Quote of the Day

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

- Susan Sontag

Quote of the Day

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

- Abigail Adams

Quote of the Day

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

Quote of the Day

You can keep the Office of Personnel Management records, I don't need Electronic Health Records, give me the metadata, big data analytics and a custom tailored algorithm and a budget and during election time, I can cut to the psychological core of any population, period!

- James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

Wisdom Of The Week

On October 30, 2008, Worsley, Gow, and Adams arrived in Punta Arenas, on the southern tip of Chile. They went to a warehouse owned by a company named Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions. During the summer, between thirty thousand and forty-five thousand tourists visit the continent, nearly all of them travelling on small cruise ships. Worsley’s party had hired A.L.E. to provide logistical support, which included transporting them by airplane to their starting point on Ross Island.

At the warehouse, Worsley and his companions collected freeze-dried meals for the expedition. They faced the same predicament that had bedevilled polar explorers for generations: they could haul only so many supplies on their sleds, a situation that left them vulnerable to starvation. Shackleton, during the Nimrod expedition, wrote ruefully, “How one wishes for time and unlimited provisions. Then indeed we could penetrate the secrets of this great lonely continent.”

Worsley estimated that the journey would take nine weeks. Each of the men would be limited to about three hundred and ten pounds of provisions, including a sled, and so they whittled down their kit to the essentials. Worsley packed his portion of the food, which was sealed in ten bags—one for each week of the journey, plus an extra in case of emergency. His clothing included two pairs of pants, a fleece shirt, a down jacket with a hood, gloves, a neck gaiter, a face mask, two pairs of long johns, and three pairs of socks. He brought cross-country skis and poles; for climbing, he carried crampons and ropes. As the only member of the team with first-aid training, he transported the medical bag, which contained antibiotics, syringes, splints, and morphine. He made room for his diary and a copy of “The Heart of the Antarctic.” And he carefully stored what he considered the most vital piece of equipment: a satellite phone with solar-powered batteries, which would allow the men not only to record short audio dispatches but also to check in every day with an A.L.E. operator and report their coördinates and medical condition. If the team failed to communicate for two consecutive days, A.L.E. would dispatch a search-and-rescue plane—what Worsley called “the most expensive taxi ride in the world.”

- The White Darkness: A solitary journey across Antarctica

Quote of the Day

Unenlightened Thinking

This is where Pinker comes in. Enlightenment Now is a rationalist sermon delivered to a congregation of wavering souls. To think of the book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. Much of its more than 500 pages consists of figures aiming to show the progress that has been made under the aegis of Enlightenment ideals. Of course, these figures settle nothing. Like Pinker’s celebrated assertion that the world is becoming ever more peaceful – the statistical basis of which has been demolished by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – everything depends on what is included in them and how they are interpreted.

Are the millions incarcerated in the vast American prison system and the millions more who live under parole included in the calculus that says human freedom is increasing? If we are to congratulate ourselves on being less cruel to animals, how much weight should be given to the uncounted numbers that suffer in factory farming and hideous medical experiments – neither of which were practised on any comparable scale in the past?

It would be idle to pursue such questions. The purpose of Pinker’s laborious graphs and figures is to reassure his audience that they are on “the right side of history”. For many, no doubt, the exercise will be successful. But nagging questions will surely return. If an Enlightenment project survives, what reason is there for thinking it will be embodied in liberal democracy? What if the Enlightenment’s future is not in the liberal West, now almost ungovernable as a result of the culture wars in which it is mired, but Xi Jinping’s China, where an altogether tougher breed of rationalist is in charge? It is a prospect that Voltaire, Jeremy Bentham and other exponents of enlightened despotism would have heartily welcomed.

Judged as a contribution to thought, Enlightenment Now is embarrassingly feeble. With its primitive scientism and manga-style history of ideas, the book is a parody of Enlightenment thinking at its crudest. A more intellectually inquiring author would have conveyed something of the Enlightenment’s richness and diversity. Yet even if Pinker was capable of providing it, intellectual inquiry is not what his anxious flock demands. Only an anodyne, mythical Enlightenment can give them what they crave, which is relief from painful doubt.

Given this overriding emotional imperative, presenting them with the actual, conflict-ridden, often illiberal Enlightenment would be – by definition, one might say – unreasonable. Judged as a therapeutic manual for rattled rationalists, Enlightenment Now is a highly topical and much-needed book. In the end, after all, reason is only the slave of the passions.

- John Gray's review of Steven Pinker's new book

Quote of the Day

I may not be as unambiguously hostile to capitalism as many people are, but what I don't like about it is the commodification of personal experiences, it turns everyone into actors.

- John Gray

Quote of the Day

Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test.

- Epictetus

Quote of the Day

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.

- Viktor Frankl

Quote of the Day

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

- Isaac Asimov

Quote of the Day

To the Greeks, the word "character" first referred to the stamp upon a coin. By extension, man was the coin, and the character trait was the stamp imprinted upon him. To them, that trait, for example bravery, was a share of something all mankind had, rather than means of distinguishing one from the whole.

- Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

Deep reinforcement learning is surrounded by mountains and mountains of hype. And for good reasons! Reinforcement learning is an incredibly general paradigm, and in principle, a robust and performant RL system should be great at everything. Merging this paradigm with the empirical power of deep learning is an obvious fit. Deep RL is one of the closest things that looks anything like AGI, and that’s the kind of dream that fuels billions of dollars of funding.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work yet.

Now, I believe it can work. If I didn’t believe in reinforcement learning, I wouldn’t be working on it. But there are a lot of problems in the way, many of which feel fundamentally difficult. The beautiful demos of learned agents hide all the blood, sweat, and tears that go into creating them.

Several times now, I’ve seen people get lured by recent work. They try deep reinforcement learning for the first time, and without fail, they underestimate deep RL’s difficulties. Without fail, the “toy problem” is not as easy as it looks. And without fail, the field destroys them a few times, until they learn how to set realistic research expectations.

This isn’t the fault of anyone in particular. It’s more of a systemic problem. It’s easy to write a story around a positive result. It’s hard to do the same for negative ones. The problem is that the negative ones are the ones that researchers run into the most often. In some ways, the negative cases are actually more important than the positives.

[---]

The rule-of-thumb is that except in rare cases, domain-specific algorithms work faster and better than reinforcement learning. This isn’t a problem if you’re doing deep RL for deep RL’s sake, but I personally find it frustrating when I compare RL’s performance to, well, anything else. One reason I liked AlphaGo so much was because it was an unambiguous win for deep RL, and that doesn’t happen very often.

This makes it harder for me to explain to laypeople why my problems are cool and hard and interesting, because they often don’t have the context or experience to appreciate why they’re hard. There’s an explanation gap between what people think deep RL can do, and what it can really do. I’m working in robotics right now. Consider the company most people think of when you mention robotics: Boston Dynamics.

This doesn’t use reinforcement learning. I’ve had a few conversations where people thought it used RL, but it doesn’t. If you look up research papers from the group, you find papers mentioning time-varying LQR, QP solvers, and convex optimization. In other words, they mostly apply classical robotics techniques. Turns out those classical techniques can work pretty well, when you apply them right.

- Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn't Work Yet

Quote of the Day

People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy.

- Richard Morris

Quote of the Day

Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.

- Matthew Scully

Quote of the Day

I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.

- John Milton

Quote of the Day

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

- Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Building Machines That See, Learn, And Think Like People - Josh Tenenbaum

Wisdom Of The Week

I wonder how many of the people making predictions about the future of truck drivers have ever ridden with one to see what they do?

One of the big failings of high-level analyses of future trends is that in general they either ignore or seriously underestimate the complexity of the job at a detailed level. Lots of jobs look simple or rote from a think tank or government office, but turn out to be quite complex when you dive into the details.

For example, truck drivers don’t just drive trucks. They also secure loads, including determining what to load first and last and how to tie it all down securely. They act as agents for the trunking company. They verify that what they are picking up is what is on the manifest. They are the early warning system for vehicle maintenance. They deal with the government and others at weighing stations. When sleeping in the cab, they act as security for the load. If the vehicle breaks down, they set up road flares and contact authorities. If the vehicle doesn’t handle correctly, the driver has to stop and analyze what’s wrong – blown tire, shifting load, whatever.

In addition, many truckers are sole proprietors who own their own trucks. This means they also do all the bookwork, preventative maintenance, taxes, etc. These people have local knowledge that is not easily transferable. They know the quirks of the routes, they have relationships with customers, they learn how best to navigate through certain areas, they understand how to optimize by splitting loads or arranging for return loads at their destination, etc. They also learn which customers pay promptly, which ones provide their loads in a way that’s easy to get on the truck, which ones generally have their paperwork in order, etc. Loading docks are not all equal. Some are very ad-hoc and require serious judgement to be able to manoever large trucks around them. Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge.

I’ve been working in automation for 20 years. When you see how hard it is to simply digitize a paper process inside a single plant (often a multi-year project), you start to roll your eyes at ivory tower claims of entire industries being totally transformed by automation in a few years. One thing I’ve learned is a fundamentally Hayekian insight: When it comes to large scale activities, nothing about change is easy, and top-down change generally fails. Just figuring out the requirements for computerizing a job is a laborious process full of potential errors. Many automation projects fail because the people at the high levels who plan them simply do not understand the needs of the people who have to live with the results.

Take factory automation. This is the simplest environment to automate, because factories are local, closed environments that can be modified to make things simpler. A lot of the activities that go on in a factory are extremely well defined and repetitive. Factory robots are readily available that can be trained to do just about anything physically a person can do. And yet, many factories have not automated simply because there are little details about how they work that are hard to define and automate, or because they aren’t organized enough in terms of information flow, paperwork, processes, etc. It can take a team of engineers many man years to just figure out exactly what a factory needs to do to make itself ready to be automated. Often that requires changes to the physical plant, digitization of manual processes, Statistical analysis of variance in output to determine where the process is not being defined correctly, etc.

A lot of pundits have a sense that automation is accelerating in replacing jobs. In fact, I predict it will slow down, because we have been picking the low hanging fruit first. That has given us an unrealistic idea of how hard it is to fully automate a job.

- Will truckers be automated? via MR comments

Quote of the Day

The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is. It’s that you can see the world as it isn’t.

- Kathryn Schulz

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

How will machines know what we value if we don't know ourselves?

- John C. Havens, Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines

Quote of the Day

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

- Hermann Weyl

Quote of the Day

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.

- Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

Quote of the Day

What now matters most is that we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth's atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.

- Derek Parfit, On What Matters

Quote of the Day

The very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee that the speaker has really experienced it, and perhaps gained something from his ... He will then reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us a truth

- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson

Wisdom Of The Week

On the blurb of 12 Rules for Life Camille Paglia says you are “the most important and influential Canadian thinker” and you were upgraded at your London lectures to “one of the world’s foremost intellectuals”. How do you keep humility active?

The first thing is, I have lots of people advising me and watching me. Tammy is one of them, and my children and my parents. Her [Tammy’s] feet are firmly on the ground.

I’m also pretty old. I’m fifty-five. [*Interviewer looks quizzically*] Yeah, but I’m not twenty. The fact is that this acclaim, let’s say, has a different effect on you when you’re older than when you are young. The temptation to take it egotistically is stronger when you’re young than it is when you are old. Partly because you have been bashed around by the time you are old. You have some sense of what life is really like and what’s really important, and all of those things.

Part of the humility that’s necessary to make this sort of thing work is the proper terror of making a mistake. I have been far more terrified of making a fatal error in the last eighteen months than I have been thrilled about my newfound notoriety. I have been walking a very thin tightrope. I only have to say one thing, in all the things that I have said since September, and I have come close!

[---]

Outside of my immediate family, I have a circle of advisers who are not the sort of people who are swayed by fame. Not because they don’t understand its utility, not because they are contemptuous of it, none of that, but because some of them have had their fame, and some of them have had the kind of power in the world that is sufficient so they are no longer star-struck by that sort of thing, and they can see the dangers. I talk to them and I say, “OK, here is what I said. What did I do wrong? Where did I go overboard? Where wasn’t I clear? Where did I wander into egotism?” And they are brutal. They tell me, “Here is what you did wrong; don’t do this again.” There are five of them. And, plus, I pay attention to the social media comments. Not obsessively, but if I have made a video that doesn’t get fifty-to-one likes to dislikes, I have made a mistake, because that seems to be about the [right] ratio.

This isn’t a moral virtue on my part. This is desperate instinct for self-preservation. It’s like if you’re in a piranha tank, you don’t want to get a speck of something delicious on you. How would that be?

- Walking the Tightrope Between Chaos and Order—An Interview with Jordan B Peterson

Quote of the Day

In but a short while you shall be ashes, or a few dry bones, and possibly just a name, or not even a name.

- Marcus Aurelius

Quote of the Day

The very fact that a general problem has gripped and assimilated the whole of a person is a guarantee that the speaker has really experienced it, and perhaps gained something from his ... He will then reflect the problem for us in his personal life and thereby show us a truth

- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson

Quote of the Day

Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything--anything--to defend ourselves against that return.

- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson