holy vs profane

I think they destroyed the Latin language as well, the Catholic Church. One comment again from theology: when they translated the texts from Latin or from Vulgar method into vernaculars. Because then, when you do, you try to market our religion as something useful, but before it was something holy, this whole thing.

You notice that the reason the Pope presented, he said that it’s to increase the number of Catholics. In fact, the Church contracted at the time, when compared to Islam, where you have one-and-a-half-billion Muslims praying in a language they don’t understand so visibly.

It’s exactly the same thing, is that its separating the holy and profane. Don’t translate to vernacular the beautiful Latin things. Likewise, do not try to make poetry or literature or history — do not make it practical.

Just make the people study for their own sake, just like you go to church. It’s not for anything practical. You don’t go to church because you’re going to meet an employer. You go to church to go to church. Likewise, we have to separate these two.

- Bryan Caplan and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on What’s Missing in Education

The reason why religion is not a subset of philosophy is because it is primarily concerned with appreciating rather than understanding. A core set of beliefs and attitudes are agreed upon, preserved and supplemented with rituals.

Buddhism's emphasis of experience over text is very spot on in the sense that the subject matter of religion is fundamentally impossible to articulate. (Meditation properly done is experimental metaphysics.) The transcendental can not and should not be put in words which are profane mortal creations and may arise a false feeling of understanding. (It is not a coincidence that songs in languages we do not understand move us more deeply.)

Religious thinking calmly ties all causal chains to a single source. Secular thinking democratizes self-referentiality and then hastily tries to loop each causal chain onto itself.* (That is why secular minds are always so busy.) But once you remove the monolithically centralized node of God, then there is no absolute good or evil any more. (Yes, you are right, this is a reference to Nietzsche.) In other words, you are completely fucked. You need to come up with profane reasons to do anything, including the act of going to church, as Taleb exemplifies above. Moreover, those reasons will inevitably be of the type that can not stand on its own. The insecurity caused by such open-ended trails of thinking will be left for some other time to be dealt with. Like a technical debt, this insecurity will grow until it breaks you down and you find yourself either talking to some stranger claiming mastery over human psyche or bending into arcane positions on a sweaty yoga mat or browsing self-help books in one of those stupid bookstores with a coffee shop inside it. All with the hope you will be able to loop those God damn causal chains back onto themselves.

* Democratization operator has been a defining feature of modernism. For instance, as I mentioned in a previous post, democracy, capitalism and social media democratized respectively power, money and fame.

progressing up the mastery levels

As your ear becomes increasingly discriminative, you start enjoying more complex pieces of music. Same goes for your mind, eyes and tongue. You leave your favorites behind as you move up the mastery levels.

This is one of the reasons why test of time is so effective. Not only you make the environmental stochasticity work in your favor but you also benefit from the fact that your filtering mechanisms are improving over time.

I personally find these dynamics kind of scary. When you keep discarding what (and who) you used to hold dear to your heart, life starts losing its meaning little by little. It is just a matter of time when what you hold on to now will look tasteless. 

What is really great? What is really true? I do not think we could even recognize the truly great if it was staring us in the face today. 

How does it feel like to be up there at the highest level of maturity? Is there even such a final level? If not, then there is no hope that the truth will ever be accessible to us.

a visual affair

We vastly overvalue visual input over other sources of sensual inputs since most of our bandwidth is devoted to vision:

Source: David McCandless - The Beauty of Data Visualization (The small white corner represents the total bandwidth that we can actually be aware of.)

This bias infiltrates both aesthetics and science:

• The set of people you find beautiful will change drastically if you lose your eyesight. (Get a full body massage and you will see what I mean.)

• We explain auditory phenomenon in terms of mathematical metaphors that burgeoned out of visual inputs. There are no mathematical metaphors with auditory origin, and therefore no scientific explanations of visual phenomenon in terms of auditory expressions. Rationality is a strictly visual affair. In fact, the word "idea" has etymological roots going back to the Greek word "Edeo" - "to see". (No wonder why deep neural networks mimicking the structure of our visual system has become so successful in machine learning challenges.)

proxies as wormholes

Remember your goals and actively seek out robust correlations. In practice only the goals matter, the actual parameters you use do not. Shortest paths and fairest judgements often lie in parallel universes which are accessible only via proxies.

Truth is lonely, overrated and impractical, its neighbourhood on the other hand is rich and fruitful.

rediscovery as a byproduct

Nietzsche understood something that I did not find explicitly stated in his work: that growth in knowledge - or in anything - cannot proceed without the Dionysian. It reveals matters that we can select at some point, given that we have optionality. In other words, it can be the source of stochastic tinkering, and the Apollonian can be part of the rationality in the selection process.

Antifragile - Nicholas Nassim Taleb (Page 256)

Freud understood much better than Münsterberg did the immense power of the unconscious, but he thought that repression, rather than a dynamic act of creation on the part of the unconscious, was the reason for the gaps and inaccuracies in our memory; while Münsterberg understood much better than Freud did the mechanics and the reasons for memory distortion and loss - but had no sense at all of the unconscious processes that created them.

Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow (Page 62-63)

We kept rediscovering the same dichotomy throughout the history:

• Apollonian vs. Dionysian (Literature)
• Rational vs. Irrational (Philosophy)
• Conscious vs. Unconscious (Psychology)

Rediscovery is a byproduct of containerisation and can be avoided by greater multi-disciplinarianness.

fairness as a necessity

There is no such thing as an observer independent event. All the major breakthroughs in physics can be attributed to the slow and painful realisation of this fact.

Relational thinking is quiet tricky. (Even Einstein could not match Mach's relational ambitions!) We instinctively believe that we share a single unified reality. This of course is a necessary illusion since each one of us is confined to a single point of view. It is only when we try to switch points of view and insist on a single underlying reality do absurdities start to emerge.

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Consider the notions of fairness and justice. These concepts come automatically with relational thinking. One is forced to listen to all sides of a story because there is no such thing as the story. There are only story-observer pairs. In other words, fairness is built into the very ontology of nature.

Perhaps the difficulty of getting our heads around relational thinking has got to do with the difficulty of being fair.

3 pillars of risk analysis

At Urbanstat, our philosophy of risk analysis is all-embracing and rests on three complementary pillars each of which has its own upsides and downsides.

 

Statistical Modeling

Generally speaking, risk analysis has always been about deciphering statistical patterns. What has changed over time is the sophistication of the models employed. Simple linear models have been discarded in favor of ensemble models that combine different types of approaches and go beyond the traditional least square estimation techniques.

Hence, in some sense, the modeling community has embraced the values of the post-modern world where no approach is deemed to be inherently correct. Every approach has its own unique context-dependent set of advantages and disadvantages.

As Urbanstat, we use ensembles consisting of decision trees and neural networks to help insurers detect the high-risk customers. Since we only know the fate of the accepted policies, we can warn the underwriters only about risks that they are willing to accept but should not. In other words, statistical modeling cannot warn about false negatives, policies that are being rejected but should not. Despite this fact that we can only see one side of the moon, we can still create enormous value for our clients, helping them see the complex statistical patterns that go unnoticed.

Models are tailor-made for each of our clients. We clean and enrich the data sets, supervise the variable and model selection processes. We work closely with our clients to ensure that the resulting decision-making assistance suits their risk appetite.

Downsides:

• Cannot detect false negatives
• Cannot provide humanly comprehensible reasons for rejection

Upsides:

• Unlocks humanly incomprehensible complex patterns
• Improves continuously over time

Physical Modeling

Unlike most other types of risks, due to their mechanical physical nature, geographical risks can be gauged even in complete absence of past policy/claims data. In this sense, Urbanstat’s geographical focus has provided it an important fallback option when statistical analysis is not feasible.

Catastrophe modeling is hard because catastrophes are both complex and rare. We either import external models or develop our in-house ones if we believe that we can do a better job than the existing alternatives.

Our ultimate vision is to become completely model agnostic by establishing a marketplace where institutions (companies, universities etc.) can put up their catastrophe models for sale. After all, as in the ensemble approach to statistical modeling, conjunctional use of different physical models often improves the outcomes.

Downsides:

• Cannot be updated very frequently
• May have a high margin of error depending on the complexity of what is being modeled

Upsides:

• Can help the underwriter even in complete absence of past policies/claims within the region concerned
• Helps build further human intuition via visual layers

Human Intelligence & Institutional Policies

Although there are talks of complete automation of underwriting services, we believe that it will not happen anytime soon. Machine intelligence and human intelligence work in different ways and each have their own advantages. That is why the hybrid approach always performs better, even in very well-defined contexts like chess games.

Moreover, one should never forget that it is the humans that provide the data sets that machine learning algorithms get trained on. Hence there is always a continuous need for human inputs.

In Urbanstat, we allow underwriters to easily draw authorization regions and add flexible if-then rules on these regions. Through this general mechanism, they can incorporate into their risk analysis framework all the institutional policies and individual insights.

Downsides:

• Subject to human and organizational biases
• Can get complex to manage and monitor as the underwriter team scales

Upsides:

• Adds anticipative power to the whole framework
• Improves statistical models that feed on human decisions

socialness, consciousness and smartness

Degree of Socialness

While humans can easily handle fourth-order intentionality chains like "I think that X thinks that Y thinks that Z thinks something", nonhuman primates seem to be capable of handling only first or second-order intentionality chains. This difference is thought to correspond to our greater social skills. (No wonder why “four” is often taken as an optimum number of active characters in any given movie scene. Spectators desire to be stimulated to the upper bound of their capabilities.)

The degree of mind-simulation capability determines the size of the Dunbar's number, which for humans is 150 and defined as the "cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person."

Some people are apparently even capable of handling sixth-order intentionality chains. In other words, they are both physically and mentally six degrees away from any other person in the world. (i.e. They can mentally simulate their entire social network one-intentionality-chain at a time.)

Children start to demonstrate theory of mind at roughly around the same time that they start to recognise themselves in the mirror. “You have to be aware of yourself in the first place in order to begin to take into account what other people may know, want, or intend to do,” Gallup says. He notes that people with schizophrenia often cannot recognise themselves in the mirror, and they struggle with theory of mind as well.

What Do Animal See in a Mirror? - Chelsea Wald

We understand others via empathy which is the ability of put oneself in other's place. Hence, it is not surprising that you are able to recognise yourself in the mirror only once you are able to formulate first-order intentionality chains. (You are literally projecting yourself onto your reflection.)

In the time between the original Homo species and ourselves, the brain doubled in size. A disproportionate share of that growth occurred in the frontal lobe, and so it stands to reason that the frontal lobe is the location of some of the specific qualities that make humans human. What does this expanded structure do to enhance our survival ability to a degree that might have justified nature's favouring it? ...In addition to regions associated with motor movements, the frontal lobe contains a structure called prefrontal cortex. "Prefrontal" means, literally, "in front of the front" and that's where the prefrontal cortex sits, just behind the forehead. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for planning and orchestrating our thoughts and actions in accordance with our goals, integrating conscious thought, perception and emotion; it is thought to be the seat of our consciousness.

Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow (Page 102-103)

The fact that the size of a species' neocortex as a percentage of its whole brain is correlated with the size of its social group implies that the relationship between self-consciousness and intentionality chains extends to higher orders too.

By the way, isn't it poetic that we feel a tender desire to touch our foreheads with the loved ones? We are literally trying to merge our consciousnesses!

Degree of Consciousness

Since consciousness is just a model of the brain itself (as pointed out in the previous blog post), we expect the volume reserved to consciousness (presumably the neocortex) to grow at the same rate as the volume of the whole brain (what is being modelled). Relative increases in the size of the neocortex as a percentage of the whole brain could be due to improvements in the fidelity of the models themselves. 

Hence, one could define "higher degree" of consciousness as any of the following equivalent statements:

• Higher fidelity cognitive models

• Less information being lost during the cognitive modelling processes

• Higher number of nested past selves one can be cognisant of at any given moment in time

Armed with this definition, the conclusion of the previous section can be rephrased as follows: The more "copies" of ourselves available to us at any given moment in time, the deeper we can simulate other minds. In other words, conscientiousness and consciousness are in some sense the same thing.

Degree of Smartness

Remember the old blog post on empathy and truth?

There we claimed that empathy allows one to get closer to truth since understanding takes place through causal statements like "A -> B" and these statements can be internalised only by literally putting ourselves in places of whatever A and B are. In other words, mental simulation of inanimate phenomena uses the same principle as that of social phenomena.

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations among things; outside these relations there is no reality knowable.

- Henri Poincare

What the great mathematician Poincare is saying here is that all understanding is relational. A and B literally have to be taken as black boxes. The only thing that we can probe is the relationship between them as depicted by the arrow sign "->". (Note that this is the essence of Category Theory.)

In some sense, the conscious self is the most canonical black box at our disposal. (We can not peek into the pronoun "I".) By projecting ourselves onto A, we temporarily replace A with "I" to gain an understanding of A's relationship with other objects.

Summing up, the degrees of all of the following are correlated via the notion of empathy:

• Socialness - as defined by the experimentally-measurable maximum-length of intentionality chains one is capable of simulating

• Consciousness - as defined by the experimentally-inaccessible maximum-number of nested past selves one can be cognisant of at any given moment in time

• Smartness - as defined by the experimentally-measurable maximum-length of causality chains one is capable of simulating

truth and happiness

Happiness hides inside echo chambers, meanwhile truth lies outside the boxes. Happiness is a calm stasis. Truth is an endless struggle. These two concepts are as incompatible as any two concepts can get.

It is not a coincidence that the world's greatest oppressors have oppressed in the name of truth.

We have a natural inclination to care about happiness, not truth. Structures that require us to care about truth (e.g. company boards, research institutions) are cognitively repugnant since their very functionality is based on constancy of cognitive dissonance.

Truth emerges from balance and integration across many points of view, and therefore is boring. Truth in fact should be boring. (That is why the click-bait way of doing science is so dangerous.) Hence it never goes viral. You literally need to put a fight to spread truth around. Happiness on the other hand is automatically viral because it gets amplified with further synchrony.

philosophy of neural pruning

The difference between math and science is baked into our brains.

Math is perfect knowledge. A mathematical statement is either true or false. But a finite brain can not cope with the incredible amount of data flowing from its environment by using such a perfect knowledge framework. Instead it uses a statistical pattern recognition framework that does not have a black-or-white view on how the world works.

The mind is pragmatic. It builds and discards models on the go without giving a shit about their ontological status. In fact, anything with a sufficiently low probability of occurrence is deemed not to exist at all. (Neural pruning is conducted using non-zero thresholds.)