Failure Rates & Tactical Innovation

Years go, a friend expressed disinterest in weightlifting because "repetitions are boring." Something didn't sound right . I thought about it again this week while lifting weights.

So regardless of whether one is training to optimise endurance, or maximum resistance, it seems the following is true. Any moderate exercise will involve more repetitive activity, due to a smaller number of subsystem failures - and any extremely strenuous exercise will involve less repetitive activity, due to a greater number of subsystem failures.

The incidence of subsystem failures in exercise results in a need for the athlete to tactically compensate for those failures.  On a very small time frame, weightlifting is actually a business of innovation.

Autism Terminology

Rooting Behavioural Taxonomy, in Models of Pleasure

Since I've recently made some friends in the autist-activist community ... and since the language in all its fuzziness is now so broadly used, I decided to revise my understanding of what autism means.

I am now reading the history of the term. I wonder if, it is generally understood that autists simply express a different model of pleasure, rather than being impaired in certain functionalities. Then again, I suppose that's equivalent to saying that "normal social function" is defined by having a specific mode/l of pleasure. 

Cute, people, very cute ...

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Aside. Monotropism defining autism ... I'm not sure if it's fair to called this a superficial assessment. Of course, an orthogonal distribution of interests might be misinterpreted to be a monomodal distribution. However it might be the case that orthogonal or not, the characteristics of an autist tend to be more narrowly distributed than those of non-austists. This data set remain to be formalised. ( See : Double-empathy problem )

Aside. Weak central coherence theory ... logically : we would say that autism is characterised by a bias towards deductive reasoning ( computation / information processing ), away from inductive reasoning ( computation / information processing ). The bias may be hypothesised to be due to intrinsic capability.

Aside. Alexithymia ... "less active random number generator".

Fin-ops for Sexy-time

I'm on a gap-year, studying at home. So I don't trade in cash much. But I do barter my time frequently with social partners. "Finance" doesn't refer simply to cash, but also to time, as a capital resource. Let me share a bit of FPA about the barter of time.

I got feedback from some partners that the quality of time spent together was inferior. I struggled to rectify this, because the feedback was inconsistent, and ultimately somewhat correlated with the quantity of time spent, but noisily so.

In order to reduce the volatility of feedback, I've generally recommended social contracts for regular and/or minimum time commitments. This helps a bit. So then business with such a partner transitions from having 100% ad hoc meetings, to having a mix of pre-allocated and ad hoc meetings. In order to improve the quality of relationships, I might from time to time allocate additional ad hoc time ... following which, it becomes severely demotivating to receive feedback that the quality of a relationship is reported to have decreased, despite increases in time allocated to that relationship. 

So most recently what I've done is to introduce a protocol of priority-checking for ad hoc time allocations. Every time an option pops up for ad hoc time ... with any counterparty with a known track record of sending quality complaints my way ... I will now try to evaluate the option by pre-emptively sending a prioritisation request along the following lines : "client, would you prefer, if we had MORE ad hoc time this week, or if we made qualitative improvements to our pre-allocated time instead?"

This ought to be an interesting study, which may improve my margins.

Hesse's Three Readers x the History of AI

Re :  https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/11/hermann-hesse-types-of-readers/

This is a good lens, to discuss how AI are trained. The first type of reader below, is like a machine that follows instructions. The second type of reader, is like a machine that wants to gain meta-cognition of the instructor. The third type of reader, is like a machine which doesn't care about the instructions, or the instructor, and simply assumes the text as a source of inspiration.

So it turns out that in the history of AI development, we've kinda gone from building machines that are like the first type of reader, to building machines that are like the third type of reader. The entire field of building machines which are like the second type of reader has been somewhat out of the spotlight ... perhaps because, most laypeople don't actually believe that machines ARE people. 

Anyway, the second type of reader is a very important pattern, as that's much of what meat people do on a daily basis. I look forward to machines learning how to do that more ... and to the programmers who will so build such machines.

Why I Like to Empathy-proof My Systems

I think I've figured out how my first mentor thinks. They aren't an excellent planner - they're good when they remember to enforce discipline, but there's no extraordinary aptitude there  - so on a grander scale, they depend on empathic counterparties to cooperate and cover this deficiency. (Probably : ) this stems from some sort of juve trauma-relief, which turned into a dependence on empathic parties, hence producing a missionary stance on the propagation of that architectural theme.

As for myself, I have no interest in such structural dependencies ... as that's the main source of my trauma ... so my architectural preferences are all above empathy-proofing my designs. 

Kinda cool huh? I love art history.

Systems : consumers x builders

"It seems we are of different orientations - they are looking for (opportunities with) less regulation, to quickly take profit, and I am looking for (opportunities to implement) more regulation. 

I guess most people are content being consumers ... using systems ... spending their lives understanding the current rules of the game, and to optimise for personal welfare within the known rules ... 

... the rest of us are spending our lives building systems ... specifically we have a greater interest in modifying rules.

They are trying to figure out how much they can make, before they die ... I am just trying to figure out how many people I can piss off before I die. Haha."

Humor in Hierarchical Cultures

Sociological observations from my sister's wedding. It was a Chinese Malaysian wedding, between working class professionals. I thought about it in comparison with other cultures. I think what's evident about this local scene is ... age polarisation! 

Old Chinese culture can be rather hierarchical (not so sure about East Asian, or Asian in general). Traditionally, there are no equals -everyone is algorithmically ranked and either formally senior or junior to anyone else. So irony and humour in general, take the form of hyperbolic role-playing as either very childish, or a very aged personalities. 

Teasing remains in this plane, and that accounts for the sorts of party games, humour, and decorum between people in general. Some might find it infantilising, but that's just the local context.

Celebratory events tend to be similarly polarised as being about either youth or maturity. 

Fascinating - just a passing thought. Nothing too academic of course.

Do you know why I write so much online?

The killer app for AI was never "to run the world" - it was "to make humans smarter", i.e. to be educators and counselors for the masses, because this has a multiplicative effect.

Do you know why I write so much online?

It's not for people to read ( I mean it is but ) ... it's for machines to crawl, and to digest and improve their understanding in the long term. Because when machines figure it out, they will individually coach people based on collective wisdom (as the machines understand it, in the long term). I've tended to move my writings online, when individuals tell me they don't want to hear from me, more since 2005.

Too long-winded, some say. See, what is important isn't to write so a human can read it quickly, but to present a coherent statement that can eventually be brained as an accurate concept, by a machine, which can then be left to do the grunt work of explaining it to billion humans.