I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.
“It often happens that Nietzsche comes face to face with something, ignoble, disgusting. Well, Nietzsche thinks it’s funny and he would add fuel to the fire if he could. He says: keep going, it’s still not disgusting enough. Or he says: excellent, how disgusting, what a marvel, what a masterpiece, a poisonous flower, finally the ‘human species is getting interesting.’”
“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. “It’s genuinely amazing that…these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.
'The machines we have now are not conscious’, Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023
My sister-in-law just wrote me a letter telling me that my brother is on the verge of total collapse. After our mother died, he reportedly said he wouldn’t make it through the year. Then came the loss of our sister. It seems that he suffers from a deep “dissatisfaction,” that he believes he has failed his life, that he laments not having “realized” himself. This obsession is very much from home, where it has taken a very sickly form, although it is found everywhere, even in the happiest of societies. However, we should get rid of it, because what does it mean: To be “realized” or not? “Realized” in relation to whom? My experience is quite long: It is among the so-called unrealized people that I found the most interesting human specimens, while the others, those who in the eyes of the average man succeeded, were pure nothingness. They who had “realized” themselves precisely lacked “reality.” But how do I write these things to my brother?
Bearing a subordinate role without bitterness is much more difficult than being an outcast, a reprobate. The latter condition entails great satisfactions of pride. It is a reverse success.
“Psychologists have shown that people have a very, very strong, robust confirmation bias. What this means is that when they have an idea, and they start to reason about that idea, they are going to mostly find arguments for their own idea. They’re going to come up with reasons why they’re right, they’re going to come up with justifications for their decisions. They’re not going to challenge themselves.
And the problem with the confirmation bias is that it leads people to make very bad decisions and to arrive at crazy beliefs. And it’s weird, when you think of it, that humans should be endowed with a confirmation bias. If the goal of reasoning were to help us arrive at better beliefs and make better decisions, then there should be no bias. The confirmation bias should really not exist at all.
But if you take the point of view of the argumentative theory, having a confirmation bias makes complete sense. When you’re trying to convince someone, you don’t want to find arguments for the other side, you want to find arguments for your side. And that’s what the confirmation bias helps you do.
The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it’s actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they’re very good at reasoning for arguing. Not only does the argumentative theory explain the bias, it can also give us ideas about how to escape the bad consequences of the confirmation bias.
Needless to say, this new theory paints a rather bleak portrait of human nature. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, blessed with this Promethean gift of being able to decipher the world and uncover all sorts of hidden truths. The function of reasoning is rooted in communication, in the act of trying to persuade other people that what we believe is true. We are social animals all the way down.”
