Monkeys on an assembly line: Part 1
30 August 2024
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Monkeys on an assembly line: Part 1
A series about the meaning behind knowledge (and acting under absence of it).
You are a little universal constructor, a human limited by knowledge. Isn't everything a knowledge problem in life? Imagine an alien (pleb) looking down on you from (very) far away; a very tiny speck on the planet; how are you navigating the knowledge problem? But what is the (implicit) human reward function? And what are you optimizing for? What is your knowledge acquisition filter and the principles for "the act of actioning"?
Oh you're following your "intuition"? Right. But aren't you guided by your inherent biases, fallacies, with your (fake) certainties, wrapped in musings with glimmers of euphorias, in a world you think you understand very well, run by a primordial and a restless, frenetic monkey mind that never stops ranting; a fool of randomness?
Here's something Ayn Rand wrote:
“Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt”
There is a piece in Incerto about the Reverse Turing test. The idea is that "You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one.”
Elaborating further from that piece, Tell me this. If we were to choose randomly choose a list of phrases, and construct the most grammatically sounding speech, with phrases like:
“We look after our customer’s interests / the road ahead / our assets are our people / our vision / our expertise lies in / we position ourselves in this market / how to serve our customers better / short-term pain for long-term gain / we will be rewarded in the long run / we play from our strength and improve our weaknesses / we are committed to innovation and technology/ commitment to excellence / strategic plan / our work ethics.”
Would it bear too close a resemblance to your boss's last speech? Would it? Right... You should (probably) quit.
Even further; now imagine, a billion to the power of one billion monkeys on an assembly line. How surprised would you be if somehow (given all the inputs right) you saw a [raptor] engine out the other side? Or more humbly:
“The initial sample size matters greatly. If there are five monkeys in the game, I would be rather impressed with the Iliad writer, to the point of suspecting him to be a reincarnation of the ancient poet. If there are a billion to the power one billion monkeys I would be less impressed—as a matter of fact I would be surprised if one of them did not get some well-known (but unspecified) piece of work, just by luck (perhaps Casanova’s Memoirs of My Life).”
(From the Beginning of Infinity) Think about that atom on Churchill's statue. How would you explain how it got there? Won't any explanation neccessarily have to include the implicit ideas of humans, our nature, of past history, why that war happened - it can't be just probabilities.
Knowledge. And. Truth. Can't. Be. Random.
A new problem now, doesn't that monkey "know" more than you? How would you objectively beat him? That monkey could be your nemesis or your future self, (or both, because who are you really competing with). And is prediction the same as action? How do you decide under uncertainty while being (very) short on information? Nature does that, it can't predict (probably nothing can) and yet it's anti-fragile.
Are you?
Monkeys on an assembly line: Part 1
30 August 2024 See all postsA series about the meaning behind knowledge (and acting under absence of it).
You are a little universal constructor, a human limited by knowledge. Isn't everything a knowledge problem in life? Imagine an alien (pleb) looking down on you from (very) far away; a very tiny speck on the planet; how are you navigating the knowledge problem? But what is the (implicit) human reward function? And what are you optimizing for? What is your knowledge acquisition filter and the principles for "the act of actioning"?
Oh you're following your "intuition"? Right. But aren't you guided by your inherent biases, fallacies, with your (fake) certainties, wrapped in musings with glimmers of euphorias, in a world you think you understand very well, run by a primordial and a restless, frenetic monkey mind that never stops ranting; a fool of randomness?
Here's something Ayn Rand wrote:
There is a piece in Incerto about the Reverse Turing test. The idea is that "You can sometimes replicate something that can be mistaken for a literary discourse with a Monte Carlo generator but it is not possible randomly to construct a scientific one.”
Elaborating further from that piece, Tell me this. If we were to choose randomly choose a list of phrases, and construct the most grammatically sounding speech, with phrases like:
Would it bear too close a resemblance to your boss's last speech? Would it? Right... You should (probably) quit.
Even further; now imagine, a billion to the power of one billion monkeys on an assembly line. How surprised would you be if somehow (given all the inputs right) you saw a [raptor] engine out the other side? Or more humbly:
“The initial sample size matters greatly. If there are five monkeys in the game, I would be rather impressed with the Iliad writer, to the point of suspecting him to be a reincarnation of the ancient poet. If there are a billion to the power one billion monkeys I would be less impressed—as a matter of fact I would be surprised if one of them did not get some well-known (but unspecified) piece of work, just by luck (perhaps Casanova’s Memoirs of My Life).”
(From the Beginning of Infinity) Think about that atom on Churchill's statue. How would you explain how it got there? Won't any explanation neccessarily have to include the implicit ideas of humans, our nature, of past history, why that war happened - it can't be just probabilities.
Knowledge. And. Truth. Can't. Be. Random.
A new problem now, doesn't that monkey "know" more than you? How would you objectively beat him? That monkey could be your nemesis or your future self, (or both, because who are you really competing with). And is prediction the same as action? How do you decide under uncertainty while being (very) short on information? Nature does that, it can't predict (probably nothing can) and yet it's anti-fragile.
Are you?