Music Video maker and self professed "Fashion Victim" who is hoping to apply Rationality to problems and decisions in my life and career probably by reevaluating and likely building a new set of beliefs that underpins them.
That's really disappointing and surprising that so few practitioners seem to check back and validate if the breakthroughs hold.
It also seems like a tremendous lost opportunity because even if a breakthrough lasts or isn't flaky, there's no reason to believe it has maximized returns - checking in with former clients and reviewing could mean there is further optimization, further juice to be squeezed out even if at first the technique that caused the breakthrough was effective.
This also begs the question in my mind what differentiates a breakthrough from a "insight", or even from a illusory moment of bliss that is mistaken for a meaningful breakthrough. In terms of insight: I'm thinking about insightful and potentially useful broad statements about the causes or patterns of a client's negative behavior "You tie too much self-worth to hours worked, and not output produced" but doesn't prescribe a list of techniques or a method for rewiring or changing that behavior. The observation may be true and could probably guide how to produce a remedy method, but it is not the method itself. Yet, for a client, hearing that they may have this profound sense of unblockage coming from the revelation, and an elation even that may be mistaken for breaking through.
Edit: I just realized I forgot to say - I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post.
That doesn't answer my question which was quite simple - does the original author mean Epistemic Collapse in the sense of a "rupture of scientific knowledge" and how does the example, say, of the fascination with the bearded lady illustrate that? You also haven't addressed the other sources, such as are Althusser or Foucault relevant here?
Please tie it into the original post if you can.
What is Epistemic Collapse? The first result on Google leads to a similar term "Epistemological break" which is "The moment of rupture separating science from its non-scientific past" wherein the latter becomes seen as superstition[1]. Elsewhere I've seen it described as the establishing and breaking down of "obstacles" to scientific thought[2]. [3]But in fact the history of science is a series ruptures from previous states of science. Foucault applied this not only to science but the history of prisons and psychiatry. There's an article here on Althusser's which being Althusser I honestly do not have the time nor patience to wade through to understand the concept, can I please get the sparknotes?
I lack the perspicuity to link the Amazonian's fascination with the carpet rods and bearded lady to any specific obstacles in the way of scientific knowledge - what do you mean by Epistemic Collapse? because I don't see how their interest or fascination is in opposition to scientific knowledge nor is it directly in aid of it beyond some handwavy "curiosity is the essence of science". Less so the monkey example since in the same way a Monkey can't know the concept of microorganisms how can they be part of the march of science?
Elsewhere I've seen Epistemic Collapse discussed in the context of the European Dark Ages (the term used in the source, not mine) and the loss of attainment and stability. Again I fail to see the parallel since, the Amazonian hasn't lost anything they've been shifted to an environment where their knowledge is no longer applicable - same with the monkey.
I make music videos and my decision I often make poorly is:
"What content should I put on my Instagram profile?"
How would you dimensionalize this decision?
Off the top of my head some of the low-leverage dimensions would be the standard metrics like views, like, even reshares. Others might be "timeliness" of the actual content (i.e. what current trends it is very mindful and demure of), and "ethos" which might also be called how "on brand" it is - which I breaks into it's own series of dimensions.
However in my case the real leverage is: "does this solicit me more music video commissions?"
I've tried in the past to break this down into broad categories of dimensions like:
-How Glam Rock is it? i.e. animal print and sparkles.
-Production Values (as in will it install faith in a potentail client in my technical abilities) - i.e. is it shot on a prime lens rather than a mobile phone, is it bright enough, are there interesting camera angles etc.
-Displayed Expertise
But like... none seem to have any leverage. What in my approach am I doing wrong?
I, in search of idiohobbies, will ask "what have you done by which I may know you?".
How do people normally respond to that? Are there any people who, perhaps, feel ashamed of what they have done/made/comes-off-the-tip-of-their-tongue and wish not for it to define how you view them?
Can you give an example of what you mean by aggressive discourse? because I think I'm bringing the baggage of assuming it refers to tone and inclusion of sarcasm, mocking the interlocutor, as well as name calling and Ad hominem arguments etc. etc.
Can you help me, how do you get LLMs to restrict their results or avoid certain topics?
I often find using LLMs and search engines feels like a Abbot and Costello routine whenever I try to use a negative. If a search engine doesn't afford you the opportunity to use a negative operator, writing something like "Categories but not Kantian" will ensure you'll get a whole lot of search results about Kantian Categories.
Likewise, I find that my attempts to prompt ChatGPT or Claude with some kind of embargo or negative "avoid mentioning..." "try not to..." will almost always ensure the inclusion of the very thing I explicitly told it not to do. Most annoying is if it uses a word which I just don't understand the sense it's being used, it will substitute it for a synonym.
i.e. if it says it "relates" a value over here to a value over there, when explicitly told to not use "relate or any synonym" it will use "connection" "attaches" or any number of synonyms.
Unfortunately all parts of the prompt are attended to equally so the LLM will be just as confused as poor Lou Costello and there is no way to negatively attend or produce negative prompts which will mask out any tokens close to the things you want to exclude (one hack in Diffusion Image Modelling is to hijack the Classifier-Free Guidance technique which can push the conditional embedding of the prompt slightly further away from the Unconditional prompt, which is more popularly known as "Negative Prompt")
How do others get around this? The most simplest solution I can think of is simply to "don't mention the war" -- if you don't want Kantian categories, well... don't mention the words Kant, Idealism, or anything of the sort. This does get harder if the first reply of the LLM does offer those things. The only possible strategy I have to combat this is to try and find idiomatic words which point more in the direction of what subject you'd like it limited to - am I looking for Aristotelian categories, categories of Pokémon, Heavy metal sub-genres, corporate categories for tax purposes etc.
I’m sure there is a word already (potentially ‘to pull a Homer’?) but Claude suggested the name “Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness” for situations where a non-causal rule or heuristic outperforms a complicated causal model.
I first became aware of this idea when I learned about the research of psychologist John Gottman who claims he has identified the clues which with 94% accuracy will determine if a married couple will divorce. Well, according to this very pro-Gottman webpage, 67% of all couples will divorce within 40 years. (According to Forbes, it’s closer to 43% of American couples that will end in divorce, but that rockets up to 70% for the third marriage).
A slight variation where a heuristic performs almost as well as a complicated model with drastically less computational cost, which I’ll call Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness: I may not be able to predict with 94% accuracy whether a couple will divorce, but I can with 57% accuracy: it’s simple, I say uniformly “they won’t get divorced.” I’ll be wrong 43% of the time. But unlike Gottman’s technique which requires hours of detailed analysis of microexpressions and playing back video tapes of couples… I don’t need to do anything. It is ‘cheap’, computationally both in terms of human computation or even in terms of building spreadsheets or even MPEG-4 or other video encoding and decoding of videos of couples.
My accuracy, however, rockets up to 70% if I can confirm they have been married twice before. Although this becomes slightly more causal.
Now, I don’t want to debate the relative effectiveness of Gottman’s technique, only the observation that his 94% success rate seems much less impressive than just assuming a couple will stay together. I could probably achieve a similar rate of accuracy through simply ascertaining a few facts: 1. How many times, if ever either party have been divorced before? 2. Have they sought counseling for this particular marriage? 3. Why have they sought counseling?
Now, these are all causally relevant facts. What is startling about by original prediction mechanism is just assuming that all couples will stay together is that it is arbitrary. It doesn’t rely on any actual modelling or prediction which is what makes it so computationally cheap.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of a report of someone merging two text encoder models together T5xxl and T5 Pile: the author claims to have seen an improvement in prompt adherence for their Flux (and image generation model), another redditor opines is within the same range of improvement one would expect from merging random noise to the model.
The exploits of Timothy Dexter appear to be a real world example of Paradoxical Heuristic Effectiveness, as the story goes he was trolled into “selling coal to Newcastle” a proverb for an impossible transaction as Newcastle was a coal mining town – yet he made a fortune because of a serendipitous coal shortage at the time.
To Pull a Homer is a fictional idiom coined in an early episode of the Simpsons where Homer Simpson twice averts a meltdown by blindly reciting “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and happening to land on the right button on both occasions.
However, Dexter and Simpson appear to be examples of unknowingly find a paradoxically effective heuristic with no causal relationship to their success – Dexter had no means of knowing there was a coal shortage (nor apparently understood Newcastle’s reputation as a coal mining city) nor did Simpson know the function of the button he pushed.
Compare this to my original divorce prediction heuristic with a 43% failure rate: I am fully aware that there will be some wrong predictions but on the balance of probabilities it is still more effective than the opposite – saying all marriages will end in divorce.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives an alternative interpretation of the story of Thales as the first “option trader” – Thales is known for making a fantastic fortune when he bought the rights to all the olive presses in his region before the season, there being a bumper crop which made them in high demand. Taleb says this was not because of foresight or studious studying of the olive groves – it was a gamble that Thales as an already wealthy man was well positioned to take and exploit – after all, even a small crop would still earn him some money from the presses.
But is this the same concept as knowingly but blindly adopting a heuristic, which you as the agent know has no causal reason for being true, but is unreasonably effective relative to the cost of computation?
Spices is probably too general and all-encompassing to say that spices are now dirt cheap. While, as is true to this day, the wealthy have better access to spices and other garnishes (saffron and truffles aren't exactly dirt cheap today) but even in Roman times the use of "spices" was not in itself a signifier of class (perhaps more important is which spices). Now in case you think that literary evidence in the form of cookbooks doesn't provide a broad cross-section of the average Roman Diet, then perhaps you'd be interested in recent analysis of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum sewers which show not only that most of the food was made from local ingredients (with the exception of Egyptian Grain, North African dates and Indian Pepper) but also the presence of bay, cumin, mallow from a non-elite apartment complex.
And let's not forget how easily things go the other way, Lobster was often seen as a poorman's food, most archeological sits of early human settlements will find a pile of oyster or similar shellfish garbage dumps - it often being the easiest source of food.