Elevators and guilt
I called up the elevator, then changed my mind and took the stairs instead. I felt a tinge of guilt for calling the elevator unnecessarily, imagining that it might feel disappointed or rejected when it was expecting someone to ride it but then there was nobody there.
But then I realized that I was projecting things on the elevator and quite likely it's used to people sometimes changing their minds, and it might have a healthy self-esteem where it doesn't take that personally. Yay for not feeling so responsible for the emotions of others!
(The above is of course said jokingly but it did feel like there was genuinely an old overly-concerned-with-the-feelings-of-others mindset raising its head. One so automatic and overly concerned that it'd even trigger when thinking about an elevator. Only for that feeling to then shift into something that felt more secure and grounded.)
One subtle difference between the scientific approach to truth and non-scientific approaches is that the former places (or aims to place) a high value on *accuracy*, while the latter often places a high value instead on *inerrancy*. The two objectives, though superficially similar, are actually not the same, and in fact opposed to each other in some fundamental ways. ("The perfect is the enemy of the good".)
By valuing inerrancy, one seeks to claim authority through never making, or at least never admitting, an error or mistake. If there is a conflict between one's authoritative statements and external observations or events, there is thus the incentive to find a rationalization that retains the former at the expense of the latter. To quote from "The Simpsons": "Am I so out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong".
Inerrancy is a binary concept - one is either inerrant, or one is not (and in the majority of situations, the latter is actually the case). In contrast, accuracy is a continuous concept - perfect accuracy is generally impossible outside of purely mathematical situations, and so the realistic objective is instead to achieve gradually higher, but still imperfect, levels of accuracy through better use of observations, models, and theory. This attitude is perhaps exemplified by George Box's well known dictum: "All models are wrong. Some are useful."
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I love that Box quote and have used it as a guiding principle throughout my scientific career.
Amusingly I happened to mention it once to my post doctoral advisor, Stephen Grossberg, who famously more or less invented the field of neural networks. To my surprise he would not accept the premise and argued with me how his own work disproved it. We never really agreed on anything after that.
of course it was simple mathematics, but symbolically was an introduction to the scientific method.
Hänen varjonsa piirtyy seinää vasten,
katselen hiljaa kun hänen siluettinsa pukeutuu.
Haluaisin mennä silittämään hänen kättään,
sanomaan rakastavani häntä,
mutta hän ei pidä häiriöistä kesken aamun kiireiden.
Hän haluaa nukkua pitkään ja keskeytyksettä
ja sitten lähteä nopeasti ja viime hetkellä töihin
kun minä toivoisin läheisyyttä,
varhain heräämistä ja sylikkäin käpertymistä.
Hän heittää suuhunsa nopean paahtoleivän,
mutisee jotain takaisin hyvän päivän toivotukseeni.
Mutta hänen lähdettyyään ovesta
puhelimeni värisee,
ja näen sydämen jonka hän on lähettänyt
astuttuaan bussiin ja saatuaan
vihdoin hetken hengähtää.
Vastaan siihen sydämellä,
ja mietin mahtaako hän hymyillä sille,
vai ajatteleeko hän jo töitä.
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Finland: Look at the amount of sunlight! It's spring!
Finland: Also if you go outside on a walk to enjoy the spring, it'll be so cold that one of these pairs of gloves isn't enough to keep your fingers warm, you'll need to stack them on top of other
Finland: Unless you end up walking in direct sunlight of course, then you'll get too hot with those. Enjoy this set of constraints. ☺️
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It's silly how dramatic this manages to be, I feel mildly pumped up from watching it
How To Make a Blockbuster Movie Trailer
Reminds me of Charlie Brooker's classic How To Report The News.
This is one of the most romantic pictures I've ever seen
Artist: Rosemary Mosco, birdandmoon.com/
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I think the term "AGI" is a bit of a historical artifact, it was coined before the deep learning era when previous AI winters had made everyone in the field reluctant to think they could make any progress toward general intelligence. Instead, all AI had to be very extensively hand-crafted to the application in question. And then some people felt like they still wanted to do research on what the original ambition of AI had been, and wanted a term that'd distinguish them from all the other people who said they were doing "AI".
So it was a useful term to distinguish yourself from the very-narrow AI research back then, but now that AI systems are already increasingly general, it doesn't seem like a very useful concept anymore and it'd be better to talk in terms of more specific cognitive capabilities that a system has or doesn't have.
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Foundational childhood experiences
my mom shared the story that I had, at age 11, reluctantly allowed her to cut my hair
after she was done, I had gone to a mirror, looked at the result, and commented nothing other than "my lawyer will be in touch"
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Achievement unlocked
I've lived in this apartment for a year and a half and today used the dishwasher for the first time
(I find it easier to just use the same dishes each time and wash them by hand, but sometimes I have guests who also use something and now it finally became easier to run it)
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jarimarkus
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