

A systems theorist explains what’s wrong with standard models of intelligence - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/ingenious-david-krakauer

======
fiatmoney
The "standard model of intelligence" is that a lot of tasks seem to have
correlated (not _identical_ ) performance, and we can call the primary
dimension of this relationship a "G factor", and in turn measure this
implicitly with tests designed to have the same measures of correlation.

This man has a delightful british accent, which seems to count for something,
but his "what is intelligence" snippet is a gigantic strawman. "You can't
compare a composer and a mathematician on the same axis, they're doing
different things!" No shit, jackass. What you can do, for instance, is study
the relationship between measured mean population IQ and GDP, which tells you
it's really important to, eg, fight IQ-lowering dietary deficiencies and heavy
element poisoning if you care about helping countries develop. It's incredibly
powerful as an aggregate measure.

~~~
coldtea
> _" You can't compare a composer and a mathematician on the same axis,
> they're doing different things!". No shit, jackass._

And this outburst serves what purpose exactly? What he said could be basic and
obvious, but science involves laying out the basic and obvious things first
all the time. Besides, you'd be surprised how many people believe in IQ as if
you CAN measure a composer and a mathematician in the same axis [1].

> _What you can do, for instance, is study the relationship between measured
> mean population IQ and GDP, which tells you it 's really important to, eg,
> fight IQ-lowering dietary deficiencies and heavy element poisoning if you
> care about helping countries develop. It's incredibly powerful as an
> aggregate measure._

So, essentially combine 2 dubious and much contested metrics, IQ and GDP, to
make decisions. I fail to see how this can be enlightening.

Nor how anyone would need this pseudo-quantification to undertstand that
"fighting dietary deficiencies and heavy element poisoning" is important "if
you care about helping countries develop". Does anyone without the unique
tools of IQ and GDP think that lead poisoning is good for a country?

[1] Not to mention how many have the related misguided notion that "music is
math", just because music theory involves some (very basic) math relationships
in it (mathematical relationships that you can summarize to a 1st year math
student in a day without getting a composer out of him).

~~~
what_even

      > And this outburst serves what purpose exactly?
    

Who are you, to preside as an authority to chastise and admonish?

    
    
      > Does anyone without the unique tools of IQ and GDP think that lead poisoning is good for a country?
    

Pretty obvious that nutrition and food are powerful forces for intellect, and
the aggregation of powerful intellect at scale is a powerful economy.
Regardless of jargon, a well-fed, unpoisoned populace thinks cleary.

~~~
coldtea
> _Who are you, to preside as an authority to chastise and admonish?_

I'm a commenter on Hacker News. Who said that only some higher "presiding
authority" has the right to "chastise and admonish" rude behavior and name-
calling on HN and the internet in general?

> _Pretty obvious that nutrition and food are powerful forces for intellect,
> and the aggregation of powerful intellect at scale is a powerful economy.
> Regardless of jargon, a well-fed, unpoisoned populace thinks cleary._

Pretty obvious to me that there are far more obvious reasons for wanting a
well-fed, non-poisoned populace that to get "a powerful intellect" and a
"powerful economy". Basic humanism and compassion for one.

------
lorddoig
> Isn't it depressing to see how technology is turning us into perfect
> consumers?

I don't know what somebody on the street would consider a 'perfect consumer',
but an economist would use that term to describe someone who made strictly
rational (i.e. objectively _good_ ) purchasing decisions. Maybe I've been
drinking too much kool-aid from the econofountain, but what on Earth is
depressing about that?

~~~
hammerandtongs
I think you are using words and concepts with multiple definitions like
"good", "perfect"(for whose purpose) and "rational". You are swapping
definitions at will and it's leading you astray.

Perhaps look at this to temper the econofountain -

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-
eco...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-economicus-a-
psychopath/)

~~~
lorddoig
"Perfect" isn't a loaded word here, it just means maximally rational.

Take 2 bundles of products - A & B. They both cost the same, but bundle A
would bring you 2x as much joy/utility/whatever-you-want-to-call-it than
bundle B. To choose bundle B would be "less good" for you than choosing bundle
A: that's what irrationality is...by definition. Choosing A is the "most good"
option: that's what rationality is. Someone who chooses A over B 100% of the
time is a "perfect consumer".

~~~
yarrel
It doesn't mean that in the original quote.

Substituting a term of art for a common usage is a bug, not a feature.

~~~
TTPrograms
Substituting personal definition for standard definition is the bug here.

------
spydum
Lots of great stuff in here, this struck me:

> It is already the case that for many of us when we make a decision about
> what book to read or what film to see or what restaurant to eat at, we don’t
> make a reasoned decision based on personal experience, but on the
> recommendations of an app! So that little bit of free will that we got to
> exercise in our daily lives has evaporated. So the lake of free will has
> become a pond.

~~~
clusterfoo
Which leads to an unsettling thought:

> And culture builds on culture. (...) That cumulative process is what allows
> for the civilization that we now live in, but it raises a very interesting
> paradox and it’s interesting that it’s very rarely commented upon.

> Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II
> running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say,
> “Impossible. Impossible!” (...)

> Now, let’s think about human beings. Human beings are hardware that’s about
> 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running
> 21st-century software! (...)

> I happen to be one who believes that the cultural becomes so complicated at
> a certain point that it won’t run on our brains. _And in fact, you could
> argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is
> consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous,
> organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit
> machines to represent culture, because we cannot._ I think there’s good
> evidence for that.

> I think that that ultimately might be what bounds us; that we’ll reach a
> point where our memory capacity and inferential power simply cannot
> accommodate the latest cultural artifact. At that point what happens? Does
> it become independent of us, or does it just stop? It’s like evolution
> coming to an end.

\---

The whole thing is worth watching really, but that question really hit home
for me. Though maybe I'm more optimistic: if we automated away all of the
menial -- such as deciding what's for dinner, searching for the next book to
read, etc. (unless it's done for pleasure of course) -- and the political --
automate a large portion of how our institutions are run -- all of these
things that stifle and fragment our creative energies, so that we could focus
all of our brainpower and energy on creative endeavours, how much more could
we accomplish?

There's still a cognitive limit, but it seems to me that currently we are
mired by so much unnecessary overhead that once we are able to remove it,
we'll find that limit is a lot farther away than we expected.

I'd guess that for most of us, well over 50% of our creative energy is instead
spent on the unnecessary and menial.

Especially since brains are not Turing machines, and the cost of overhead is
not linear (50% overhead might mean more than 50% productivity loss): brains
get tired over time, they burn out, they need rest, context switching is
hard... that overhead burns you out and is making you less productive even
when you're not actively thinking about it (what's for dinner, your personal
finances, schedules, meetings, that dentist appointment, am I due for a
haricut? did I already book the mechanic? my car is making that weird noise
again, oh crap did I miss the new Game of Thrones last night, now I gotta
catch up... etc etc etc etc) -- what a relief would it be to automate all of
that and only focus on what's fun and what's important!)

~~~
maxerickson
Thinking along those lines, a major role of modern society is to automate away
safety.

It isn't perfect, but I guess there are lots of ways in which it succeeds at
it.

~~~
clusterfoo
And security. The biggest problem of course is that this a field ripe with
potential for abuse... there's a fine line between a personalized book
recommendation service, and a massive, streamlined propaganda machine.

We have the knowhow to build either (very near) futures: one in which we
automate all the menial aspects of our day-to-day lives and are left to
explore and create... and one in which our desire for convenience is exploited
by governments and corporations.

The technical difficulty of achieving either is the same, the only difference
between utopia and dystopia in this case is the foundation on top of which
it's built:

One is built on openness: open data, neutral networks, open software and
standards, all massively available so that anyone with the ingenuity to do so
can pitch in and help build this future.

The other is built on a foundation of walled gardens and closed ecosystems:
everyone building on top of platforms and technologies that are ultimately
controlled by a handful of individuals whose interests we now have to trust
align with our own.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
It wouldn't be propaganda if it gave you want you wanted. But the same systems
that can predict what you want will give you what some unnamed face wants the
masses to know, and silently reports on people whom it detects aren't
complying. It's the same system, what it does depends on who owns it and how
transparent their operations are.

------
dredmorbius
Oh! David Krakauer. His observation that intelligence is search is one of the
more novel, useful, and insightful I've encountered in decades.

~~~
xxxyy
I find his thoughts about the potential limits of humanity provocative and
really clever. These three parts made great impression on me:

 _> And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated
computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize
that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have
to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s
good evidence for that._

 _> The atom bomb, for example, forced a crisis. We had an extraordinary power
and we didn’t really have the moral probity or sophistication to deal with it.
We still do not. And that’s not making a judgment about whether our actions
were right or wrong; it’s just that I think thinking reasonably about how to
deploy power on that scale is beyond us._

 _> Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run
string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! How is it
possible that old, antiquated hardware can continue to run ever newer and more
complex cultural software?_

~~~
ihm
Interestingly enough the "mental software" used to handle the crisis of the
atom bomb came from mathematics (von Neumann's game theory, in particular the
idea of mutually assured destruction) rather than moral philosophy or
something which we label as "humanities". I'd probably argue that what von
Neumann was doing with MAD was "humanities" but I don't have a good definition
of the word.

------
pointernil
Is it just me or does David Krakauer sound A LOT like Joe Armstrong of Erlang
fame? ;)

Thanks for this very insightful link. Worth every minute.

------
tbrownaw
Re birds, fish, etc --

That's an interesting approach, discarding generality / repurposeability as a
requirement.

On the other hand, requiring those would mean that being very very good at,
say math and only math, would maybe not actually count as intelligence.

Perhaps there's two related things? Artifacts of fixed / embodied
intelligence, like bird's wings and traffic lights. And whatever process
produced those artifacts.

Saying that intelligence is solving problems or making problems go away, also
implies that there's no such thing as disembodied isolated intelligence.
Because being isolated and disembodied means there are no problems to work on.

So you can have a general algorithm (say, fitness-biased random search), that
only becomes intelligent when put in the right environment (given a fitness
function that matches to a problem).

------
iamcurious
Is there a transcript of the videos? I much prefer reading to listening.

~~~
JonnieCache
No, but heres the videos as a playlist on vimeo. Click the couch button to
watch them all in a row.

edit: whoops forgot to paste the link!

[https://vimeo.com/couchmode/album/3361299/sort:preset](https://vimeo.com/couchmode/album/3361299/sort:preset)

~~~
ukigumo
Thank you for this. I was getting pretty annoyed with the scroll down to
select video, scroll up to watch video routine.

------
sunstone
The problem with "intelligence" tests is that they generally measure deductive
ability because this is easy. Make up tricky problems and check if the answers
are right.

Actual intelligence is usually and balanced combination of taking things
apart, deduction, and putting disparate things together in creative ways. This
second attribute is much harder to measure so.... why bother.

To quote Albert E. "Creativity is more important than knowledge."

------
wellpast
His Hamlet analogy doesn't work for me. Couldn't I change Hamlet's name every
other line of his dialogue (this making < 1% changes to the original) and yet
by doing tihs _drastically_ change the qualities of the work.

~~~
astrobe_
The analogy doesn't work at all because DNA is more like a program than a
tragedy (yeah, some programs are actually tragic but stay focused, please).
Changing only one character in a program can have catastrophic consequences.
Biological systems are generally more tolerant because they are highly
redundant but still; 1% can easily explain the differences.

I just don't understand why he doesn't pick the obviously better analogy
although somewhere else in the interview he shows some computer knowledge. And
I don't know why he relates intelligence to DNA when we know that crows can
compete with chimps on tool use.

------
tunesmith
His definition of "stupidity" seems to be the same thing as "willful
ignorance".

~~~
dredmorbius
Not necessarily.

Stupidity can arise out of having the wrong model for solving a problem. Say,
the theory of humors or of spirits rather than a germ theory of disease. You
can collect all sorts of information _consistent with your model_ and still
end up no better than, or even worse off, than you were before. E.g.,
determining that you've got to bleed a patient to death.

 _You lack the appropriate model to solve the problem._

In the case of wilful ignorance, and as illustrated in the examples of
continental drift and Mars cananls, or today, global warming, requires not
only _having the wrong model_ , but in _rejecting the correct model._

Related, I particularly like his definition of genius.

