I am still reading Charles Dickens’ Tale of two cities. i am reading it slow. I want to make sure I grasped every single thing in there with full depth. the first installment of the book ends with Mr. Lorry’s plan to revive Mr. Manette from Bastille prison who was wrongfully imprisoned there for 18 years. The context of 1775 where people did not trust each other much is revealed. the robbery, violence and all sorts of betrayal for the sake of Money and power. it was all there. Dickens is characterizing a particular aspect of the society where all these immoral things appeared as if they were the unbreakable parts of the era. I am starting to get hooked to the book. will be reading it more as soon as I have more time. but for now I am still contemplating on the opening paragraph “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of light, it was the epoch of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the spring of darkness…’ such a profound prose. I will be remembering this by heart. it reads like a poem. better yet it reads like the reality of every situation we have been through and we will be encountering.
Karl Popper’s comes to mind. I saw a twitter post where Taleb was saying you have to understand your opponent’s position so good as if it were your own. tHis is basically how popper’s books are written. if you read his criticisms of marxism in open society and its enemies, he at first lays out arguments as if he were a marxist. then he goes on to dismantle all the flaws marxism contains. I guess that’s what you call critical thinking and good faith argument. knowledge gets enough room to grow with such an attitude. after all while differing in the bits we know here and there in the vast ignorance we are all equal. we are all fallible. only good explanations and good faith argument can help the march of new knowledge towards new frontiers. shouting match in social media won’t help much. I am moving away more and more from any forms of bad faith arguments in social media. I am using it to augment my cognitive processing tool. so yeah this shift in the thought has helped me understand the nuances with an open mind.
we tend to anthropomorphize AI these days a lot. what if it gains consciousness. what if it is a sentient being plotting against the humanity. we get these arguments floating around a lot. but we ignore the study of the development of cognition in infants and toddlers. reality is more compute and data won’t add much to the process,. it is a sigmoid curve and is already plateauing in its effectiveness. we can get out of the plateaued land only if we understand what intelligence even means. that is the burning question. yet I see billions dollars on increasing the scale only. not increasing the effort to understand human intelligence and how it develops by observing kids. how do kids learn. humans don’t have as much compute power as these modern llms machines. yet we are far superior in reasoning and understanding the phenomena nature. its just that our memory is limited not as big as llms powered chatbots. there is a lesson to learn. the shift needs to made where relatively small memory space is needed to develop AGI of our dreams. at least to develop the human level cognition. our best bet to imitate human intelligence is by studying closely how kids operate within their cognitive frames.
Daily Thoughts 