
Negative Expertise (1994) - the-mitr
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/NegExp.mss.txt
======
harshreality
(1994) Minsky essay.

> Could it be that our accumulations of counterexamples are larger and more
> powerful than our collections of instances and examples? Could it be that we
> learn more from negative rather than from positive reinforcement?

It seems like major scientific breakthroughs involve both positive (oh, so
THAT'S how to do it) and negative (well, we tried a, b, and c, they all failed
or had bad consequences, so let's not do that again) knowledge.

I think the essay sets up a false dichotomy, or a false question, of "which is
more important?"

It might be that everyday life depends more on negative expertise than
positive expertise. You don't have to be top of your field or know things that
nobody else knows, but if you make a major mistake you might get hurt,
socially outcast, etc. But humanity's progress seems like it depends on both
positive and negative expertise, inextricably intertwined.

~~~
gumby
> I think the essay sets up a false dichotomy, or a false question, of "which
> is more important?"

He sets the ground right up front: that expert systems (the state of the art
at the time, though by then in decline) primarily consist(ed) of positive
questions, and that that was a mistake. Essentially the dichotomy had been
implicitly resolved in favor of the "positive questions are more important"
side, and Marvin was arguing against that.

------
ttoinou
> Other colleagues maintain that we should be able to construct large, uniform
> neural networks that can learn to do all that minds might need. I do not see
> much hope of this, because of fear that any very large such network would be
> prone to accumulate too many interconnections and become paralyzed by
> oscillations or instabilities. How could we stabilize such systems ? My
> answer is that one might have to provide a variety of alternative sub-
> systems, decoupled enough that if each part should fail from time to time,
> the rest could continue to function so that not all the system will all fail
> at once. This means that those parts must be suitably insulated from one
> another.

Looks like Generative Adversorial Networks ?

~~~
gumby
I think he's referring to the Society of Mind.

------
gumby
I happen to have a copy of The Emotion Machine on my desk right this instant,
so I looked in it and this topic is discussed in that book (his last).

------
dahart
> But a 'negative' way to seem competent is, simply, never to make mistakes.
> How much of what we learn to do -- and learn to think -- is of this other
> variety?

Is it an interesting question, but I feel like the words "competent" and
"expertise" set up misleading expectations. Most people are experts at walking
and eating, but not nuclear physics or the history of Asian music.

I guess almost all of what we do at any given moment - look, talk, eat, sleep,
walk, read, etc. - is this type. We abstract everything and don't consciously
process most of what we see & do. Lots of people have speculated that if we
were consciously thinking about every sensory input and every action we took,
living would be unbearable.

But for learning new things, for establishing what it means to be an expert in
a new field by being better than others, by doing research, by breaking new
ground -- it has to be asked, what good does learned knowledge and not making
mistakes serve? What is ever learned if someone doesn't make a mistake?
Science doesn't move without mistakes. Nor does evolution. With competence,
there's no change.

Maybe I'm just coming to the conclusion that being competent and becoming an
expert are two completely different things?

> Presumably, experts have more effective censors than the rest of us

I'm honestly not sure why this is presumed. A lot of us would recognize that
someone who's made more mistakes and learned from them is more expert than
someone who's tried nothing new and has only relied on the learned "book
knowledge" of mistakes of others.

> It annoys me how frequently people suggest that the 'secret' of making
> creative machines might lie in providing some sort of random or chaotic kind
> of search generator. Nonsense!

I couldn't agree more with this, it hits home having spent time practicing
digital art. So many people talk about adding a random number generator as if
that's going to find new things and add some magical discovery to the process.
It doesn't, and there are almost always better alternatives.

------
phkahler
One challenge with encoding negatives is that there are infinitely many of
them. When confronted with a lion, positive things to do would all involve
defense or escape. Things not to do include taking a nap, having lunch,
provoking the lion, pulling out your phone to read HN... We can sift through
those and say "provoking the lion" will likely be very bad and avoid that. All
the others might get lumped into "do nothing" because they don't really
address the lion. So I suppose I've answered myself - the negatives must be
restricted by potential relevance to the situation in order to limit their
number.

