You can't just propose a solution to the biggest problems confronting humanity and then walk away if you want people to take you seriously. You propose using algorithmic information theory to evaluate models in sociology. OK prove it. Give me an example of a question you want to answer and the data you would compress to solve it.
I gave an example of predicting future population from historical data. This actually works pretty well for a decade or two. But you can see the problems when you go further out. If you have n data points, you can fit an n degree polynomial exactly, but it has no predictive power because the coefficients take up as much space as the original data. It overfits, resulting in wild swings between points. If you start with a low order polynomial, then each added coefficient adds some bits to store it but reduces the bits needed to encode smaller residual errors. The break even point is around log n. Now the leading coefficient is very near 0, hovering on a fine line between a Kardashev level civilization and human extinction. What about adding more data? Claude compressed 20 TB of human knowledge, so it should be able to reason about fertility rates by country, advances in medicine, the economy, and so on. For 2100 it cites several forecasts and says 8.8 to 10.4 billion people. For 2200 it says that's too far into the future to predict. https://claude.ai/share/57292ed8-455f-4d73-92a7-8cc9a0c51d56 Can you beat that? Or is there another problem you can suggest? I'm not attacking AIT. We accept Newton's law of gravity because it uses a simpler model to explain the motions of the planets than the epicycye model where the planets go around the Earth but sometimes reverse direction. It is the foundation of machine learning, explaining the optimal number of coefficients for fitting a polynomial or the number of parameters in a neural network. But it doesn't work for everything. Compression works great for evaluating language models but not vision models because the latter is overwhelmed by noise. It works great for physics but not the social sciences for the same reason. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 8:33 PM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Tue, Jul 21, 2026 at 4:21 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> ... >> So my question is what questions do you want to answer and what data >> would you compress? >> > > That's not for me to decide, as I lack the authority to determine the > narratives influencing decisions about whether calls for "optimism" by > "influencers" are realistic. > > However, Forrester is someone whose warnings should not be ignored when he > says that people routinely cause the problems they're trying to solve. > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T5b58bcc51c493d41-Mdf3ae2f075e4adb8f54465e4> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T5b58bcc51c493d41-M8dde40c12166e1a7c4bce99b Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
