Bibs and bobs #8
Literature and research
A post derived from a paper the author wrote about the role of literature in AI research brought to mind an idea I have been clumsily wrangling with, of what I have called intellectual path dependence. Path dependence is a well established idea that articulates with my ongoing interest in material semiotics. One of the more famous and colourful instances of path dependence is retold by Kevin Kelly [1]:
There’s an old story about the long reach of early choices that is basically true: Ordinary Roman carts were constructed to match the width of imperial Roman war chariots because it was easier to follow the ruts in the road left by the war chariots. The chariots were sized to accommodate the width of two large warhorses, which translates into our English measurement of 4' 8.5". Roads throughout the vast Roman Empire were built to this specification. When the legions of Rome marched into Britain, they constructed long-distance imperial roads 4' 8.5" wide. When the English started building tram ways, they used the same width so the same horse carriages could be used. And when they started building railways with horseless carriages, naturally the rails were 4' 8.5" wide. Imported laborers from the British Isles built the first railways in the Americas using the same tools and jigs they were used to. Fast-forward to the U.S. space shuttle, which is built in parts around the country and assembled in Florida. Because the two large solid-fuel rocket engines on the side of the launch shuttle were sent by railroad from Utah, and that line traversed a tunnel not much wider than the standard track, the rockets themselves could not be much wider in diameter than 4' 8.5". As one wag concluded: “So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses’ arse.” More or less, this is how technology constrains it self over time.
Academic publishing is, of course, an exercise in demonstrating path dependence, i.e. that research builds on or adds to the research work of others. The standard practice is to make a statement and support it by citing one or more sources that you imply support the statement. I sometimes find it amusing to see how others have bent the arguments of my research to best suit their purpose. This is a phenomenon more common in the sciences of the social. There is much to say about the citation game but for another time.
What I puzzle about are the dots that have been well connected and reinforced over time in brain-1 [2], think the width of Roman war chariots. Those connections are further reinforced in brain-2 [3] which has links that don’t fade over time.
I guess it is the last point in the Kelly quote that bothers me, how my thinking gets constrained over time as I join more dots and particularly those that are already a dense set of connections.
I suppose this kind of assembling of stuff around core ideas is what the species does, pattern matching, which relates to what Leonard Mlodinow draws attention to in his book Subliminal [4]:
As it turns out, the brain is a decent scientist but an absolutely outstanding lawyer. The result is that in the struggle to fashion a coherent, convincing view of ourselves and the rest of the world, it is the impassioned advocate that usually wins over the truth seeker. We’ve seen in earlier chapters how the unconscious mind is a master at using limited data to construct a version of the world that appears realistic and complete to its partner, the conscious mind.
Protecting one’s butt is a good thing I suppose but perhaps not when it goes to the lengths that Mlodinow illustrates with this example:
For example, in the 1950s and ’60s a debate raged about whether the universe had had a beginning or whether it had always been in existence. One camp supported the big bang theory, which said that the cosmos began in a manner indicated by the theory’s name. The other camp believed in the steady state theory, the idea that the universe had always been around, in more or less the same state that it is in today. In the end, to any disinterested party, the evidence landed squarely in support of the big bang theory, especially after 1964, when the afterglow of the big bang was serendipitously detected by a pair of satellite communications researchers at Bell Labs. That discovery made the front page of the New York Times, which proclaimed that the big bang had won out. What did the steady state researchers proclaim? After three years, one proponent finally accepted it with the words “The universe is in fact a botched job, but I suppose we shall have to make the best of it.” Thirty years later, another leading steady state theorist, by then old and silver-haired, still believed in a modified version of his theory.
I guess this is why science can sometimes appear to move ahead one burial at a time.
And, while I’m joining dots, the two hemisphere hypothesis popularised by Iain McGilchrist [5] adds beautifully to my puzzling:
The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it. Meanwhile, compounding the problem, we take the success we have in manipulating it as proof that we understand it.
If your head does not hurt by now, the drugs are likely working.
Research in education: delegating work to machines
I gave a short, intentionally provocative presentation at an internal education research conference recently which I plan to turn into a short working paper [6]. I was trying to point to the insular nature of much of educational research. I made the analogy with a surfer that only goes to one beach to surf, compared to surfers who go to a variety of beaches. The beaches were crude analogies for intellectual fields in education, e.g. critical sociology, developmental psychology, poststructural feminism etc.
Being good at surfing at a particular beach has its advantages. It helps progress an academic career but if all you do is work the one beach you miss all of the different opportunities that appear on different beaches, i.e. you more or less insulate yourself from the hummingbird effect via the always interesting and prolific Steven Johnson [7].
In the brief conversation that followed my pitch, another Steven, Hodge, offered another view of education’s silo positioning. It was that, very crudely paraphrasing, other fields did not value what education had to offer. Much more to say about that.
Delegating research work to a machine
I’ll try and put together a useful list of apps that might be used to support research tasks. In the interim, Azeem Azhar has a brief commentary on Metaphor and Elicit both of which I have been playing with for some time.
What does AI think of humans?
A fun post by Alberto Romero about a wee experiment he did, having two AIs have a conversation about humans.
There is quite a bit of fun to be had with large language models as Janelle Shane has shown with many examples.
Along similar lines, a fun bit of GPT-3 wrangling: A conversation in which I teach GPT-3 to read a book by Henrik Karlsson.
[1] Kelly, K. (2010). What Technology Wants. Penguin, pp 180-181.
[2] The meat computer that sits on my shoulders.
[3] I keep my zettelkasten in an app called DEVONthink (OSX only).
[4] Mlodinow, L. (2012). Subliminal : the revolution of the new unconscious and what it teaches us about ourselves (1st ed.). Allen Lane.
[5] McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.
[6] Don’t hold you breath.
[7] Johnson, S. (2014). How we got to now : six innovations that made the modern world. Riverhead Books.
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