Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,
I hope you understand - and I think you do - unlike your good friend -
that it's actually a lot easier to say nothing. Harsh as I may sound, I
was trying to be constructive.
I hear your sentiment (and welcome it), but if you really believe you
were not being harsh, then you might want to consider investing in some
diplomacy lessons. Mark's personal style is to be vigorous and
energetic, but if you make allowance for his style, I think you might
find that his comments were not entirely inappropriate.
I suggest that you cannot expect your reader to make allowances for you
- your ideas have to be clearly stated upfront, even if in condensed
form. You asked me for my ideas - e.g. the picture tree - I gave you
them upfront, in v. condensed form. It's actually a v.g. & incredibly
valuable discipline to force yourself to pitch your ideas succinctly.
It's useful whomever you're talking to, even idiots.
I agree that succinctness is something to strive for (and I do strive
for it, and I readily admit that I am less than perfect), but what you
are doing is mistaking a lack of background knowledge on your part for a
lack of succinctness on mine.
As for your own efforts to present your ideas, again I have to claim
that there is inequality. I have in my head already the remnants of
many discussions and papers and books that I have read, stretching back
to the early 1980s, that have some bearing on the question of how
symbols are encoded, whether pictures can be a representations, etc etc.
Now, when you put forward your ideas about images you seem to assume
that you are suggesting something radically new and powerful, but you
have no awareness of the fact that I have already thought through many
of the issues that you will enounter in the next step of your idea.
That does not mean I think your idea is lousy and that you should shut
up and go away, it just means that you should just stop *expressing*
your ideas in the "You guys are stupid because your just don't get this"
style and instead try to find out what it is that we already know,
discuss that with us and then try to articulate your own idea well
enough that we can see that it gets over various obvious snags.
So, when I ask you for more detail, it is so that I can look it over and
give you pointers to how that relates to ideas that I and others have had.
In case you missed the 2nd of my mis-postings, I DID actually read your
paper long ago as well as today - I had it in a folder.
And I suggest it's worth considering my ideas about presentation - this
is an area where I have a lot of professional experience. It's a major
truth of understanding, for example, that if you don't tell your reader
what your system does, you automatically leave them feeling vague, and
place a strain on them. (A bit like a detective story without a murder).
You could tell from Ben's recent report what a difference it made to his
audience to have a clear demo of his system.
Fair cop. But the purpose of my paper was to describe the *problem*,
not to say exactly what the solution was ... as I explained before, I
simply had no space to do both. The existence of the problem can be
just as important as the beginning of the solution.
All of the detail will come out eventually, but I know full well that if
I start to describe a small part of it, you will be none the wiser. At
the moment I am trying to invest my effort in a full presentation of the
paradigm, rather than in bits and pieces which are easily misunderstood.
Richard Loosemore
If you want to send me something, I'll gladly look at it & reply offline
- although I'm real busy at the mo. answering *your* last question.!
Best
Mike Tintner wrote:
Richard,
I can't swear that I did read it. I read a paper of more or less
exactly that length some time ago and do remember the Neats vs
Scruffies bit.
Here's why I would have not made an effort to remember the rest - and
this is consistent with what what you do mention briefly here from
time to time, and the impression I've already formed:
"The new methodology that I propose is not about random exploration
of different
designs for a general, human-level AI, it is about collecting data on
the global behavior
of large numbers of systems, while at the same time remaining as
agnostic as possible
about the local mechanisms that might give rise to the global
characteristics we desire."
This is a proposal about how you're going to try and come up with an
idea. In spirit, (and I stress "spirit"), it's not a lot different
from someone saying: "What's my idea? I'll tell you - I'm going to
get the best brains [or computers] that money can buy - loads & loads
of them. And get them to come up with an idea. Pretty original, huh?"
That's not an idea, Richard. *You* have to come up with that..
Is there any reason why you went to Section 4 of the paper, picked the
first sentence out, and then criticized it as if that WAS the proposal
I made?
Section 4 is 1700 words long. Did you not notice the rest?
Sadly, Section 4 had to be only 1700 words long because the paper was
already over budget by about 2000 words. It made me miserable to try
to condense any ideas at all into that space, but I had no choice.
If you had come to me and said: "I read section 4 and I tried to
understand what you said there, but it seems like it barely scratches
the surface: could you not elaborate on [this or that point]?" I
would have been more than willing to oblige. Heck, I'd have agreed
with you: by the standards I anted to achieve, that section was
awful. Instead you poured vicious, scornful sarcasm onto that first
sentence. Doesn't look too good to me.
I feel really bad about being unable to put more detail into that
paper, so you have touched my weak spot, for sure. But, as I say, I
really had no choice. There is a huge amount more that could have
been said, believe me. What I actually did was to explain the
approach in terms of existing approaches, thereby giving myself some
hope of reaching people who already understood what those existing
approaches were. Connectionism, for example, was a good reference point.
Meet me halfway here and I am always willing to expand on anything I
have written.
Richard Loosemore
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