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by Geminidog
1954 days ago
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> Isn't that like saying, "I used to marvel at nature, that it has elements such as fire, water, ice, and amazing living things. Then I discovered it is all made of atoms interacting... I am now less motivated." ? Yes it is exactly what I'm saying. I'm less interested because of this. I could turn it around and also say that with your extremely positive attitude you can look at a piece of dog shit and make it look "amazing." Think about it. That dog shit is made out of a scaffold of living bacteria like a mini-civilization or ecosystem! Each unit of bacteria in this ecosystem is in itself a complex machine constructed out of molecules! Isn't the universe such an interesting place!!!!! This history of that piece of shit stretches back though millions of years of evolutionary history. That history is etched into our DNA, your DNA and every living thing on earth!!! All of humanity shares common ancestors with the bacteria in that piece of shit and everything is interconnected through the tree of life!!! We can go deeper because every atom in that DNA molecule in itself has a history where the scale is off the charts. Each atom was once part of a star and was once part of the big bang! We, You and I are made out of Star Material! When I think about all of this I'm just in awe!!!! wowowow. Not. I'm honestly just not interested in a piece of shit. It's boring and I can't explain why, but hopefully the example above will help you understand where I'm coming from. |
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You see, there are people out there that legitimately, professionally study poop for a living. I read a book (well, part of it) Gorillas in the Mist, by Dian Fossey, and there is an appendix on parasites, mostly using fecal analysis. Literally, a chapter on poop and worms. Reading it without prejudice, I found it extremely interesting.
Should we just say 'ewww', 'dog shit is boring, no one should study it'; or should we give it the benefit of doubt? What makes something interesting? I'm sure you could study poop and parasites for years -- they tell you about the diet of an animal without having to follow it day and night, they reveal parasites that may be of health concern for human poop.
Should we, as a society, forsake all study of poop by deeming it boring? Are those people that study poop, and don't find it boring, wrong? Or maybe they secretly go about their job finding it extremely boring? I doubt it.
> Yes it is exactly what I'm saying. I'm less interested because of this.
I think you're falling victim to reductionism. I meant my example literally: because everything is just atoms, should everything be boring? (if intelligence is just parameter adjustment) I suppose you don't find literally everything boring despite literally everything being just interacting atoms.
You could have this reductionist attitude on anything really:
Once I found out mathematics is just manipulating symbols, I am less motivated/Once I found math is just deriving from axioms, I am less motivated/Once I found life is just a bunch of organisms fighting for survival, I am less motivated
Does it really make sense to be less motivated, is the subject matter really boring, or are you just taking a reductionist argument and replacing the nuance and complexity and beauty of the real thing with a reductionist model (that doesn't really tell us much about how it works)?
Going even further: forget about machine learning. You can formulate physics so that Nature, everything, is locally minimizing (optimizing) a high-dimensional energy function. Literally everything in the Universe is parameter tuning! Oh no, everything is boring! :p
To me, then, there are three pillars of what makes something interesting:
1) It is useful;
2) It has breadth of knowledge (i.e. it's not a trivial matter you can learn in one sitting);
3) It has structure (i.e. it's not just rote memorization)
If I pointed someone to a perfectly uniform white wall and with an extremely positive attitude he declared "Amazing!", and spent hours going "Look how white the white is... what purity, I will stand here all day contemplating different aspects of the whiteness", I'd think he's yes a bit different. But it's not difficult to argue why we think that.
Another point of confusion, is that we're not all in the same situation. Each person has a set of skills, and a background knowledge, such that, for an individual, a subject can seem more or less useful, more or less related to everything he knows (thus much structured, connected, rich), and more or less aligned with his skills. It's perfectly acceptable to declare something as not interesting to him, but not plain boring, universally uninteresting.
I cannot advance much further without talking about the specifics of intelligence: do you know learning theory (PAC learning, etc.), reinforcement learning, all the interesting mathematical structures e.g. in convnets, GANs, Wasserstein-GANs, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, etc.. I think my argument is easy because in this case 'intelligence' is so vastly broad, reaching most areas of math, engineering and science that I doubt with serious effort someone could still blankly classify it as uninteresting (unless you literally do find everything uninteresting... you should be a bit worried about that, I'm serious).
And like in every field in practice one would not sit every day thinking in abstract terms about 'intelligence' -- you would be trying to solve specific problems e.g. what kind of neural architecture could be used to solve a specific problem, what kind of data augmentation can I contribute, or more advanced problems like what is the internal architecture of a robot.
Thank you for the opportunity of laying out those thoughts :)
(Please read my other comment as well, and I have a few things to add w.r.t. hyper-specialization)