metaphornik

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Narrative vs Ruminative Sense making: The Mind Red in Tooth and Claw

TL;DR In this post, I dissect two key modes of sense-making: narrative and ruminative: Narrative Sense-Making The narrative mode, often our default due to its vivid place in our experiences, unfolds in a linear, guided fashion, much like a predator hunting its prey. However, I argue that its reliance on human experience can become a limitation, especially when it cannot draw on pre-existing…

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chinese room 2

So there’s this guy, right? He sits in a room by himself, with a computer and a keyboard full of Chinese characters. He doesn’t know Chinese, though, in fact he doesn’t even realise that Chinese is a language. He just thinks it’s a bunch of odd symbols. Anyway, the computer prints out a paragraph of Chinese, and he thinks, whoa, cool shapes. And then a message is displayed on the computer monitor: which character comes next?

This guy has no idea how the hell he’s meant to know that, so he just presses a random character on the keyboard. And then the computer goes BZZZT, wrong! The correct character was THIS one, and it flashes a character on the screen. And the guy thinks, augh, dammit! I hope I get it right next time. And sure enough, computer prints out another paragraph of Chinese, and then it asks the guy, what comes next?

He guesses again, and he gets it wrong again, and he goes augh again, and this carries on for a while. But eventually, he presses the button and it goes DING! You got it right this time! And he is so happy, you have no idea. This is the best day of his life. He is going to do everything in his power to make that machine go DING again. So he starts paying attention. He looks at the paragraph of Chinese printed out by the machine, and cross-compares it against all the other paragraphs he’s gotten. And, recall, this guy doesn’t even know that this is a language, it’s just a sequence of weird symbols to him. But it’s a sequence that forms patterns. He notices that if a particular symbol is displayed, then the next symbol is more likely to be this one. He notices some symbols are more common in general. Bit by bit, he starts to draw statistical inferences about the symbols, he analyses the printouts every way he can, he writes extensive notes to himself on how to recognise the patterns.

Over time, his guesses begin to get more and more accurate. He hears those lovely DING sounds that indicate his prediction was correct more and more often, and he manages to use that to condition his instincts better and better, picking up on cues consciously and subconsciously to get better and better at pressing the right button on the keyboard. Eventually, his accuracy is like 70% or something – pretty damn good for a guy who doesn’t even know Chinese is a language.

* * *

One day, something odd happens.

He gets a printout, the machine asks what character comes next, and he presses a button on the keyboard and– silence. No sound at all. Instead, the machine prints out the exact same sequence again, but with one small change. The character he input on the keyboard has been added to the end of the sequence.

Which character comes next?

This weirds the guy out, but he thinks, well. This is clearly a test of my prediction abilities. So I’m not going to treat this printout any differently to any other printout made by the machine – shit, I’ll pretend that last printout I got? Never even happened. I’m just going to keep acting like this is a normal day on the job, and I’m going to predict the next symbol in this sequence as if it was one of the thousands of printouts I’ve seen before. And that’s what he does! He presses what symbol comes next, and then another printout comes out with that symbol added to the end, and then he presses what he thinks will be the next symbol in that sequence. And then, eventually, he thinks, “hm. I don’t think there’s any symbol after this one. I think this is the end of the sequence.” And so he presses the “END” button on his keyboard, and sits back, satisfied.

Unbeknownst to him, the sequence of characters he input wasn’t just some meaningless string of symbols. See, the printouts he was getting, they were all always grammatically correct Chinese. And that first printout he’d gotten that day in particular? It was a question: “How do I open a door.” The string of characters he had just input, what he had determined to be the most likely string of symbols to come next, formed a comprehensible response that read, “You turn the handle and push”.

* * *

One day you decide to visit this guy’s office. You’ve heard he’s learning Chinese, and for whatever reason you decide to test his progress. So you ask him, “Hey, which character means dog?”

He looks at you like you’ve got two heads. You may as well have asked him which of his shoes means “dog”, or which of the hairs on the back of his arm. There’s no connection in his mind at all between language and his little symbol prediction game, indeed, he thinks of it as an advanced form of mathematics rather than anything to do with linguistics. He hadn’t even conceived of the idea that what he was doing could be considered a kind of communication any more than algebra is. He says to you, “Buddy, they’re just funny symbols. No need to get all philosophical about it.”

Suddenly, another printout comes out of the machine. He stares at it, puzzles over it, but you can tell he doesn’t know what it says. You do, though. You’re fluent in the language. You can see that it says the words, “Do you actually speak Chinese, or are you just a guy in a room doing statistics and shit?”

The guy leans over to you, and says confidently, “I know it looks like a jumble of completely random characters. But it’s actually a very sophisticated mathematical sequence,” and then he presses a button on the keyboard. And another, and another, and another, and slowly but surely he composes a sequence of characters that, unbeknownst to him, reads “Yes, I know Chinese fluently! If I didn’t I would not be able to speak with you.”

That is how ChatGPT works.

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Improving academic writing: Four books to read during #AcWriMo

Improving academic writing: Four books to read during #AcWriMo

What is #AcWriMo November is the month of writing. There’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for writing fiction but also AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) for producing academic writing. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to make a commitment and finish a piece of writing. This makes more sense for fiction because everyone has that novel inside them and having a month to have a go all out at it…

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Unintentional Pygmalions: 4 questions to ask when checking an artificial entity for sentience and how to think about the answers

Unintentional Pygmalions: 4 questions to ask when checking an artificial entity for sentience and how to think about the answers

Summary This post has two independent parts: I ask what would some of the basic criteria for sentience be and how to check for them in a way that would give us a chance to satisfy our need to know.I explore some of the dilemmas a fully machine-based sentient entity would have to face or rather paradoxes we would have to address. Here are four things, I think it’s worth checking for, each with…

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Learning is a Journey: Consequences of a metaphor

Learning is a Journey: Consequences of a metaphor

How to read this This will take about 18 minutes to read (at 230 words/min) but the text is structured to make it easy to jump around and find the key points faster. I tend to go into more detail than most people find necessary.Two reasons to read:Explore a different perspective on some aspects of teaching and learningSee an illustration of a generative metaphor analysisThe two main sections can…

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3 fundamental problems of translating metaphor (or anything else)

New post looking at how hard it is or is not to translate #metaphor compared to all the other problems of #translation

How hard is it to translate metaphor? Metaphor seems like it should be very difficult to translate. But I’d like to argue that what is difficult about translating it is not the metaphor part but rather how it is used. This makes it no different from any other aspect of language. But because it is a rather salient use of language, we can use it to illustrate these general problems of…

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World as a directly meaningful place: A comment on Ecological Psychology and the richness of human experience

World as a directly meaningful place: A comment on Ecological Psychology and the richness of human experience

Background – From comment to blog post I just finished reading Andrew Wilson’s series of blog posts on the foundation of ‘ecological psychology’ This post started as a comment but it was too long for the comment field (and at 1800 words, that’s not a surprise), so I’m posting it here. It is a bit rough and in places, it expects, that you know what the original posts say. I added some quotes for…

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History as weather: A fractal theory of history for Ian Morris, Jared Diamond and CGP Grey

History as weather: A fractal theory of history for Ian Morris, Jared Diamond and CGP Grey

Note: This post originally appeared on Medium in 2016. This a very lightly revised version with new formatting for ease of readability. Outline of the argument History is often accused of not being sufficiently scientific. To remedy this people try to come up with all sorts of theories of history that try to look like science. They come up with some measurable variable (e.g. availability of…

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Why I am a feminist: A reading list

How I became a feminist: A reading list #internationalwomensday

I became a feminist because a woman once told me not to be an idiot and I decided that it was good advice. That was in 1998. But I was all ready to be a feminist long before that, so it really just took a small push to get me over the hump. I was always surrounded by strong women who outshone the men around them, read books as a boy with girls holding their own, later on had women friends who I…

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The nonsense of style: Academic writing should be scrupulous not stylish

The nonsense of style: Academic writing should be scrupulous not stylish

The problem with writing advice The problem with the likes of Steven Pinker and Helen Sword is that they like their own writing way too much. But I don’t. Like their writing, that is. [1] I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want them to get to the point. I am not reading them for enjoyment, that’s what fiction is…

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Metaphors and freedom: On Tolkien's notion of allegory vs applicability

Metaphors and freedom: On Tolkien’s notion of allegory vs applicability

On rereading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, I was struck by this passage in his foreword to the second edition: I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse…

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No back row, no corridor: Metaphors for online teaching and learning

No back row, no corridor: Metaphors for online teaching and learning

Publication note

An earlier version of this was published in the Oxford Magazine No 422.  This post expands certain sections based on questions and feedback I received following the first publication of the piece. It is also available on Medium.

The state of digital dislocation

The current state of digital dislocation is forcing us to reevaluate what is the essence of teaching and learning. The…

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It’s not personal, it’s family: The conservative communism of David Brooks and the complexity of social obligation Brooks on the alternatives to nuclear family

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How to actually write a sentence: The building blocks of written language

How to actually write a sentence: The building blocks of written language

Some time ago, Thomas Basbøll followed up his excellent post on how to write a paragraph with a much more daring endeavour on how to write a sentence. And while the post is a pleasure to read, I think it did not quite overcome the challenge the author stated at the start:

“it is substantially more difficult to explain what one does when one writes a sentence than it is to explain what one does…

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Potemkin wisdoms, phronesis and Pixar: How wise sayings protect us from meaning

Potemkin wisdoms, phronesis and Pixar: How wise sayings protect us from meaning

Potemkin wisdoms: Epistemology according to Pixar

Potemkin wisdoms, phronesis and Pixar: How complex ideas summarised protect us from change

TL;DR

This is an exploration of the difference between wisdom and practical wisdom (phronesis) triggered by this quote from a talk by Ed Catmull:

“Once one can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then one can use this statement, and not…

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So you think you have a historical analogy? Revisionist history and anthropology reading list

So you think you have a historical analogy? Revisionist history and anthropology reading list

What is this about How badly we’re getting history

While the world of history and anthropology of the last 30-40 years has completely redrawn the picture of our past, the common perception of the overall shape of history and the development of humanity is still firmly rooted in the view that took hold in the 1800s’ mixture of enlightenment and romanticism.

On this view, we are the pinnacle of…

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Turing tests in Chinese rooms: What does it mean for AI to outperform humans

Turing tests in Chinese rooms: What does it mean for AI to outperform humans #ml #ai #agi

TLDR;

Reports that AI beat humans on certain benchmarks or very specialised tasks don’t mean that AI is actually better at those tasks than any individual human.

They certainly don’t mean that AI is approaching the task with any of the same understanding of the world people do.

People actually perform 100% on the tasks when administered individually under ideal conditions (no distraction, typical…