My present motive for bringing up the "physics envy" trope, and Minsky's redemption, is the chasm over which civilization is now passing the abyss may be bridged if only people get over the idea that Algorithmic Information Theory's model selection criterion is "just another information criterion like BIC, AIC, etc.". You don't need artificial intelligence AT ALL to bridge this chasm with AIT. All you need is for people to stop yammering (and potentially shooting) at each other about their social theories and accept that the smallest executable archive of the collected data available to us about society and the environment, should be accepted as embodying the best theory we currently have for guiding public policy.
Both the AGI and the Statistics community can contribute to bridging this gap by giving up on their respective unprincipled behaviors relating to AIT: The AGI community has to STOP thinking about lossless compression as a solely or even primarily automatic process and the statistics community has to STOP thinking about models of society and the environment as less than Turing complete. Only then can the two sides bridge the chasm so the vast sums of money sitting in passive piles under the control of senile institutions will pour into prize purses for incremental reductions in the size of the executable archive of said comprehensive data collections. Failure to do this _will_ result in "rivers of blood". On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 9:53 AM James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 6:03 AM John Rose <johnr...@polyplexic.com> wrote: > >> There may have been physics envy then since the technological convergence >> of AIT and QIT had yet to materialize. >> > > The "physics envy" trope is an excuse for being unprincipled while > occupying positions of trust, power, privilege, responsibility and/or > authority. Minsky had a life-long habit of being unprincipled while > occupying a position of trust, power, privilege, responsibility and/or > authority. This goes back, at least, with the conclusion of the book > "Perceptrons" which started the first connectionist winter. After my > colleague, Charles Sinclare Smith, managed to end that first winter when he > took control of the Systems Development Foundation's endowment and financed > the early work of Hinton, Werbos, Rumelhart, MacLelland, etc. Minsky had > the gaul to get up in front of the 2nd IJCNN -- a time when those of us > struggling to rekindle neural network research had finally overcome > Minsky's first connectionist winter -- and address us plenary regarding his > unprincipled "society of mind". I was among those who walked out when he > took the stage. Although AFAIK Minsky didn't have a hand in the second > connectionist winter, his 2007 invocation of "physics envy" came at a time > when it was ending based primarily on Hinton's exploitation of hardware > advances. > > I see Minsky's 2014 admission as a deathbed confession. As far as I'm > concerned, he redeemed himself at least to the extent that people he had > misled throughout his life heard it. > > Epstein? Do we *really* need to go there? > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T07361bd0216a4e97-M1232223bf9f8933e9073f7d2 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
