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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4055 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 16, 2022

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So, what are you reading? (Another thread with this question was in here in the Fun Thread)

I'm still on Gray's Postmodern War. So far it's an interesting blend of history, analysis of the ideas behind military programs, and meditations on the nuances of war. Very quotable.

War explodes around the planet, relentlessly seeking expression in the face of widespread moral, political, and even military censorship, since the old stories of ancient tribal grievances and of the supremacy of male courage, and therefore war, don't sell everywhere.

Michael Allen Gillespie - The Theological Origins of Modernity. The argument is that there is far less of a break between Medieval theology and modern philosophy than we think, and that modernity owes its origins to the Scholastic realism vs Nominalism break that occupied the minds of the 13th century. Or as Gillespie puts it:

To understand the shape of modernity as it has come down to us, we thus need to examine carefully the origins of modernity, to look behind the veil that modernity itself has drawn to conceal its origins. The origins of modernity therefore lie not in human self-assertion or in reason but in the great metaphysical and theological struggle that marked the end of the medieval world and that transformed Europe in the three hundred years that separate the medieval and the modern worlds. This book is the account of the hidden origins of modernity in those forgotten centuries.

What are Scholastic Realism and Nominalism?

Scholastics in the High Middle Ages were ontologically realist, that is to say, they believed in the real existence of universals, or to put the matter another way, they experienced the world as the instantiation of the categories of divine reason. They experienced, believed in, and asserted the ultimate reality not of particular things but of universals, and they articulated this experience in a syllogistic logic that was perceived to correspond to or reflect divine reason. Creation itself was the embodiment of this reason, and man, as the rational animal and imago dei, stood at the pinnacle of this creation, guided by a natural telos and a divinely revealed supernatural goal.

Nominalism turned this world on its head. For the nominalists, all real being was individual or particular and universals were thus mere fictions. Words did not point to real universal entities but were merely signs useful for human understanding. Creation was radically particular and thus not teleological. As a result, God could not be understood by human reason but only by biblical revelation or mystical experience. Human beings thus had no natural or supernatural end or telos.

One interesting thing mentioned is that Ockham's Razor owes its origin to this debate:

This notion of divine omnipotence was responsible for the demise of realism. God, Ockham argued, could not create universals because to do so would constrain his omnipotence. If a universal did exist, God would be unable to destroy any instance of it without destroying the universal itself. Thus, for example, God could not damn any one human being without damning all of humanity. If there are no real universals, every being must be radically individual, a unique creation of God himself, called forth out of nothing by his infinite power and sustained by that power alone. To be sure, God might employ secondary causes to produce or sustain an entity, but they were not necessary and were not ultimately responsible for the creation or the continued existence of the entity in question. The only necessary being for Ockham was God himself. All other beings were contingent creations of his will. In a technical sense, the things God chooses to bring into existence already have a nature, but these natures are not themselves universal but apply only to each individual thing. Moreover, they are infinite in number and chosen freely by divine will.

These “natures” thus do not in any real sense constrain divine will except insofar as they exclude the impossible, that is, the logically contradictory. They are neither implied by nor are they the presupposition of anything else. In this way, Ockham’s assertion of ontological individualism undermines not only ontological realism but also syllogistic logic and science, for in the absence of real universals, names become mere signs or signs of signs. Language thus does not reveal being but in practice often conceals the truth about being by fostering a belief in the reality of universals. In fact, all so-called universals are merely second or higher order signs that we as finite beings use to aggregate individual beings into categories. These categories, however, do not denote real things. They are only useful fictions that help us make sense out of the radically individualized world. However, they also distort reality. Thus, the guiding principle of nominalist logic for Ockham was his famous razor: do not multiply universals needlessly. While we cannot, as finite beings, make sense of the world without universals, every generalization takes us one more step away from the real. Hence, the fewer we employ the closer we remain to the truth.

Nominalism vs realism sounds like ... a strange philosophical debate. "Universals are real, particulars aren't" vs "particulars are real, universals aren't" - what does this even mean? It reminds one of plato, and the right response is - https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/archive/stove/

what does this even mean

Well a lot according to the book. Has God created a rationally ordered world (realism) or does it all exist at his whim (nominalism)? Given a rational order can we deduce the laws of nature logically or can we only gain knowledge about what God has created through observation of his seemingly arbitrary choices? Is each human simply an imperfect expression of the universal man imbued with the same telos, or is there some divine significance to the expression of individual will?

Secularise these concepts and you derive a lot of the same ideas we believe in today.

I'm reading Cathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction. It has been on my TBR pile for... too many years, now, which makes some of her case studies particularly interesting, in retrospect. I'm a little over halfway through, however, and so far she seems to not appreciate the difference between these two positions:

  • Automated, opaque data aggregation and processing is, by its nature, damaging to something important (e.g. rights, economies, society, mental health, whatever)

  • Automated, opaque data aggregation and processing should be used only to advance my political goals

It's not a bad book, exactly, but I'm concerned that by the time I finish reading it, I will just feel annoyed that it came so highly recommended. A lot of what she says seems basically right, but she essentially telegraphs the eventual capture of so-called "AI alignment" by progressives ideologues. Her hope does not appear (as, I think, advertised) to understand how the application of algorithms to human existence might be objectionable per se, but to find a way to make sure that algorithms apply to human existence only in ways that progressives like.

But in one sense O'Neill accomplished something interesting, at least: she successfully, if inadvertently, became the trendsetter for today. With art generators in the West being specially trained to not produce nudity or violence, while art generators in China are trained to not produce pictures of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, "AI aligment" "experts" the world over are chattering about how we will avoid building bias into our AI tools by, apparently... building the right bias into our AI tools. In so doing, they are apparently--it so far appears--channeling O'Neill.

Yeah, I recall being pretty disappointed in the book when I read it a few years ago, though I don’t recall why. I seem to recall her making a lot of dubious assumptions

tl;dr: progressivism-related arguments generally fallacious, but not exactly untreaded ground here - general anti-algorithm arguments certainly demonstrate 'algorithms can be components of bad things sometimes', but fail to put algorithms as a direct and only cause, or connect them to much large-scale harm. There were some interesting bits that hadn't occurred to me, like "for-profit colleges are significantly driven by generous student loans", but none of them had much to do with algorithms.

From the wiki article for the book:

Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.”

All of the 'systemic biases mean those who are worse off are made even worse off', and a 'vicious spiral (cycle?)', arguments are inaccurate (in the current year) for two reasons - their effects just aren't large enough, and they're made up for by compensatory progressive programs. The loan example's multiple 'if's each correspond to specific conditions - plenty of minorities live in not-disproportionately-minority zip codes, even given said algorithm some of the ones in the zip code will get loans, there are many local colleges that are incredibly cheap, there are plenty of self-study resources available, etc. And, of course, there are loan programs for poor people and affirmative action. So, even if that's somewhat true, you'd expect - if that was the only effect - incomes to even out over several generations - and, for some ethnic minorities, it does.

On the specific topic of 'automated, opaque data aggregation' - I guess i'll skim the book a bit ... I found the epub on libgen.is, then, wanting a more convenient experience than the native epub reader, searched hn.algolia.com for 'epub read' (the first google result was packed with ads and a premium subscription) and picked "https://app.lotareader.com" for no particular reason

reading a few pages, i'm reminded of why I don't read popular books that much. "weapons of math destruction" is an annoying, unhelpful term, and the book generally seems to be broad gestures towards 'algorithms bad' as opposed to coherently explaining why they are. Many complaints, but just a few:

In general there are a lot of extraneous sentences that don't really add anything - like this paragraph "Now, if they incorporated the cost of education into the formula, strange things might happen to the results. Cheap universities could barge into the excellence hierarchy. This could create surprises and sow doubts. The public might receive the U.S. News rankings as something less than the word of God. It was much safer to start with the venerable champions on top. Of course they cost a lot. But maybe that was the price of excellence". Half the clauses here are entirely useless, and the other half are just smugly restating her point. "as something less than the word of God."? really?

[on a recidivism score taking birthplace into account] But even if we put aside, ever so briefly, the crucial issue of fairness, we find ourselves descending into a pernicious WMD feedback loop. A person who scores as “high risk” is likely to be unemployed and to come from a neighborhood where many of his friends and family have had run-ins with the law. Thanks in part to the resulting high score on the evaluation, he gets a longer sentence, locking him away for more years in a prison where he’s surrounded by fellow criminals—which raises the likelihood that he’ll return to prison.

Again, if you have a feedback loop that, say, increases risk by 5% - x * (1.05) is 1.05x. The 'vicious cycle' means that that .05 gets gets another 1.05 modifier added to it, so we get ... x + (.05) * (1.05)x. The series, sum 0 to inf of .05*n, converges to 1 / (1 - .05) ~= 1.0526. And when you combine 'in part', 'likely', 'more', 'raises the likelihood', 5% seems high! (the math is entirely tangential, "it should be obvious", i guess)

A key component of this suffering is the pernicious feedback loop. As we’ve seen, sentencing models that profile a person by his or her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair.

But this is just stated, no evidence is provided...

The chapter on online advertising spends a lot of time outlining non-targeted-ad, human-driven recruiting methods for for-profit universities that are, afaict, just as 'awful' as the target ad-driven one. So, again - what exactly does the algorithm add here?

Also strange is the claim that making a model transparent improves it. Not super relevant, but the weights for stable diffusion and OPT175 are just ... right there, and nobody is really sure how they work. (It's plausible that stable diffusion and GPT are still 'relatively simple' and we don't understand them just because they're so big and there's a lot of slightly complex 'circuits' or something, but that doesn't mean we're more able to understand them!) She seems to just assume transparency means there will be awesome independent journalists inspecting the model and demanding social change to fix it or something. Especially bizzare is a claim that the 'opacity' of college 'admissions models' leaves applicants/parents "in the dark" but "creates a big business for consultants". A transparent algorithm wouldn't reduce the number of consultants, it's not like each rich parent would manually interpret regression coefficients and design their kid a plan instead of paying for a program. And it just claims 'admissions models are derived from the US news model and each is a WMD'. I guess this is supposed to add to the sense that 'wmd = bad = everywhere', but wouldn't admissions be tough in any case? How would a more holistic admissions model make parents compete less?

I'm not sure "the concept of a safety school is now largely extinct", as claimed, and the 'american college USNews' chapter seemed to just say that US News rankings exist, point to people gaming them and a ton of potential consequences, but never really connected the ranking system to any specific college issues in a coherent way.

That's already way too long and ranty, but the entire book read like that.

Other mostly-unrelated observations:

We had about fifty quants in total. In the early days, it was entirely men, except for me. Most of them were foreign born. Many of them had come from abstract math or physics; a few, like me, had come from number theory

I still don't get the 'all immigrants must be stopped bc they dont contribute to america' thing, at all, in large part because of a ton of observations like this.

Some of people I know would claim, after reading this, "wow, our elite are so stupid, but they believe stuff like this". But it shows the opposite - the author is clearly very smart - algebraic geometry, math professor, quant at hedge fund!

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