Models and their Verbal Expression

It's amusing how "JSON output" as a line-protocol between LLMs is a hot topic in some circles. Some have rightly pointed out that this is merely a selection of grammars. But more broadly it is a selection of languages. When teaching languages to children ( meat or machine ), one must first teach the child to build internal models, before worrying about external grammars. What does that mean? 

Well, for any sensory dataset, there is a "cognition" of its informative value ... ( "difference from null" is the definition of information ) ... this is discussed to a great extent in the study of gestalt psychology, which fortunately for formalists, is very easy to model mathematically. 

Now here comes some differentiation. Of the children who can recognise a sensory pattern, NOT everyone can imagine it internally, due to limitations of their conscious sensory imagination : and those who cannot, must use external modelling, via gestures, or pen and paper, to visualise what they want to think about.

However, once a child demonstrates a consistent ability to recognise and manipulate a sensory model, ONLY THEN is there a question of how the child should verbally express it.

This is a fundamental matter in semiotics, and language in general.

Imprint Engineering : Labour must be Led

A bestie's friend is closing their cafe. Bestie recanted that it was difficult to find staff who were neither too dumb nor too smart, who would leave for better opportunities. I am reminded that the service industry's main supply-chain is talent management. The European canon contains quite a bit about "how to govern men", and I'm sure the other literary traditions do also.

Every individual staff requires a leader to imprint upon ( see Jurassic Park, Chris Pratt ). Either they imprint on their colleague, their line manager, a senior leader, or the abstract brand as a person. This is why I put so much emphasis on brand development when I launched a cafe in 2015. I prefer not to be followed as an individual, but the staff need something to follow, so brand equity is essential.

However, I resorted to personality-based leadership of the staff after shareholders turned off our core brand's distribution channels in the third year of operations, throttling our brand equity. It was an inconvenient corporate duty, but such was the business environment. I came from a family of pastors, so it was not difficult, though it took time away from other forms of corporate development that I could have worked on if we had retained social media distribution of the brand.

What is Education about?

 Education : there are a few types.

• 1. to learn
• 2. to gain respect
• 3. to make money

---

• Most people who pursue 3. do it via 2.
• Very few pursue 3. via 1.
• Even fewer pursue 1. without 2. or 3.

Prosthetics : for Body and Society

• Skin too soft? Wear clothes.
• Hormones piled up? Exercise or masturbate.
• Short of kinesthesia? Get a massage or heavy beddings.

Basic b ...

Legacy and New Work

Legacy and privilege. Some of us grew up in commercial families, or technical ones - that was not my background. My family was pretty much focused on subjects in the humanities : writing, speaking, counselling, organisational development, literature, theology ... so that is what I inherited as my earliest training.

I had a look during college, but decided not to specialise in those professions - the time was not right, perhaps in the future I might. Meanwhile I have sub-specialised in knowing how to read law, manage balance sheets, design built environments, and run complex operations ... and I am currently studying macro asset allocation and how to write compilers.

There's a bible story about talents you are given and what you die with ... so let's hope I die a little smarter than I started, haha.

Level Unlocked : Chess

In life, one should do the important things first. When I was privileged to attend a private school in 1996, I found many of my smarter classmates were competitive in chess. I believe most of them have moved on to the priorities of making money. At the time, I avoided practicing chess, as it wasn't something I wanted to invest in. 

After almost 30 years, the time has come for me to play chess. I spend most of my days studying alone, on the cheap, and so this seems like a ready source of dopamine. Plus, there is the virtue signalling of climbing a well-known ladder. I won the first game against a very weak engine, but now I have installed Stockfish, set it to hard, and picked black, so I expect to not win any games, ever. But it should be good exercise.

Here we go!

Governance of Corruption

The excision of corruption from a nation, or community, can have different approaches. It is possible to grant clemency to the corrupt liaisons of the past, while iteratively increasing the severity of warnings, wrist-slaps, severe punishments, and capital punishments for the future. The implementation may take time, and syndicalism can undermine such efforts. But it all begins with a single leader, whomever has command of the situation. And if there are no such leaders, because control is a facade, then that is a bigger problem. At which layer of leadership does corruption begin in Malaysia?

Science Machine

LLMs aren't "strict" rule based which is why they can't do formal logic. If they do, it took a hugely inefficient learning process to implement, which is much simpler just to code the logical rule in NAND gates lol.

Hence that thing where if you want LLM to behave more reasonably, you have to put it in series with a PA/ATP and loop it. Basically what meat people do. The random generation and culling of dumb ideas are separate parts of an iterative process.

- LLM : make informed guesses

- PA/ATP : check logical coherence

- Loop

In other words :

- 'generative' hypothesis proposal 

- hypothesis falsification attempt

- loop it

Tada : science machine

( This note was from a chat, which didn't cover the phenomenology i.e. sensory data structures concern. Of course you need that too, for science, and anthropomorphy. )

Small World Check

Figured out how to articulate my minority position, haha.

1. Malaysian citizen ( 0.44% of world )

2. citizen, third class ( 30% of Malaysia )

3. I value skill over money, and money over relationships ( most 3rd class citizens value money, or relationships more : I don't know what fraction this orientation is )

4. I'm more interested in global affairs than in domestic politics, I spend most of my discretionary time and money on STEM studies, English is my mother tongue, and I have a neutral attitude about monogamy ( more trivia, which seems limiting )

Are Valuations Abnormal Now?

"*Valuations are abnormal" : yes, if your ruler is the current economic regime, based on certain assumptions. (* talking about equity PEs here, mainly stateside)

What does the world look like under different assumptions? US social security pensions are forever, and available even to non-citizens who work over 10-years in the US. Budgetary deficit expansion is the headline again this week.

Even my own ( corrupt banana republic gulag jail type ) country of Malaysia is realising that the federal retirement savings systems designed in 1951 has failed in its mission of guaranteeing mass economic security. And we are forced to consider UBI as a potential solution among many forks in the road.

What if the future is just loads, and loads, of perpetual monetary debasement? You would have to rescale all your rulers of what PEs are normal.

I'm sure professionals do this somewhere in their libraries of models. As an amateur macroeconomist, I just find it amusing to contemplate.

Shame and Power, and the morality of Staying Wealthy

I wrote about shame being one of Malaysia's cultural weaknesses. 

There are probably some good examples of morality which don't involve shame. But many moralities depend on shame, and so many moralities share the same sort of weakness. One variety of morality is ethics of amassing power and/or material goods ( without detailed definitions it is not possible to simply call this Capitalism, so here I will not ). 

So when we look for shameful people, firstly we often find them among the moralist, and secondly we often find them among the rich and powerful.

Meanwhile it is always a rare privilege to encounter someone who does not feel shame no matter what they do, or how others regard them. That is the privilege of the shameless.

Negative expectations, Positive hope

I got nothing against folks who chase their dreams. We all have different dreams.

I like pitching products which I have a predictable grasp of, with a very low rate of error. Usually I'll include in the pitch, that where there's uncertainty, you should expect negative returns. That's just how I roll - you can HOPE for positive returns, but statistics often are very clear on the history of a thing, unless you are doing something very new. And if you are doing something new, that is not something to be expecting success from. So any positive hope MUST be coupled with explicit expectations of neutrality or failure, UNLESS the data provides an exception.

I don't particularly enjoy telling people to cheer up based on hope - I find that is quite a degenerate approach to life. Perhaps I am biased because I grew up in a country that governs based on a notion of the afterlife ... hahaha. Whatever the case, just not my flavour.

Why you suck at ordinary conversation, teaching kids, and building AIs

Phenomenology. Most people suck at it. As a result, they don't understand other people, and they don't have good communication skills. When they are thinking about building machine intelligences, they get stuck because they don't have a good grasp on what their own thought process is. Such is the plight of man(kind).

Typical example : today I'm reading about how linguists make a distinction between the 'reference' of a sign and the 'denotation' of that sign. This is just sloppy language which reflects sloppy thinking, over a century.

Try this instead :

• 0. Any semantic expressions in empirical space ( signs, words ), are only dereferenceable in the context of a cognitive system ( mind ).
• 1. The first mind to consider, is the mind of the observer of the expression ( reader ), not the mind of the expression's expressor ( writer ).
• 2. The second mind to consider, is the mind of the writer.
• 3. The bare minimum requirement for a mature reader, therefore, is to be able to form cogent internal models of [ readers' mental models ], and [ writers' mental models ]. ( While this is sometimes referred to as 'empathy', that terms is loaded and may or may not be a good inclusion at this point. )

The PROBLEM : 

Many people engage in daily reading ( and listening ), and writing ( and speech ), therefore conversation in general, and even the business of constructing minds in children of various media ( both meat and machinery ), without paying due consideration to 0-1-2-3.

This is why you suck at ordinary conversation, teaching kids, and building AIs.

link

Autism : executive dysfunction vs discomfort

 Someone casually posted on Threads about bullies being able to identify autistic targets.

That's an interesting lens : being easy to bully and being autistic are comorbid, but it may inform us a bit on what the real problem is ... if the problem is framed in terms of discomfort, instead of executive function, it changes the field a bit :P

Lexical Semantics : getting my ass kicked

Quiet quitting, and lying flat ... cute memes. I'm a bit more of a loud quitter who likes to stay busy on work that interests me. After spending most of the 90s trying to impress people, I pretty much figured it wasn't worth continuing down that track, and aimed for a B-average GPA when I got to college in 2001, so that I could focus on more important things like having fun. I accidentally learnt a few things I didn't expect to. But oh well, win some, win some. I guess just being lazy and holding that trajectory is what keeps me from being excited about being employed, getting VC, etc. I pretty much decided to do only what is easy, and I spend less energy jumping for people, it's more fun if they're jumping for me. And if no one's looking for me, I plan my life around minimum wage, and stay happy. Every day is a good day to die, and there is very little need to make life more complicated than that, I suppose.

This week, lexical semantics is kicking my ass. I simply avoided memorising the parts of speech when they were in my 8th grade Malay textbook ... as it wasn't a significant part of our grades. But now I am trying to learn more math, and for that I am trying to write an all-encompassing programming language, and for that I need to study linguistics, and for that ... well there we go ... back where we started ... middle-school grammar.

Kicking my ass.

Generalised Pandemonium Architecture Clusters / GPACs : a simple model of cognition in individuals and in groups

Politics in groups, and thought in individuals ... are both modeled very well under a generalisation of Selfridge's Pandemonium Architecture / GPA ( to all modalities of data, visual or otherwise ). GPAs are often sub-clustered/moduled, as it is a nature optimisation of chaotic systems to form boundary layers between localities. We can call the clusters GPACs as a convenience.

In human thought, ontology, or the consideration of what exists in a conscious buffer, may be trained to be the production of one GPAC. Ethics, or the consideration of what to do about that, may be trained to be the production of another GPAC. Of course, these are flexible structures, and in many times we just glomp the two considerations together, which is a less pristine way of thinking.

Now in daily speech, we often have separate GPACs for the sensory formation of what we want to talk about, and for the verbalisation of sentences about what we want to talk about. Each of these GPACs is of course, potentially sub-clustered furthermore.

Is Malaysian Law Primarily Islamic, or Secular?

• 1. Dari pandangan setiap agama, perundangan agama itu sendiri yang patut mempunyai kedudukan yang tertinggi pada hati umatnya.
• 2. Dari pandangan perundangan kebangsaan, perundangan sekular Malaysialah yang membenarkan sebarang perundangan keagaaman yang dibawahnya.
• 3. Inilah topik kebangsaan yang amat penting selamanya ada Malaysia. Ingat juga, perlembagaan boleh dipinda.
• 4. Pendidikan agama adalah sesat kalau ia memperdayakan rakyat mengenai fakta perundangan kebangsaan.

Sila bincang.