kadonoishi

He did certain things, like went to a certain college, got married and had kids at particular ages, went to a certain type of grad school, took and quit certain jobs at certain times. I went through and asked, of each observation, the Bayesian question of whether the probability of that observation differed in the worlds where the hypothesis was true and false. In all 12 of my cases, where I was doing it by hand in an Excel spreadsheet using Bayes' Theorem in its probability form, I judged the observation was more likely in the world where he was indeed avoiding the Vietnam draft.

I started over with Gemini with the prompt "can you evaluate the final odds for a hypothesis, given a number of observations that could be evidence for or against that hypothesis". It first laid out Bayes' Theorem in its odds form, and then asked me to lay out the hypothesis and set of observations.

I did so, with it leading me through asking for three or four observations at a time. Gemini came up with its own assessment of the odds for each one, justifying the odds it gave based on historical background context like draft rules around going to college; worked up the running odds as it went; and provided a narrative interpretation.

Gemini's final tally of observations was 10 in favor, 2 neutral, and 2 against, where my own by-hand analysis in a spreadsheet had come out 12-0 in favor (Gemini came up with a couple more things like inquiring about his 1969 draft lottery number). The individual odds we came up with independently were largely quite comparable. Gemini's final aggregated odds were 124,000-to-1 in favor where my spreadsheet analysis had 4600-to-1. Its final narrative assessment was that the history I described appeared to be a classic case of "draft hedge."

I thought my father looked like he was a Vietnam draft avoider. I went through a dozen things he did, using a spreadsheet to evaluate the Bayesian evidence. Then I walked through it with Gemini, which did an incredible job. My conclusion was a tally of 12-0 in favor, aggregate odds 4600-1; Gemini added a couple things, tally 10-2-2, aggregate odds 124,000-1. Its commentary along with the patient systematic analysis was a devastating confirmation of my own work. My father's primary motivation was avoiding the Vietnam draft, and that's what shaped our family's history, decisively. These AI's are like steel pliers against hard-shelled crabs, peeling away the defenses of human crabs, inexorably. It's quite terrifying how powerful LLMs can be used like this.

Used to live in Yokohama. This is relaxing, to listen to the quiet traffic, thanks.

> Much of what's wrong in the current world is actually loneliness, having no outlet for your expressions.

A dramatic line. I made a note of it.

To detect a presence, a real brain takes in sensory input and compares it to expectations, and stays calm or registers surprise, and from time to time issues predictions to guide the organism.

To detect an absence, the brain cannot rely on sensory input, by definition. To be surprised if sensory evidence is _not_ there requires a model of the world strong enough to register surprise if the expectation is not there, without a sensory prompt.

It seems to me detecting an absence is a strictly higher-order neurological task than processing sensory input.

If LLMs can't do this strictly higher-order neurological task, is that not a capability currently unique to living things?

Gah, that would be hard to dig out. It was over 30 years ago.

edit: Ok that wasn't too hard, it was in a box. It's

"Fields on the Hoof: Nexus of Tibetan Nomadic Pastoralism" by Robert B. Ekvall, 1968, 1983.

Thanks for making me go find that, the notebook for the class is interesting to look at again.

I once read a small book for an anthropology class, and got more and more puzzled, and rather incensed. It was covering its subject well but with this bizarre hodgepodge of different anthropological framings, some of them quite anachronistic, some current, jumping around with jarring inconsistency.

I got to the end (it was a small book, only maybe 110pp) wondering what in the heck this thing was, and flipped to look at the author at the back. And it was a missionary! Instantly my attitude flipped; I was in awe that a missionary could do such good anthropology, and the inconsistencies in framing made perfect sense.

This author has good psychological insights, but her theoretical framings are somewhat mis-specified, inconsistent, sometimes out-of-date by psychological standards, to my eye. But it's very good stuff.

artist : psychologist :: missionary : anthropologist

Yeah, yes, Schrodinger meant no such thing. But suppose for a moment that a wave, in going up and down repeatedly, is manifesting time itself repeating. Like time legit has an aspect where it's a repeating thing.

To reconcile that with the common experience of time progressing, it could be a sort of statistical matter of time not repeating exactly, where the accumulation of little differences produces the experience of passing time out of quantum-level mostly repeating time.

Here's another answer to the Fermi Paradox, that while life is normal and abundant, there are lots of random possibilities for destruction such as a primordial black hole coming by.

The apparent rarity of intelligent life might be a statistical matter of there being lots of opportunities for such life to arise, but also lots of hazards of random destruction.

... on reflection, while this might be intellectually satisfying, it's not particularly nice to contemplate.

Peter Jenkins did his Walk Across America in the 1980s.

Oh, is that why Tolkien had Frodo throw the Ring in the Fire on March 25? And then King Elessar made that day the first day of the New Year. And the tradition held on until the 18th century. Huh.