Oh my! I heard nothing of it until now
We are heading back to our own Tornado Alley... flying into Denver...
(far western edge) and then Mary to Wisconsin which is on the
northeastern edge. I checked weather and it was suggested that there
might have been 6" (15cm) hail in Minnesota? I see/hear Santa Fe has
been under early monsoons and that is calming the otherwise
out-of-control Pecos fire(s) but that California is starting to see more
lightning caused fires (so far a modest reprieve this year).
Zelazny/SciFi fans might check out the 1960s? "Damnation Alley" or skip
forward to Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather"...
On 6/28/22 7:18 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
There was a Tornado in the Netherlands yesterday. Hope you are OK?
Very unusual for Europe. The weather is too warm for this season. We
have July temperatures in June. Probably another sign of climate change
https://news.sky.com/story/netherlands-at-least-one-dead-as-tornado-sweeps-through-dutch-coastal-town-12641338
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com>
Date: 6/26/22 09:16 (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] A* and emulatoin
This is what made it through my semi-permeable filter-bubble membrane
first thing this morning (CET):
https://theconversation.com/googles-powerful-ai-spotlights-a-human-cognitive-glitch-mistaking-fluent-speech-for-fluent-thought-185099
which became grist for the mill we have been grinding with here of
late. It highlights interesting things like how flawed (but useful?)
the Turing Test is. The TT represents precisely "the glitch". I
think this idea points in the general direction of conscious
empathy... if we recognize language fluency *as* mental fluency,
then it is more obvious that we would grant others who present
language fluency as being similar to ourselves, possibly assuming that
"other" is closer to "not other" simply because of the familiar
language that flows out of us.
In my (limited) EU travels this season I have heard only a half-dozen
languages with half as many accents/dialects each... In
english-speaking ireland, a little gaelic slipped out here and there
but the accent referenced it with every lilt. This was not
unfamiliar to my ear, so I mostly heard it as "same", but in Wales,
the Welsh was not nearly (at all?) familiar and the
romanisation/anglification of the written Welsh was overwhelmingly
unfamiliar. When I read a sign, I felt like I was left with a
mouthful of consonants and diacritics that I had to spit out just to
clear my vocal passage to start on the next phrase.
It gave me more sympathy for my non Southwest colleagues struggling
with the various anglifications of the hispanification of a dozen
different native American languages (starting in my neighborhood with
Tewa/Tiwa/Towa and expanding out withe Keres and Dine' and Zuni ...)
The (nearly conventional/normalized) rendering of most of these
languages is for me familiar enough that I don't struggle or wince,
but after (especially Welsh)... "I get it". When confronted with
each British accent (I couldn't identify or distinguish many if any)
it took a few hours at least to become habituated enough to not be
disturbed (intrigued or put off, depending) by the unfamiliar sound
patterns and often idiomatic constructions.
I thought i would be able to "hear" French as comfortably as I did
Italian 10 years ago, but it seems the "Romance" connections between
Spanish and Italian and the plethora of Latin words/phrases in science
made it much more familiar than French. The tiny bit of French I
think I am habituated to are a few Americanized stock phrases and
maybe a very little bit of dialogue from movies... After a week of
hearing almost nothing *but* French it no longer felt outrageously
"Other" even if I couldn't hardly parse a thing out of a
run-together-spoken-phrase. Mary and I observed one another trying
to speak English to someone who did not speak much if any and we
realized that we were both prone to repeat the same sentence with a
word choice or two changed, but more emphatically (and therefore more
run-together) each time. Not helpful, and perhaps what the few
French who bothered to speak to us once it was established that we had
no language in common, were doing themselves. It was hard to
recognize even word-breaks in the word-salad coming at us. The
little German we were exposed to had a *different* set of familiar
words and sounds and I think the English and German might have a much
stronger phonemic overlap, making it not sound quite as foreign...
though I was left wanting to clear my throat after hearing much spoken
german... and then here in the Netherlands with *many*
English-speaking-with-Dutch-Accent we are much more comfortable...
and much of the written Dutch is familiar even when the pronunciation
is a git foreign.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-cognitive-glitches-of-humans-laurie-santos-on-what-makes-the-human-mind-so-special
In trying to (re)find the first article, I ran across this article
which was a bit more interesting to me. The point they make about
human cognitive bias against anyone who speaks differently (acutely
illuminated by the once-familiar term "deaf and dumb" or "dumb-mute"
for those who could not speak (due to deafness, aphasia, or perhaps
some trauma? The line from the Rock Opera "Tommy"s Pinball Wizard
comes to mind: "That deaf, dumb and blind kid, could sure play a mean
pin ballll!"
A counter to the *negative* bias I recently heard was: "Don't mistake
an accent for a personality"...
It is fascinating to me how many ways we can split a hair in
discussing AI, etc. A* really. Intelligence, Reasoning, Life,
Consciousness, etc. ad nauseum. And yet it is useful (I think) to
note that no one of them is really broad nor narrow enough at the same
time. Each is a facet or reflection of the other. The second article
seems to discuss "emotional intelligence" or I think more aptly
"emotional knowledge". My very first (and practically only)
published "artpiece" was a visual study on the distinction between
"knowing" and "knowing-about", with AI climbing the steep part of the
hill toward a pinnacle (or more likely series of false summits) of
"knowing about" without possibly getting at all any closer (at all) to
"knowing".
This leads me back to Marcus' haunting suggestion that "is learning
anything more than imitation/emulation?"
Following Glen's ideation about bureaucracy as a form of tech, I find
that a great deal of my daily interaction with other people is, in
fact, with their bureaucratic roles. I am seeking a transaction...
knowledge, information, material goods, a service. And given the
level of the mutual (mis)understanding I've been enduring for over a
month now in those transactions, It now feels like a luxury to expect
a service person to articulate their preferences and basis of their
preferences in a given baked good, bit of unfamiliar produce, or even
(gawdess forbid) Beer! But it has trained me to "listen for
emotional content" more than substance. If I ask for a "Blonde" or a
"Bruun" or a "Trippel" or a "Wit" and they rattle off something about
one or more of them, I will choose one based on the level of
excitement in their voice-eye over any imagined information content
their response implied. I am sometimes disappointed but almost
always surprised. The vocabulary of European Beers overlaps (up to
language) what I am familiar with amongst American Craft beers but my
exploration is wider (through clumsiness if nothing else). My best
strategy is simply to (try to) ask for "whatever is brewed locally".
Also a good strategy for food it seems.
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