First there was the person who built a computer inside of Minecraft and programmed it to play Minecraft. 

Now Frederic Besse built a usable linux terminal in GPTchat — usable in that it can perform systems operations on a virtual computer that’s also been invoked in (by? with?) GPTchat. For example, you can tell the terminal to create a file and where to store it in a file system that did not exist until you asked, and under most definitions of “exist” doesn’t exist anywhere.

I feel like I need to get a bigger mind in order for it to be sufficiently blown.

(PS: I could do without the casual anthropomorphizing in the GPT article.)

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There’s a new version of Wordle called Semantle — not one that I “predicted” — that wants you to find the target word by looking not for a chain of spellings but a chain of semantics. For example, if you started with the word “child” you might get to the answer as follows:

1. Child
2. Play
3. game
4. Chess
5. Square
6. Circle
7. Donut
8. Homer

In short, you’re playing word associations except the associations can be very loose. It’s not like Twenty Questions where, once you get down a track (say “animals”), you’re narrowing the scope until there’s only one thing left. In Semantle, the associations can take a sudden turn in any of a thousand directions at any moment.

Which means it’s basically impossible to win.

It is, however, a good introduction to how machine learning “thinks” about words. Or at least one of the ways. Semantle is based on word2vec, which creates text embeddings derived from an analysis of some large — sometimes very very large — set of texts. Text embeddings map the statistical relationships among words based on their proximities in those texts.

In a typical example, word2vec may well figure out that “queen” and “king” are semantically close, which also might well let it figure out that “king” is to “prince” as “queen” is to “princess.”

But there are, of course, many ways that words can be related — different axes of similarity, different dimensions. Those are called “vectors” (as in “word2vec“). When playing Semantle, you’re looking for the vectors in which a word might be embedded. There are many, many of those, some stronger than others. For example, “king” and “queen” share a dimension, but so do “king” and “chess”, “king” and “bed size”, and “king” and “elvis.” Words branch off in many more ways than in Wordle.

For example, in my first game of Semantle, after 45 attempts to find a word that is even a little bit close to the answer, I found that “city” is vaguely related to it. But now I have to guess at the vector “city” and the target share. The target could be “village”, “busy”, “taxi”, “diverse”, “noisy”, “siege”, or a bazillion other words that tend to appear relatively close to “city” but that are related in different ways.

In fact, I did not stumble across the relevant vector. The answer was “newspaper.”

I think Semantle would be more fun if they started you with a word that was at some reasonable distance from the answer, rather than making you guess what a reasonable starting word might be. Otherwise, you can spend a long time — 45 tries to get “city” — just generating random words. But if we knew a starting word was, say, “foot”, we could start thinking of vectors that that word is on: measure, toe, body, shoe, soccer, etc. That might be fun, and would stretch our minds.

As it is, Semantle is a game the unplayability of which teaches us an important lesson.

And now I shall wait to hear from the many people who are actually able to solve Semantles. I hate you all with a white hot and completely unreasonable passion.[1]

[1] I’ve heard from people who are solving it. I no longer hate them.

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Notes for a post:

Plato said (Phaedrus, 265e) that we should “carve nature at its joints,” which assumes of course that nature has joints, i.e., that it comes divided in natural and (for the Greeks) rational ways. (“Rational” here means something like in ways that we can discover, and that divide up the things neatly, without overlap.)

For Aristotle, at least in the natural world those joints consist of the categories that make a thing what it is, and that make things knowable as those things.

To know a thing was to see how it’s different from other things, particularly (as per Aristotle) from other things that they share important similarities with: humans are the rational animals because we share essential properties with other animals, but are different from them in our rationality.

The overall order of the universe was knowable and formed a hierarchy (e.g. beings -> animals -> vertebrates -> upright -> rational) that makes the differences essential. It’s also quite efficient since anything clustered under a concept, no matter how many levels down, inherits the properties of the higher level concepts.

We no longer believe that there is a perfect, economical order of things. “We no longer believe that there is a single, perfect, economical order of things. ”We want to be able to categorize under many categories, to draw as many similarities and differences as we need for our current project. We see this in our general preference for search over browsing through hierarchies, the continued use of tags as a way of cutting across categories, and in the rise of knowledge graphs and high-dimensional language models that connect everything every way they can even if the connections are very weak.

Why do we care about weak connections? 1. Because they are still connections. 2. The Internet’s economy of abundance has disinclined us to throw out any information. 3. Our new technologies (esp. machine learning) can make hay (and sometimes errors) out of rich combinations of connections including those that are weak.

If Plato believed that to understand the world we need to divide it properly — carve it at its joints — knowledge graphs and machine learning assume that knowledge consists of joining things as many different ways as we can.

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Aeon.co has posted an article I worked on for a couple of years. It’s only 2,200 words, but they were hard words to find because the ideas were, and are, hard for me. I have little sense of whether I got either the words or the ideas right.

The article argues, roughly, that the sorts of generalizations that machine learning models embody are very different from the sort of generalizations the West has taken as the truths that matter. ML’s generalizations often are tied to far more specific configurations of data and thus are often not understandable by us, and often cannot be applied to particular cases except by running the ML model.

This may be leading us to locate the really real not in the eternal (as the West has traditional done) but at least as much in the fleeting patterns of dust that result from everything affecting everything else all the time and everywhere.

Three notes:

1. Nigel Warburton, the philosophy editor at Aeon, was very helpful, as was Timo Hannay in talking through the ideas, and at about a dozen other people who read drafts. None of them agreed entirely with the article.

2. Aeon for some reason deleted a crucial footnote that said that my views do not necessarily represent the views of Google, while keeping the fact that I am a part time, temporary writer-in-residence there. To be clear: My reviews do not necessarily represent Google’s.

3. My original first title for it was “Dust Rising”, but then it became “Trains, Car Wrecks, and Machine Learning’s Ontology” which i still like although I admit it that “ontology” may not be as big a draw as I think it is.

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You’ve probably heard about MyHeritage.com‘s DeepNostalgia service that animates photos of faces. I’ve just posted at Psychology Today about the new type of uncanniness it induces, even though the animations of the individual photos I think pretty well escape The uncanny Value.

Here’s a sample from the MyHeritage site:

And here’s a thread of artworks and famous photos animated using DeepNostalgia that I reference in my post:

https://t.co/MDFSu3J0H1 has created some sort of animate your old photos application and I’m of course using it to feed my history addiction.
I apologise in advance to all the ancestors I’m about to offend.

Very fake history.

I’m sorry Queenie. pic.twitter.com/2np437yXyt

— Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunt) February 28, 2021

More at Psychology Today …

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In “The Efficiency-Destroying Magic of Tidying Up“, Florent Crivello (twitter: @Altimor) has written a clear, convincing, and compact critique of the assumption that efficient organization is tidy, neat, and rectilinear. “[E]fficiency tends to look messy, and good looks tend to be inefficient.”

This is because complex systems — like laws, cities, or corporate processes — are the products of a thousand factors, each pulling in a different direction. And even if each factor is tidy taken separately, things quickly get messy when they all merge together

He applies this to management organization, the tool sets used by collaborators, city planning, science fiction visions of the future, parenting, and pizzas.

Not to mention that in one brief, beautiful essay he unites the themes of two of my books: Everything Is Miscellaneous and my new Everyday Chaos.

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Back when I was a lad, we experienced the absurdity of life by watching as ordinary things in the world shed their meanings the way the Nazi who opens the chest in Raiders of the Lost Ark loses his skin: it just melts away.

In this experience of meaninglessness, though, what’s revealed is not some other layer beneath the surface, but the fact that all meaning is just something we make up and project over things that are indifferent to whatever we care to drape over them.

If you don’t happen to have a holy ark handy, you can experience this meaninglessness writ small by saying the word “ketchup” over and over until it becomes not a word but a sound. The magazine “Forbes” also works well for this exercise. Or, if you are a Nobel Prize winning writer and surprisingly consistently wrong philosopher like Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps a chestnut tree will reveal itself to you as utterly alien and resistant to the meaning we keep trying to throw on to it.

That was meaninglessness in the 1950s and on. Today we still manage to find our everyday world meaningless, but now we don’t see ourselves projecting meanings outwards but instead imagine ourselves to be in a computer simulation. Why? Because we pretty consistently understand ourselves in terms of our dominant tech, and these days the video cards owned by gamers are close to photo realistic, virtual reality is creating vivid spatial illusions for us, and AI is demonstrating the capacity of computers to simulate the hidden logic of real domains.

So now the source of the illusory meaning that we had taken for granted reveals itself not to be us projecting the world out from our skull holes but to be super-programmers who have created our experience of the world without bothering to create an actual world.

That’s a big difference. Projecting meaning only makes sense when there’s a world to project onto. The experience of meaninglessness as simulation takes that world away.

The meaninglessness we experience assigns the absurdity not to the arbitrariness that has led us to see the world one way instead of another, but to an Other whom we cannot see, imagine, or guess at. We envision, perhaps, children outside of our time and space playing a video game (“Sims Cosmos”), or alien computer scientists running a test to see what happens using the rules they’ve specified this time. For a moment we perhaps marvel at how life-like are the images we see as we walk down a street or along a forest path, how completely the programmers have captured the feeling of a spring rain on our head and shoulders but cleverly wasted no cycles simulating any special feeling on the soles of our feet. The whole enterprise – life, the universe, and everything – is wiped out the way a computer screen goes blank when the power is turned off.

In the spirit of the age, the sense of meaninglessness that comes from the sense we’re in a simulation is not despair, for it makes no difference. Everything is different but nothing has changed. The tree still rustles. The spring rain still smells of new earth. It is the essence of the simulation that it is full of meaning. That’s what’s being simulated. It’s all mind without any matter, unlike the old revelation that the world is all matter without meaning. The new meaninglessness is absurd absurdity, not tragic absurdity. We speculate about The Simulation without it costing a thing. The new absurdity is a toy of thought, not a problem for life.

I am not pining for my years suffering from attacks of Old School Anxiety. It was depressing and paralyzing. Our new way of finding the world meaningless is playful and does not turn every joy to ashes. It has its own dangers: it can release one from any sense of responsibility – “Dude, sorry to have killed your cat, but it was just a simulation” – and it can sap some of the sense of genuineness out of one’s emotions. But not for long because, hey, it’s a heck of a realistic simulation.

But to be clear, I reject both attempts to undermine the meaningfulness of our experience. I was drawn to philosophical phenomenology precisely because it was a way to pay attention to the world and our experience, rather than finding ways to diminish them both.

Both types of meaninglessness, however, think they are opening our eyes to the hollowness of life, when in fact they are privileging a moment of deprivation as a revelation of truth, as if the uncertainty and situatedness of meaning is a sign that it is illusory rather than it being the ground of every truth and illusion itself.

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I’m at the STEAM ed Finland conference in Jyväskylä where Ulla Richardson is going to talk about GraphoLearn, an adaptive learning method for learning to read.

Ulla has been working on the Jyväskylä< Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). Globally, one third of people can’t read or have poor reading skills. One fifth of Europe also. About 15% of children have learning disabilities.

One Issue: knowing which sound goes with which letters. GraphoLearn is a game to help students with this, developed by a multidisciplinary team. You learn a word by connecting a sound to a written letter. Then you can move to syllables and words. The game teaches by trial and error. If you get it wrong, it immediately tells you the correct sound. It uses a simple adaptive approach to select the wrong choices that are presented. The game aims at being entertaining, and motivates also with points and rewards. It’s a multi-modal system: visual and audio. It helps dyslexics by training them on the distinctions between sounds. Unlike human beings, it never displays any impatience.

It adapts to the user’s skill level, automatically assessing performance and aiming at at 80% accuracy so that it’s challenging but not too challenging.

13,000 players have played in Finland, and more in other languages. Ulla displays data that shows positive results among students who use GraphoLearn, including when teaching English where every letter has multiple pronunciations.

There are some difficulties analyzing the logs: there’s great variability in how kids play the game, how long they play, etc. There’s no background info on the students. [I missed some of this.] There’s an opportunity to come up with new ways to understand and analyze this data.

Q&A

Q: Your work is amazing. When I was learning English I could already read Finnish, so I made natural mispronunciations of ape, anarchist, etc. How do you cope with this?

A: Spoken and written English are like separate languages, especially if Finnish is your first language where each letter has only one pronunciation. You need a bigger unit to teach a language like English. That’s why we have the Rime approach where we show the letters in more context. [I may have gotten this wrong.]

Q: How hard is it to adapt the game to each language’s logic?

A: It’s hard.

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I’m at the STEAM ed Finland conference in Jyväskylä. Mirka Saarela and Sanna Juutinen are talking about their analysis of education data.

There’s a triennial worldwide study by the OECD to assess students. Usually, people are only interested in its ranking of education by country. Finland does extremely well at this. This is surprising because Finland does not do particularly well in the factors that are taken to produce high quality educational systems. So Finnish ed has been studied extensively. PISA augments this analysis using learning analytics. (The US does at best average in the OECD ranking.)

Traditional research usually starts with the literature, develops a hypothesis, collects the data, and checks the result. PISA’s data mining approach starts with the data. “We want to find a needle in the haystack, but we don’t know what the needle looks like.” That is, they don’t know what type of pattern to look for.

Results of 2012 PISA: If you cluster all 24M students with their characteristics and attitudes without regard to their country you get clusters for Asia, developing world, Islamic, western countries. So, that maps well.

For Finland, the most salient factor seems to be its comprehensive school system that promotes equality and equity.

In 2015 for the first time there was a computerized test environment available. Most students used it. The logfile recorded how long students spent on a task and the number of activities (mouse clicks, etc.) as well as the score. They examined the Finnish log file to find student profiles, related to student’s strategies and knowledge. Their analysis found five different clusters. [I can’t read the slide from here. Sorry.] They are still studying what this tells us. (They purposefully have not yet factored in gender.)

Nov. 2017 results showed that girls did far better than boys. The test was done in a chat environment which might have been more familiar for the girls? Is the computerization of the tests affecting the results? Is the computerization of education affecting the results? More research is needed.

Q&A

Q: Does the clustering suggest interventions? E.g., “Slow down. Less clicking.”

A: [I couldn’t quite hear the answer, but I think the answer is that it needs more analysis. I think.]

Q: I work for ETS. Are the slides available?

A: Yes, but the research isn’t public yet.

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I’m at the STEAM ed Finland conference in Jyväskylä. Harri Ketamo is giving a talk on “micro-learning.” He recently won a prestigious prize for the best new ideas in Finland. He is interested in the use of AI for learning.

We don’t have enough good teachers globally, so we have to think about ed in new ways, Harri says. Can we use AI to bring good ed to everyone without hiring 200M new teachers globally? If we paid teachers equivalent to doctors and lawyers, we could hire those 200M. But we apparently not willing to do that.

One challenge: Career coaching. What do you want to study? Why? What are the skills you need? What do you need to know?

His company does natural language analysis — not word matches, but meaning. As an example he shows a shareholder agreement. Such agreements always have the same elements. After being trained on law, his company’s AI can create a map of the topic and analyze a block of text to see if it covers the legal requirements…the sort of work that a legal assistant does. For some standard agreements, we may soon not need lawyers, he predicts.

The system’s language model is a mess of words and relations. But if you zoom out from the map, the AI has clustered the concepts. At the Slush Sanghai conference, his AI could develop a list of the companies a customer might want to meet based on a text analysis of the companies’ web sites, etc. Likewise if your business is looking for help with a project.

Finland has a lot of public data about skills and openings. Universities’ curricula are publicly available.[Yay!] Unlike LinkedIn, all this data is public. Harri shows a map that displays the skills and competencies Finnish businesses want and the matching training offered by Finnish universities. The system can explore public information about a user and map that to available jobs and the training that is required and available for it. The available jobs are listed with relevancy expressed as a percentage. It can also look internationally to find matches.

The AI can also put together a course for a topic that a user needs. It can tell what the core concepts are by mining publications, courses, news, etc. The result is an interaction with a bot that talks with you in a Whatsapp like way. (See his paper “Agents and Analytics: A framework for educational data mining with games based learning”). It generates tests that show what a student needs to study if she gets a question wrong.

His newest project, in process: Libraries are the biggest collections of creative, educational material, so the AI ought to point people there. His software can find the common sources among courses and areas of study. It can discover the skills and competencies that materials can teach. This lets it cluster materials around degree programs. It can also generate micro-educational programs, curating a collection of readings.

His platform has an open an API. See Headai.

Q&A

Q: Have you done controlled experiments?

A: Yes. We’ve found that people get 20-40% better performance when our software is used in blended model, i.e., with a human teacher. It helps motivate people if they can see the areas they need to work on disappear over time.

Q: The sw only found male authors in the example you put up of automatically collated materials.

A: Small training set. Gender is not part of the metadata in Finland.

A: Don’t you worry that your system will exacerbate bias?

Q: Humans are biased. AI is a black box. We need to think about how to manage this

Q: [me] Are the topics generated from the content? Or do you start off with an ontology?

A: It creates its ontology out of the data.

Q: [me] Are you committing to make sure that the results of your AI do not reflect the built in biases?

A: Our news system on the Web presents a range of views. We need to think about how to do this for gender issues with the course software.

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