“eemadges”
26 posts under this tag.
Artificial Intelligence is 50 years old this summer, to celebrate here’s an interesting New York Times article on computer models: Maybe We Should Leave That Up to the Computer.
Here some highlights:
“As long as you have some history and some quantifiable data from past experiences,” Mr. Snijders claims, a simple formula will soon outperform a professional’s decision-making skills.
Something researchers have known for decades: that mathematical models generally make more accurate predictions than humans do. Studies have shown that models can better predict, for example, the success or failure of a business start-up, the likelihood of recidivism and parole violation, and future performance in graduate school.
They also trump humans at making various medical diagnoses, picking the winning dogs at the racetrack and competing in online auctions. Computer-based decision-making has also grown increasingly popular in credit scoring, the insurance industry and some corners of Wall Street.
The algorithms behind so-called quant funds, he said, act with ” much greater depth of data than the human mind can. They can encapsulate experience that managers may not have.”
Other cherished decision aids, like meeting in person and poring over dossiers, are of equally dubious value when it comes to making more accurate choices, some studies have found, with face-to-face interviews actually degrading the quality of an eventual decision.
“People’s overconfidence in their ability to read someone in a half-an-hour interview is quite astounding,” said Michael A. Bishop, an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University who studies the social implications of these models.
Max H. Bazerman, a professor at Harvard Business School, wonders how many managerial decisions can actually be modeled. “The vast majority of decisions that we make in professional life don’t have this quality,” he said.
He agrees that models can make better decisions about credit card applications and college admissions, he said, “but there are many decisions that are much more unique, where that database doesn’t exist. I’m as skeptical about human intuition as these folks, but it’s not only a computer model that we replace it with. Sometimes it’s thinking more clearly.”
Many in the field of computer-assisted decision-making still refer to the debacle of Long Term Capital Management, a highflying hedge fund that counted several Nobel laureates among its founders. Its algorithms initially mastered the obscure worlds of arbitrage and derivatives with remarkable skill, until the devaluation of the Russian ruble in 1998 sent the fund into a tailspin.
Mark E. Nissen, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who has been studying computer-vs.-human procurement, sees a fundamental shift under way, with humans becoming increasingly peripheral in making routine decisions, concentrating instead on designing ever-better models.
By making smart use of computer models’ advantages, ” you’ll become like the crafty A student who doesn’t work that hard but gets mostly right answers, rather than the really hard-working student who gets lots of wrong answers and as a result gets C’s.”
“Quant fund” is a keeper word, remember it.
As for the eeriest applied A.I. example I’ve heard lately:
A French company, Poseidon Technologies, sells underwater vision systems for swimming pools that function as lifeguard assistants, issuing alerts when people are drowning, and the system has saved lives in Europe.
There are also 7 interesting eemadges on the topic.
Sí, la histeria colectiva está súper presente en el tema de la muerte. La lágrima colectiva, como ya comienzo a decir. De verdad, la gente llora más porque está junta llorando. Es como un efecto dominó muy loco. Sí, hay que decir por básica decencia, que todo mundo tiene el derecho de vivir su luto como quiera. Sí, no hay nada de nuevo en eso.. Sí, está rico sentir compasión por uno mismo y llorar sabroso con más gente que te da pie a eso. No sé cuánto tiempo esté chida y positiva esa actitud. Llorar sí es positivo, no estoy en contra de ello. De hecho, me gusta llorar. Sólo no estoy de acuerdo en la onda colectiva que parece barril sin fondo. Claramente te pegan la vibra..
La gente va al funeral a llorar y ver llorar. Creo que por eso la gente que no va a llorar, que sólo va a acompañar le han hecho tan difícil esto de dar el pésame. No están en la superficie sicológica para meterse en el llanto colectivo y sienten que traicionan si ríen o simplemente están ahí acompañándote. No, no, no.
“Once long ago, when Japan was still struggling to enter the modern age, we let ourselves be ruled by our military. Soldiers were our masters, and they led us into an evil war, to conquer nations that had done us no wrong.”
“We paid for our crimes when atomic bombs fell on our islands.”
“Paid?” cried Aimaina. “What is to pay or not to pay? Are we suddenly Christians, who pay for sins? No. The Yamato way is not to pay for error, but to learn from it.”
Children of the Mind, Orson Scott Card
I’m hungry for Japan.
Btw, Children of the Mind is the 4th book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga. Card noticeably risks a whole lot more than in previous books, too much at times and he often fails, but at others, he really shines.
Oh, the beauty!
I’m on the verge of screaming. The thing I’m going to tell you about is that good.
Even though I’ve got 9,165 songs in my library—my collection exploded some months ago when I started donwloading entire discographies (which is a brave new way of listening to music)—I find myself falling into the same old ruts, much to my chagrin, with only the occasional shuffle surprise showing me something unexpectedly good.
Enter Predixis MusicMagic Mixer, a new function of the just launched Winamp 5.21. There are detailed instructions of how to use it here, but it’s all incredibly simple. Basically, after letting MusicMagic acoustically analyze all your library, you can now select any song and ask MusicMagic to generate a list of best-acoustic-match recommendations. It’ll surprise you. This thing is so sufficiently advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic (there’s a beautiful relevant eemadge on the statistical process behind this). I can’t stop using it, I’m looking at my music library as I’d never been able to and, my god, it’s full of wonderful songs!
- A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
- A form is a linguistic pattern.
- A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
- Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
- It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
- Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
- Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
- Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
- Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.
I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
- Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
- Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
- Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
- Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.
-
We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.
[...]
A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.
The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
- Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.
What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?
“Make me one with everything.”
* * *
When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”
Formists just want to have fun.
- A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
- Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
- Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
- Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
- Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
- A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugarWP .”
- It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
- This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
- All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.
Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!
Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]
Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
- Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.
|
RSS
email
