[erikpukinskis]

What’s wrong with anthropomorphizing?

I’ve noticed at least as many people under-anthropomorphize as over. People who seem obsessed with human exceptionalism and are personally offended at the idea that plants and animals (and computers!) might have subjective experiences like our own.

But to me it seems obvious we are far more alike “lower” species than we are unlike them. I would say the cases of human exceptionalism are actually extremely rare. The main source of our uniqueness is that we amalgamate other species, not that we have transcended them.

My theory is that we are terrified that we might be simpler than we think, because socially we behave as if we are so singular. If we are simple, and animals and machines are like us, then maybe we should be treating them with more reverence.

But being afraid of that is OK for a random person. For a machine learning researcher I would hope they are more careful about what we have evidence for (the similarities between us) and what we don’t (that there is some ineffable magic about humans).

[projektfu]

Anthropomorphizing is dangerous because it leads to metaphor that can both ascribe too much to the subject and create blind spots in the minds of researchers. Saying, for example, "Dogs want love," is fine for the owner but problematic for a researcher because love, as we understand it, is a human state. We'll never really understand what it means for a dog to feel loved. To the ethologist that is not to say that there are not similar emotional processes for dogs, it's to say that they cannot be understood by analogy to the human ones.

It's sort of like the color perception problem [1]. Dogs and machines do see colors, but what do they see?

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/121843/philosophy-color-perc...

[ecorithm]

You should go and read some stuff written by ethologists. Basically everything you said would be vehemently disagreed with by a large group of prominent ethologist. The term anthropodenial has even been coined to criticize your exact thinking and to describe the dangers of not anthropomorphizing enough. Not saying you can't over do it, but the GP's comment is much more in line with thinking by modern ethologist. Frans De Waal is a good place to start.

[projektfu]

Ok things may have changed since I studied ethology

[ecorithm]

Right, to be fair to you this was a hotly debated topic in ethology (and still is to an extent), however I would say most modern ethologist have come out on the side of embracing evolutionary parsimony and viewing our human experience as a valuable asset to understanding animals (especially mammals).

Probably the most cited paper regarding this debate is by Marc Bekoff, "Cognitive Ethology: Slayers, Skeptics, and Proponents" (http://cogprints.org/160/1/199709005.html). Your original comment would be categorized as a "slayer" a position which is widely criticized. In fact Bekoff's focus is on canines and he used your exact example with dogs, but to opposite affect.

[projektfu]

Phew, I'm surprised to see such an emotionally-charged article on the subject. Everyone who is uncomfortable with anthropomorphism is biased and misguided in some way, but extremist proponents are merely overly enthusiastic.

I do wonder about the theoretical bird scientist trying to figure out the "fixed action patterns" of other animals. If anthropomorphism is the way to go, surely it goes in the other direction in some way.

[projektfu]

A review I just read (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220...) suggests both of our viewpoints and seems to allow for a continuum of approaches without resorting to name-calling. I think that there's definitely stupidity in the history of "anti-anthropomorphism" if it's really true that people dismissed an article that started by saying bees appear to dance. After all, the fact that they have a behavior like that suggests something interesting is going on. It's also really easy to go overboard in simplifying animal behaviors to our own poorly-understood human behaviors.

[dghughes]

Or people who say "The computer thinks...". No it's a machine that only does what people make it do.

[roenxi]

We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking. It decides if moves are good or bad after a little pause for processing, its decisions improve with time, it has an opinion on the state of play, the opinion is formed using basically the same data as a human, different iterations of the neural network can have a different opinion but there is a link between it and the previous one.

I don't see a test that majorly distinguishes it from a human. It appears to be following the same process with a few tweaks around the edges. There are some exceptions in the 2-5 situations in Go where a human can actually use optimised logic to determine what will happen; but they aren't the meat of the game.

[drongoking]

> We've seen that threshold crossed with neural agents like AlphaGo which can be reasonably described as thinking.

I don't recall ever reading in a technical paper, or in an interview, a leader in the field of ANNs claim they were thinking. If you have, I'd like to see a reference. Most are fairly honest about the differences between artificial neurons and real ones, and between human cognition and what ANNs are doing with data.

[erikpukinskis]

Is “thought” even a well defined scientific term? I doubt neuroscientists write about it either.

[projektfu]

Chess is one of those areas where humans have developed computer-like abilities, such as exhaustive search. What's interesting is the appearance of intuition-like movement in modern chess computers, but is it ... intuition?

[Akababa]

I feel that's just a semantics rabbit hole. "Think" is too broad of a term to be picky about.

[shotashotashota]

They are both a problem, people do think human are somehow exceptional. We all agree that we are apes but none of us want to admit when we get horny in public.

But ML, AFAIK, is so simple; its literally a glorified polynomial functions. The only thing it get going for it is the large data set that we can train it on. It cannot "learn" anything from a small data set and extract any information out of it without a human imposing his/her knowledge on it.

For instance, take the concept of an even number. This simple knowledge is so powerful in solving algorithmic problems. But, its very hard to make a machine learn of this concept in general.

I think the problem is really overestimating how "intelligent" human are. We are only as intelligent with respect to our imagination. Its possible that there is an entire class of intelligent outside of our imagination that we cannot fully grasp its intelligent. Similarly, I am only conscious with respect to my own consciousness, but there may be another class of consciousness that is unimaginable to this monkey's brain.

[toolslive]

"Don't antropomorphise computers. They really hate that" (NN)

[ska]

> What’s wrong with anthropomorphizing?

c.f. 'eliza' for some of the issues.