and - this - .
      - mkoubaa 9mo ago
        Read Wittgenstein
- colechristensen 9mo ago
  If you haven't run across it yet you would enjoy Borges and Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_and_Me:_An_Encounter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_and_Me:_An_Encounter
divbzero 9mo ago
The most avid members of the Cartographers Guilds had even proposed a Map of the Empire several times larger than the Empire itself to depict microscopic details that would otherwise be invisible. Such proposals were considered the peak of academic excess after the Study of Cartography fell out of favor.
- bobson381 9mo ago
  I do sometimes wonder if we will get "detailed enough" vector embeddings in LLMs to bring the grain of resolution down below human perception - like having enough bits to fully capture what's on tape in audio world. Maybe this is never possible, and (I hope) some details are unresolvable, but it will be interesting to see.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    LLMs are already used in signal processing so the idea is explored. Simply put anything that can be encoded is a language, so you just need sensors to capture and classify the incoming data and build that into a model. The real question is post training the model to behave correctly as these places are far less explored than things at the human scale. RLHF may be a poor choice because the models may see actual behaviors that humans don't and humans will discount it as being incorrect.
  - storystarling 9mo ago
    I suspect the curse of dimensionality makes this an optimization dead end. You hit prohibitive latency limits on retrieval long before the resolution approaches human perception. Even with current dimensions, the trade-off between index size and query speed is already the main constraint for production systems.
    - bobson381 9mo ago
      Reminds me of >When I was a child I used to ask my mother—of course—all sorts of ridiculous questions that every child asks, and when she got bored with my questions she would say, “Darling, there are just some things we’re just not meant to know.” I said, “Will we ever know?” She said, “Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven, God will make everything plain.” So I used to imagine on wet afternoons in heaven, we’d all sit around the throne of grace and say to God, “Well, now, why did you do this?” and “How did you do that?” and he would explain it to us. “Heavenly father, why are the leaves green?” And he would say, “Because of the chlorophyll.” And we’d say, “Oh.” 1:00:09 But in he Hindu universe, you would say to God, “How did you make the mountains?” And he would say: well, I just did it. Because what you’re (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind-1 https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...) asking me for—when you ask me how did I make the mountains, you’re asking me to describe in words how I made the mountains, and there are no words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I made the mountains any more than I can drink the ocean with a fork. A fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it, but it’s of no use for imbibing the ocean. It would take millions of years. So it would take millions of years, and you would be bored with my description long before I got through it, if I put it to you in words. Because I didn’t create the mountains with words, I just did it. Like you open and close your hand. You know how to do this, but can you describe in words how you do it? But you do it. You are conscious, aren’t you? Don’t you know how you manage to be conscious? Do you know how you beat your heart? Can you say in words, explain correctly, how this is done? You do it, but you can’t put it into words! Because words are too clumsy, and yet you manage this expertly for as long as you’re able to do it.[1] [1]:https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind-1 https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...
johngossman 9mo ago
"I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6." Steven Wright Though it's not as funny without his delivery
zubiaur 9mo ago
Ficciones is full of mockings of intellectualism. I Particularly like the critique on the critical philosophical work of Menard's Quixote. Where Menard, the subject of the story, carefully writes parts of a novel that is word-for-word a copy of Cervante's Quixote, but shaped by Menard's intellectual efforts, one is to draw the opposite appreciations than from the one written by Cervantes. His stories are such a strange read. The plot, the characters, the mentions, all feel almost secondary to the feeling they evoke.
- lkm0 9mo ago
  Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve. Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.
  - zubiaur 9mo ago
    Fascinating. Borges is not shy in mentioning his admirations, and what he was exposed to. I like that he leaves breadcrumbs, or whole loaves, pointing to what he likes. It's an interesting way to thread into literature. I envy a bit those , who, like you, had such exposures. It's such a fascinating world, which I used to scoff at when I was younger. But it's a healthy envy. I feel happy for those who choose to developed such capacities, and it inspires me to try to develop them for myself. I think I've still got the time. Thanks for your reply.
    - lkm0 9mo ago
fbn79 9mo ago
"The House of Asterion" is the most beautifully written thing I have ever read. https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house_of_asterion.pdf https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...
- sylos 9mo ago
  Holy cow, that was amazing.
- Eliand 9mo ago
  The last words almost make me cry everytime I read them. It's such a beautiful tale.
- internet_points 9mo ago
  I read that after seeing it was a forgotten inspiration for Piranesi: https://www.betterreading.com.au/news/author-related/susanna-clarke-shares-the-inspiration-behind-her-enchanting-new-novel-piranesi/#:~:text=Asterion https://www.betterreading.com.au/news/author-related/susanna... (And probably House of Leaves)
- RationPhantoms 9mo ago
  It was lost on me at first because I had none of the background, it's now beautiful in hindsight with the context.
profsummergig 9mo ago
I think it's a message about how science is really about effective sampling.
moss_dog 9mo ago
While we're Borges-posting, I recommend "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-Tlön-Uqbar-Orbius-Tertius.pdf https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
kej 9mo ago
This seems like a good place to ask: I have a memory of a longer story along very similar lines. Maps are made that are increasingly larger, but in the version I'm remembering the maps are in a room of a palace or something? Does this ring a bell to anyone?
- moss_dog 9mo ago
  Maybe Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1"?
  - kej 9mo ago
    That definitely sounds like part of what I remember. Possibly I read several similar stories around the same time and merged them in my head. Thanks!
andychiare 9mo ago
I love Borges and his lucid hallucinations. As this story highlights, when a representation of reality (the map) ends up mapping reality one by one, the representation becomes useless. I see this as a warning for the progress of AI. When AI maps human intelligence one by one, it will be useless (or perhaps we will be the ones who will be useless).

91 points by jxmorris12 9mo ago

I can't get enough of Borges. His way with words and way to highlight to absurdity of situations is first class. My favorite is the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. It's a critique of the classification used by the Institute of Bibliography which he considered nonsensical. He claims to have found the list in an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia: - those belonging to the Emperor - embalmed ones - trained ones - suckling pigs - mermaids - fabled ones - stray dogs - those included in this classification - those that tremble as if they were mad - innumerable ones - those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush - et cetera - those that have just broken the vase - those that from afar look like flies

bobson381 9mo ago
It's such a wonderful thing to be reminded of how silly it is to take language seriously. IMO it's prickles and goo[1] all the way down - and the prickles help us share meaning and exchange information, but there is no project of exactitude to be completed. The hubris it takes to maintain the view that we can just keep figuring things out if we are rational enough is also sometimes overwhelming to me. It's not that we can't understand things better through analysis, just that it sometimes seems foolish to me to try to get all of it through system-2 type behavior. We will always miss something crucial[2]. [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU [2]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
- mkoubaa 9mo ago
  An algorithm written in a well specified language with precise semantics might have bugs. A "logical" argument made with natural language is orders of magnitude less precise
  - bobson381 9mo ago
    What I've always wondered, though, is whether that lack of precision is what allows for meaning to arise in the first place. In the gap between language and - this - .
    - mkoubaa 9mo ago
      Read Wittgenstein
colechristensen 9mo ago
If you haven't run across it yet you would enjoy Borges and Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_and_Me:_An_Encounter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_and_Me:_An_Encounter

divbzero 9mo ago

The most avid members of the Cartographers Guilds had even proposed a Map of the Empire several times larger than the Empire itself to depict microscopic details that would otherwise be invisible. Such proposals were considered the peak of academic excess after the Study of Cartography fell out of favor.

bobson381 9mo ago
I do sometimes wonder if we will get "detailed enough" vector embeddings in LLMs to bring the grain of resolution down below human perception - like having enough bits to fully capture what's on tape in audio world. Maybe this is never possible, and (I hope) some details are unresolvable, but it will be interesting to see.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  LLMs are already used in signal processing so the idea is explored. Simply put anything that can be encoded is a language, so you just need sensors to capture and classify the incoming data and build that into a model. The real question is post training the model to behave correctly as these places are far less explored than things at the human scale. RLHF may be a poor choice because the models may see actual behaviors that humans don't and humans will discount it as being incorrect.
- storystarling 9mo ago
  I suspect the curse of dimensionality makes this an optimization dead end. You hit prohibitive latency limits on retrieval long before the resolution approaches human perception. Even with current dimensions, the trade-off between index size and query speed is already the main constraint for production systems.
  - bobson381 9mo ago
    Reminds me of >When I was a child I used to ask my mother—of course—all sorts of ridiculous questions that every child asks, and when she got bored with my questions she would say, “Darling, there are just some things we’re just not meant to know.” I said, “Will we ever know?” She said, “Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven, God will make everything plain.” So I used to imagine on wet afternoons in heaven, we’d all sit around the throne of grace and say to God, “Well, now, why did you do this?” and “How did you do that?” and he would explain it to us. “Heavenly father, why are the leaves green?” And he would say, “Because of the chlorophyll.” And we’d say, “Oh.” 1:00:09 But in he Hindu universe, you would say to God, “How did you make the mountains?” And he would say: well, I just did it. Because what you’re (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind-1 https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...) asking me for—when you ask me how did I make the mountains, you’re asking me to describe in words how I made the mountains, and there are no words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I made the mountains any more than I can drink the ocean with a fork. A fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it, but it’s of no use for imbibing the ocean. It would take millions of years. So it would take millions of years, and you would be bored with my description long before I got through it, if I put it to you in words. Because I didn’t create the mountains with words, I just did it. Like you open and close your hand. You know how to do this, but can you describe in words how you do it? But you do it. You are conscious, aren’t you? Don’t you know how you manage to be conscious? Do you know how you beat your heart? Can you say in words, explain correctly, how this is done? You do it, but you can’t put it into words! Because words are too clumsy, and yet you manage this expertly for as long as you’re able to do it.[1] [1]:https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind-1 https://www.organism.earth/library/document/out-of-your-mind...

johngossman 9mo ago

"I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6." Steven Wright Though it's not as funny without his delivery

zubiaur 9mo ago

Ficciones is full of mockings of intellectualism. I Particularly like the critique on the critical philosophical work of Menard's Quixote. Where Menard, the subject of the story, carefully writes parts of a novel that is word-for-word a copy of Cervante's Quixote, but shaped by Menard's intellectual efforts, one is to draw the opposite appreciations than from the one written by Cervantes. His stories are such a strange read. The plot, the characters, the mentions, all feel almost secondary to the feeling they evoke.

lkm0 9mo ago
Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve. Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.
- zubiaur 9mo ago
  Fascinating. Borges is not shy in mentioning his admirations, and what he was exposed to. I like that he leaves breadcrumbs, or whole loaves, pointing to what he likes. It's an interesting way to thread into literature. I envy a bit those , who, like you, had such exposures. It's such a fascinating world, which I used to scoff at when I was younger. But it's a healthy envy. I feel happy for those who choose to developed such capacities, and it inspires me to try to develop them for myself. I think I've still got the time. Thanks for your reply.
  - lkm0 9mo ago

fbn79 9mo ago

"The House of Asterion" is the most beautifully written thing I have ever read. https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house_of_asterion.pdf https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...

sylos 9mo ago
Holy cow, that was amazing.
Eliand 9mo ago
The last words almost make me cry everytime I read them. It's such a beautiful tale.
internet_points 9mo ago
I read that after seeing it was a forgotten inspiration for Piranesi: https://www.betterreading.com.au/news/author-related/susanna-clarke-shares-the-inspiration-behind-her-enchanting-new-novel-piranesi/#:~:text=Asterion https://www.betterreading.com.au/news/author-related/susanna... (And probably House of Leaves)
RationPhantoms 9mo ago
It was lost on me at first because I had none of the background, it's now beautiful in hindsight with the context.

profsummergig 9mo ago

I think it's a message about how science is really about effective sampling.

moss_dog 9mo ago

While we're Borges-posting, I recommend "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-Tlön-Uqbar-Orbius-Tertius.pdf https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

kej 9mo ago

This seems like a good place to ask: I have a memory of a longer story along very similar lines. Maps are made that are increasingly larger, but in the version I'm remembering the maps are in a room of a palace or something? Does this ring a bell to anyone?

moss_dog 9mo ago
Maybe Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1"?
- kej 9mo ago
  That definitely sounds like part of what I remember. Possibly I read several similar stories around the same time and merged them in my head. Thanks!

andychiare 9mo ago

I love Borges and his lucid hallucinations. As this story highlights, when a representation of reality (the map) ends up mapping reality one by one, the representation becomes useless. I see this as a warning for the progress of AI. When AI maps human intelligence one by one, it will be useless (or perhaps we will be the ones who will be useless).