This made me think of a much more interesting project. A compendium of information automatically extracted from research articles.
Essentially one totalizing meta analysis.
E.g. If it reads an article about the relationship between height and various life outcomes in Indonesian men, then first, it would store the average height of Indonesian men, the relationship between the average height of Indonesian men and each life outcome in Indonesian men, the type of relationship (e.g. Pearson's correlation), the relationship values (r value), etc. It would store the entity, the relationship, the relationship values, and the doi source.
At least in the US, basically Epic and Cerner took over the EHR market and took effective ownership of all medical records and actively prevented care providers, patients, and researchers from easy access to those records (including for migrations to a competitive EHR — basically impossible).
Two pieces of legislation and guidance in 2016 and 2020 basically required that any EHR has to allow providers and patients to pull their records, which at first Epic was like “okay go for it, but the data model of those records is proprietary.” The government had to issue additional guidance that records must be exportable via a standard interface (e.g. HL7 FHIR), which extricates the records from any of the EHR’s internal data model.
The pre-FHIR/pre-21st Century Cures Act was pretty horrible for America’s biomedical research posture: it simply isn’t capable of doing the sort of national-scale research that e.g. the NHS system can do, which is especially valuable for understanding things like COVID and for doing research on any treatments/vaccines being used in the wild.
During COVID it became clear lot of Americans have this implicit idea that there’s a way for researchers to just “look at what’s going on” in the wild and there literally isn’t. It just recently went from effectively impossible (due to consolidation of EHR records and affiliated commercial interests locking them down) to now just very hard (due to privacy, data quality, data harmonization, and still commercial interests). That change happened via regulation and will open the door to fragmentation (while maintaining interop).
A key point here is that the centralization in this case is from a for-profit company.
If the records were centralized by the government, the issues that we see now would likely not be as prevalent.
There would be other talking points and issues to be sure, but the point is there are many ways to 'centralize' information, even including, ironically, the technologies that are infamous on HN that "de-centralize" information.
Hyperassociativity is not necessarily apophenia. Apophenia is finding meaningful patterns in random noise, but it is not clear that the patterns being discovered were in random noise, or if the person merely saw the present patterns more clearly. That can happen too, and is not apophenia. It's something more like hypercognition
The original context of the discussion was altering consciousness under the influence of psychedelics. The phenomenon of apophenia is well known in that context and has some unfortunate side effects that overlap with other communities, such as the conspirituality subculture, all of which make use of an almost institutionalized form of apophenia that is accepted as valid by their adherents. More interestingly, this kind of imagery is often used as a social glue to keep the community in sync. The most simple and basic example is the use of imagery such as tie-dye by people in the psychedelic community. The colors and patterns themselves are highly reminiscent of a drug-induced hallucination. The images of colorful, random bits of noise produced by tie-dye designs promote a kind of basic apophenia at the most sensory level which allow the members of the subgroup to engage in apophenic flights of fancy at will by using their eyes. This can evolve into more elaborate forms that go beyond the sensory system, like the kind of all encompassing, conceptual conspiracy theories that are common to more religious and spiritual subsets of related communities. These intellectual flights of fancy are similar to tie-dye designs that facilitate apophenia. Fundamentalist Christians and QAnon adherents, as only two examples, also make great use of this, in their search for signs and symbols that emerge out of the random chaos of everyday experience. This kind of patternicity-seeking is common to these communities, and many of their shared values and beliefs come out of their use of apophenia to create and augment their experience of new or altered realities that align with the values of the group. In a very real way, this is a form of alternate reality role playing, the only problem being that for many of them, they see it as real. This is where the disconnect emerges post-experience. In an attempt to recapture the magic of the altered state, many of them will forget about the mundane nature of noise and how patterns will emerge from random chaos just about anywhere, and attribute real, concrete information where none in fact exists. This is the problem.
You said up above that you’ve never done psychedelics, so it makes sense that you’ve never experienced it. This is not a simple example of hyperassociation, it’s a classical case of psychedelic apophenia. If you spend just a few minutes browsing r/psychonaut, you’ll see if for yourself. I’ve also found that one can replicate it by drinking too much coffee. The connection between apophenia and psychedelics is well known.
Bing chat is programmed to never be rude, but also to respond in the same tone that it was spoken to. And so, if it tries to mirror a negative tone, it will instead respond with that goodbye message, to avoid being rude.
If the book is actually good, then what is interesting about it is that it would still be about something that humans find important and relevant, due to the LLM being trained on human cultural data.
1. Start by writing down everything you know about what you want to write about in a disorganized way.
2. Read the disorganized text and figure out which information goes together, then put that information together.
3. Elaborate on the points you've now brought together.
4. Turn each elaboration of points into a proper paragraph.
5. Reread the whole document and figure out if the paragraphs make sense together, and if not, edit them to integrate them.
6. Edit out everything in your text that is besides the point you are trying to make.
Let me make an example:
1.
Trees are tall. Trees are living and have lived for millions of years. The bark of a tree is hard. Trees are immobile.
2.
Trees are tall. The bark of a tree is hard. Trees are immobile.
Trees are living and have lived for millions of years. Trees bring up nutrients from their roots and absorb sunlight in their leaves. The branching patterns of roots and branches are similar. There is a reason for this.
3 - 4.
Trees are tall living creatures that have existed for millions of years. They can be so tall because they are very hard due to the strong structures that cellulose holds. They can't be too hard, and some flexibility is necessary so the tree doesn't snap, but they are still much harder than they are flexible. This hardness makes them immobile, which requires the static form they take to be reliable and robust enough to keep them alive.
The best static form a tree can take is the one they evolved to take. The fractal branching pattern is the pattern that exists in the equilibrium of three requirements: it needs the strongest possible structure, allows for the greatest surface area of leaf coverage, and takes the least amount of volume up. These requirements lead to the formation of the fractal structure of tree branches. The fractal structure of roots is governed by two main forces: the need to fill as much volume of earth as possible with the least amount of root matter. This leads to branches being slightly different from roots, and according to these requirements, one would predict that roots have a much shorter distance-to-divergence of their branches than tree branches.
5 - 6.
How are trees so tall? Why do they branch as they do? Over millions of years, trees have evolved into the form they take. Several forces guided this evolution, and the properties of trees reflect them. What lets trees get so tall is that they are very hard and flexible due to the strong bonds that cellulose holds. This hardness makes them immobile, which requires the static form they take to be reliable and robust enough to keep them alive. What determines the properties of this static form?
The best static form a tree can take is the one they evolved to take. The fractal branching pattern is the optimal pattern that falls in the equilibrium of three requirements or forces: it needs the strongest possible structure, allows for the greatest surface area of leaf coverage, and takes the least amount of volume up. These requirements lead to the formation of the fractal structure of tree branches. The fractal structure of roots is governed by two main forces: the need to fill as much volume of earth as possible with the least amount of root matter. This leads to branches being slightly different from roots, and according to these requirements, one would predict that roots have a much shorter distance-to-divergence of their branches than tree branches.
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As you can see, it's a simple process that allows for rapid expansion of ideas, starting from me simply dumping information about trees, to making a point about why trees take the structure they do.
Not at all. The caution about attributing human concepts to other animals is that they can have an arbitrarily different brain organization in such a way that stretches those notions beyond what we usually take them to mean. Does a tiger experience joy? If it does, what does joy feel like to a tiger? Is bird song language? What are they saying? That last question is obviously begging the question, are they saying anything? Is "saying" something that more than humans can do, or when we refer to the word "say" do we only apply it to humans expressing human concepts? We don't even know if the concepts we use to describe minds are even valid, or if they are just products of introspection. This, along with the fact that other abstract aspects of the human condition are also on shaky ground when you change the underlying substrate those aspects emerge from, means that it's not clear that animals have those same exact aspects in their species-specific condition, and if they do have some similar aspects, those aspects can be quite different than what we'd find in humans, with completely different sets of states. TL;DR We hardly know if you and I see the same red, let alone if a tiger and a human feel the same joy.
Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language".
They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby.
There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".
Essentially one totalizing meta analysis.
E.g. If it reads an article about the relationship between height and various life outcomes in Indonesian men, then first, it would store the average height of Indonesian men, the relationship between the average height of Indonesian men and each life outcome in Indonesian men, the type of relationship (e.g. Pearson's correlation), the relationship values (r value), etc. It would store the entity, the relationship, the relationship values, and the doi source.
Something like a quantitative Wikipedia.