Monthly Archives: June 2012

The Cat and Mouse Game of General Intelligence

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Google researchers published a paper that at once fills my heart with hopeful joy and eternal sadness. Joy because people care and are investing resources into developing intelligent systems. Sadness because of how poorly such systems perform 40+ years after the release of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The authors of the paper put together a large neural network that ran on a thousand 16-core machines for three days “learning” from a dataset of 10 million 200×200 pixel images.

The task is to train a face detector without ground truth (labeling images as containing a face or not). This task is absurdly difficult and I would even say just plain absurd. It’s like trying to teach a child algebra by giving him addition problems, but not ever telling him how to do addition or what the right answer is. It’s a fascinating and brave question to ask, because of how counter-intuitive it is.

Not surprisingly, the “breakthrough” that the paper touts is a 15.8% accuracy of classifying the objects in one of 20,000 categories. This is apparently a good improvement over the previous state of the art. My question is, in what universe is 15.8% deserving of a New York Times article? Granted it does exceed the approval rating of Congress, but that’s about it.

I don’t mean to be so dismissive. This is an excellent paper that scratches at the surface of an immense mystery: the gap between the most powerful supercomputer and the most primitive human brain? What’s even more exciting is that Google is funding this research and even more importantly putting its immense computational resources behind it.

Centralized Health Care Record Database

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I’m a big proponent of “big data”, of giving people the option of storing anything and everything about their life digitally as long as it makes their life easier, better, more fulfilling.

Unfortunately, too many people are still scared of giving personal information over to “big business” or “big government”. In my view, that’s like being scared of pulling down your pants during a physical exam.

There are areas of our lives, where keeping a centralized database of personal information can have dramatic effects of the quality of life. One such area is the healthcare system, where many records are still not kept electronically, and those that are, cannot be easily synchronized from one doctor to the next.

You could, of course, pass laws that require health care providers to (1) keep all records electronically and (2) to use the same standard that work with the centralized database. My hope is that companies like Google come out with a solution that seems obviously beneficial.

Unfortunately, Google Health tried to do just that and recently closed down. The reason is unknown, there are many suggestions, but the main reason is probably that it was bad PR. People seem scared of putting their health records online due to privacy concerns, and therefore if Google helps them do it, that somehow automatically make Google evil.

The following is a C-SPAN program on this subject from a while back:

Easiest Way to Live: Remember the Positive, Forget the Negative

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In interactions with close friends, casual acquaintances, shifty eyed neighbors, overly complimentary coworkers, and bitter ex-girlfriends, I’m learning one simple truth…

Reality: People have a lot of good qualities and a lot of bad qualities (the good and the bad being purely subjective judgements).

Easiest way to live: Forget people’s bad qualities, and remember their good qualities.

This isn’t some hippie comment about the goodness of people, and that we all should get along. It’s just me acknolwledging that in the long run, life is easier and relationships are more fulfilling if you focus on the good in people (both in their character traits and in their actions).

I have complained about people at times to vent. And I think that’s okay. I grew up in a culture where high-tension confrontational food fights is a way of life. Russians are quick to elevate their voices in arguing about the smallest things. But after the heat of the moment dissipates, there’s always a choice: keep a grudge or let it go. Letting go is the right answer for me 99% of the time.

I’m not preaching forgiveness either, just a message that we are all mortal and will be dead pretty soon, and that assigning immense amount of value to truthy chunks left over from irrational bickering distracts from the few days of contentment that we get to enjoy before it’s all gone.

Get angry only if it’s really needed to send a message in the short term for the better or if it will help you make a positive change. But otherwise, just let it go.

This is something that I enjoy doing, maybe it sounds stupid, but it works for me. If I’ve learned anything about my obsessive brain, it’s that thinking “that guy is an asshole” will quickly turn to “i hate that guy” if I let it. And if you’re not careful that will lead to the worst thing you can imagine… an un-friending on Facebook.

You Are Not Special, Life is Meaningless, and There is No Absolute Morality

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School is out for the summer. I know this because there’s cars parked around the school next to my apartment.

So perhaps there is no better time than now to address the meaning of life and the pursuit of “success”. A commencement address video that’s been making its rounds on YouTube grounds the soaring hot balloon of people’s hopeful dreams quite succinctly:
“You are not special”.

The topic of meaning always struck me as profoundly absurd, as have most big “why” questions. So for me, even in my darker moments, I tend to find humor in it rather than sadness. The “you are not special” speech is simply an entertaining reminder that you should do everything you do for the pure challenge of it and because you love it.

Of course, such high-minded discourse is the luxury of the middle class, of those with food on the table, access to clean drinking water, and a good doctor.

Much like the speaker in the video, I’m at a loss of practical recommendations except that  you should read as much as possible.

Letting Go Of Books That Changed My Life

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I can’t explain why, and it’s strange to admit in words, but I have a close relationship with certain books. There’s about 100 of them that I’ve read at some point in my teens and early twenties. They now sit on my shelves collecting dust, and today, I have tasked myself with throwing them out (or rather, donating them).

In a cold logical sense, I don’t need them anymore. I have all of them in ebook form on my Kindle. But even if I didn’t, I already read them (several times in many cases). If I’m honest with myself, it’s clear that I will most likely never open them again. There are too many other amazing books out there that I still haven’t read.

Most of these books fall into the category of “philosophical fiction”, but are more commonly referred to as “modern classics”. They affected me more than almost any people or events (except for a few close friends and family members), and are very much responsible for the development of my “world view”.

I remember reading The Plague and struggling to breath over the realization that perhaps there is no meaning at all to suffering, to joy, to life in general. As I put it down into words now, it all sounds so dramatic. But it wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet, and it was subtle. It wore me out like a long run does, and in the same way, left me feeling happy to be alive in the most genuine way. It made me think. It made me ask questions that I will probably never find good answers to. It set me off on a lifelong journey of learning.

So how can I throw out such good old friends of mine? It’s tough, but even if I had infinite space in my apartment, these books are nothing more than an artifact of the flawed belief that somehow every moment in life is of profound importance and that it ought to be saved for all eternity. And yet, my reading of Kafka is no more momentous of an occasion than my purchase of apples and coffee at Seven Eleven earlier today.

There is no reason to hold on to stacks of old memories, when life is just short enough to enjoy the process of making new ones.