I am quite surprised that the NobAIl committee did not select ChatGPT‘s Sam Altman for their literature prize—since he made a reality of monkeys typing at random on a typewriter, hence bound to a.s. produce past and future masterpieces—, now betting on Twitter’s Dorsey, Williams and Stone for their peace prize— for achieving worldwide harmony if within each single-minded community in only 140 characters—, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for their Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel—for produing the ultimate monopoly of a single worldwide convenience store—, given their picks for physics—with spin glass Ising models that have always sounded to me like the worst possible illustration for MCMC techniques— and chemistry—for a deep learning predictor of protein structures, built by large teams and numerous CPU hours, achieving high success rates if not perfection, but prediction is not explanation, reminding me of Nietzsche’s “physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation”—… Keeping their sharp focus on AI’s, corporate funded research, and male recipients… (As coïncidences come, I am currently reading a book of the literature 2024 Nobel recipient, Han Kang, The Vegetarian, that I find stunning and immensely original!)
Archive for Friedrich Nietzsche
NobAIl prAIzes
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel, University life with tags AI, AlphaFold, Amazon, artificial intelligence, Boltzmann machines, Botlzman models, ChatGPT, Deep Mind, Friedrich Nietzsche, Google, Hopfield networks, Ising model, Markov random field, MCMC algorithms, neural network, Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize in Litterature, protein folding, South Korea, Stockholm, Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Sweden, twitter, vegetarian diet on October 11, 2024 by xi'anin defense of subjectivity [sound the gong]
Posted in Books, Statistics, Travel, University life with tags Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Poincaré, IMS, IMS Bulletin, Keep calm posters, Krzysztof Burdzy, London, London calling, Montréal, presidential address, Rutgers University, subjective versus objective Bayes, The Clash on October 13, 2022 by xi'an
When browsing the IMS Bulletin [01 October] a few days ago, I saw that Ruobin Gong (from Rutgers) had written a tribune about Subjectivism. In response to [IMS President] Krysz Burdzy’s presidential address at the IMS Meeting in London a few months earlier. Address that I had missed and where he was calling for the end of the term subjective in statistics… (While ironically attending the Bayesian conference in Montréal!) Given the tone of his Search for Certainty book, which Andrew and Larry and I discussed a while ago, I am not at all surprised by another go at Bayesian statistics, but I will not indulge into another response, since Krysz found my earlier review “venomous”! Especially since Ruobin has produced a deeply argument ed and academically grounded criticism of the presidential address (which, if I may mention it, sounds rather rambling away from statistics). In particular, Ruobin introduces Objectivity³ as “an interpreted characterization of the scientific object”, which reminds me of Nietzsche’s aphorism about physics. And where personal and collegial inputs are plusses, even though they could be qualified to be “subjective”. This was also Poincaré’s argument for Bayesian reasoning. In conclusion, I think that the London call to cease using the term in statistics was neither timely (as the subjective-versus-objective debate has sort of dried out) nor appropriate (in that it clashed with the views of part of the IMS community).
atheism: a very [very] short introduction [book review]
Posted in Books with tags agnosticism, atheism, beliefs, book review, David Hume, ethics, evidence, ex nihilo, existentialism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Julian Baggini, naturalism, Philosophy of religions, pholisophy, religion, very short introduction on November 3, 2017 by xi'an
After the rather disappointing Edge of Reason, I gave a try at Baggini’s very brief introduction to atheism, which is very short. And equally very disappointing. Rather than approaching the topic from a (academic) philosophical perspective, ex nihilo, and while defending himself from doing so, the author indeed adopts a rather militant tone in trying to justify the arguments and ethics of atheism, setting the approach solely in a defensive opposition to religions. That is, in reverse, as an answer to faiths and creeds. Even when his arguments make complete sense, e.g., in the lack of support for agnosticism against atheism, the link with inductive reasoning (and Hume), and the logical [and obvious] disconnection between morality and religious attitudes.
“…once we accept the inductive method, we should, to be consistent, also accept that it points toward a naturalism that supports atheism…” (p.27)
While he mentions “militant atheism” as a fundamentalist position to be as avoided as the numerous religious versions, I find the whole exercise in this book missing the point of both an intellectual criticism of atheism [in the sense of Kant’s best seller!] and of the VSI series. Again, to define atheism as an answer to religions and to their irrationality is reducing the scope of this philosophical branch to a contrarian posture, rather than independently advancing a rationalist and scientific position on the entropic nature of life and the universe, one that does not require for a purpose or a higher cause. And to try to show it provides better answers to the same questions as those addressed by religions stoops down to their level.
“So it is not the case that atheism follows merely from some shallow commitment to the primacy of scientific inquiry.” (p.77)
The link therein with a philosophical analysis seems so weak that I deem the essay rather belongs to journalosophy. The very short history of atheism and its embarrassed debate on the attributed connections between atheism and some modern era totalitarianisms [found in the last chapter] are an illustration of this divergence from scholarly work. That the author felt the need to include pictures to illustrate his points says it all!
Mathematical underpinnings of Analytics (theory and applications)
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, analytics, Bayes factor, Bayesian Analysis, book review, bootstrap, CHANCE, Friedrich Nietzsche, genetic algorithm, Laplace succession rule, logistic regression, machine learning, particle filter, Patti Smith, The Bayesian Choice, Yogi Berra on September 25, 2015 by xi'an“Today, a week or two spent reading Jaynes’ book can be a life-changing experience.” (p.8)
I received this book by Peter Grindrod, Mathematical underpinnings of Analytics (theory and applications), from Oxford University Press, quite a while ago. (Not that long ago since the book got published in 2015.) As a book for review for CHANCE. And let it sit on my desk and in my travel bag for the same while as it was unclear to me that it was connected with Statistics and CHANCE. What is [are?!] analytics?! I did not find much of a definition of analytics when I at last opened the book, and even less mentions of statistics or machine-learning, but Wikipedia told me the following:
“Analytics is a multidimensional discipline. There is extensive use of mathematics and statistics, the use of descriptive techniques and predictive models to gain valuable knowledge from data—data analysis. The insights from data are used to recommend action or to guide decision making rooted in business context. Thus, analytics is not so much concerned with individual analyses or analysis steps, but with the entire methodology.”
Barring the absurdity of speaking of a “multidimensional discipline” [and even worse of linking with the mathematical notion of dimension!], this tells me analytics is a mix of data analysis and decision making. Hence relying on (some) statistics. Fine.
“Perhaps in ten years, time, the mathematics of behavioural analytics will be common place: every mathematics department will be doing some of it.”(p.10)
First, and to start with some positive words (!), a book that quotes both Friedrich Nietzsche and Patti Smith cannot get everything wrong! (Of course, including a most likely apocryphal quote from the now late Yogi Berra does not partake from this category!) Second, from a general perspective, I feel the book meanders its way through chapters towards a higher level of statistical consciousness, from graphs to clustering, to hidden Markov models, without precisely mentioning statistics or statistical model, while insisting very much upon Bayesian procedures and Bayesian thinking. Overall, I can relate to most items mentioned in Peter Grindrod’s book, but mostly by first reconstructing the notions behind. While I personally appreciate the distanced and often ironic tone of the book, reflecting upon the author’s experience in retail modelling, I am thus wondering at which audience Mathematical underpinnings of Analytics aims, for a practitioner would have a hard time jumping the gap between the concepts exposed therein and one’s practice, while a theoretician would require more formal and deeper entries on the topics broached by the book. I just doubt this entry will be enough to lead maths departments to adopt behavioural analytics as part of their curriculum… Continue reading
also sprach Nietzsche
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures with tags Andrew Gelman, atheism, Friedrich Nietzsche, graphical novel, Maximilien Le Roy, Michel Onfray, Philosophenweg on March 30, 2015 by xi'an
