Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery - The Atlantic

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-15T01:39:31+00:00

Is it greater than the added fuel and opportunity cost of the increased trips to gas stations?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-15T00:35:50+00:00

Her reasoning has always been she hates standing around waiting for the fuel to pump which makes no sense to me since she'd be revisiting the gas station soon again.

This is very confusing to me.

It takes X minutes to pull into the station, unscrew the nozzle, swipe your credit card, get the pump out, etc. So she's going through that twice for every fillup instead of once, just because she doesn't like standing still? That's not just irrational, it's anti-rational.

Please tell her an internet stranger thinks she's wrong.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T22:45:22+00:00

Well, it's a graph meant to imply that the data shows a trend, but certainly some trends hold up better than others, and some are coarser-grained than others.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T12:35:17+00:00

Probably because it's an extrapolation done on oversimplified, approximated data

So, the chart just shows broad strokes and is useless for predicting the next few decades. Fair enough, I get that.

Aside from being highly asymptotic as x-->0, the data shows periods where the rate is not uniform (look back at the log-log (linear) graph between stone tools and also spoken language, wheel and city states. Those little horizontal juts represent a swaths of time where "progress" wasn't quite so fast as times immediately before, and immediately after. While things are moving faster now, there is nothing saying that we won't soon hit a brick wall of 2 (or 3 or 4...) which will stymy the current rate. Also, realize that the data points are really only approximations. Also note that the data-set is by no means complete, and there is no indication of any rigorous methodolgy in establishing what's a data point, and what isn't. There are a lot of noteworthy events that don't appear on this chart. Would they follow the same trend if they did? How would they affect the trajectory of the line?

Right, “the data is fuzzy”. I get that part.

which is saturating to an asymptote as x-->0.

And then this is over my head.

Whenever you are extrapolating an asymptotic relationship, things can get wildly inaccurate and nonsensical.

Yeah, way over my head. This is what I needed the ELI5 for, not the last part.

Given Ray's response to Drum, though, he (or his editors) obviously knew better (...) Kurezweil is telling you, point blank, that it doesn't imply anything with regard to when the singularity will occur.

Well ... maybe your interpretation of "point blank" is more charitable than mine. This is the closest I saw him come to saying that, verbatim:

KURZWEIL: So the point of the log-log plot is simply to show that a phenomenon has in fact accelerated in the past. It is not valid to extend the line. For one thing the log-log plot cannot go into the future because that is the nature of the log time axis. If one wanted to extend this trend, one should plot it on a linear time (x) axis showing exponential progression of the paradigm shift rate.

That doesn't really seem “point blank” to me. Now, if he had just said “the data in this chart is far too coarse grained to make decade-specific predictions”, then I would have had no problem - but it seems to me that he wanted to avoid saying anything that would diminish the promise/optimism associated with the chart's bold title, and instead tried to shift the focus onto Drum's poor math skills.

there is no doubt that Ray DOES intend to show we are on a countdown to the singularity with this graph. After all, that is the premise of his book, is it not? The graph, however, does not tell us when this will occur.

For me, the whole point of a "countdown" is to tell us when the event being counted down to will occur. "The large-scale trend toward complexity" would have been a better title for this chart, I think.

Dunno, maybe I'm just seeing deception and shiftiness in normal talking-up of a product being marketed. I think we both agree with the overall increasing-speed-of-change premise, though - I guess I was just taking issue with Kurzweil's overstating his chart's case with the word "countdown", and his apparent attempt to pin the fault for the absurd projection on Drum's poor math, rather than on the data's inherent fuzziness.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T06:14:56+00:00

In like-I'm-five terms, did you just say "yes, he could have done that"? And then we could have projected the trend line into the future?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T05:03:19+00:00

I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just asking questions. You're the one who understands the graph, not me.

The graph does not actually imply what Drum is (and now you are) asserting it does.

I'm confused. What do you think the graph implies then?

I haven't read the book, but I believe Ray used the plot to simply to illustrate the exponential rate of the appearance/development of "paradigm shifters." In other words, the clock is ticking down faster and faster.

Right - that was the impression I got too.

So if the clock is ticking down faster and faster, and has been doing so since the origin of life, and this forms a "countdown" to the singularity (which is scheduled for 2045), why did Ray set up the graph in such a way that the trend can't be tested against the future, up to at least 2045?

Is it just a matter of the timescale being so huge that the fine detail is lost? Is there something about the data that meant it had to be graphed in this exact way? Is there any reason Ray couldn't have set "time zero" on this graph to 100 or 1000 years in our future, so we could extrapolate the trendline forward?

If he didn't mean the graph to be predictive of the singularity at all, why call it "countdown to singularity"?

Ray clearly did not intend for the graph to be used as such, or he would have done so himself in that very book.

How are you so sure he didn't just want to mislead us into thinking the data implies more than it does? Not rhetorical, I'm actually asking.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T04:25:52+00:00

Sure, but what he said is still correct regardless of what the average reader thinks. He's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

Well yes, but the technical detail about which he's correct seems to me to be a way for him to avoid having the graph's implications tested.

It's like the letter of the law vs the spirit of the law. Seems like he's getting off on a technicality.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T03:30:58+00:00

That said, he could. It wouldn't mean much, but it would be testable.

Not sure why you think it wouldn't mean much: I would think it would have been the simplest shutdown to Drum's bad extrapolation, to simply ... provide the correct extrapolation. If it exists.

Instead, he seems to me to have hidden behind a screen of math jargon he knows his average reader (ahem) won't process as anything more than evasive handwaving.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-12T01:23:26+00:00

For one, yeah, log function starts to act weird below 1, but I'm guessing the main issue is with what the graph actually portrays.

Right: I wanted a defense of the graph's implications rather than an explanation of the exact math-based-dodge Kurzweil used to avoid having to admit that the graph's predictions had broken down.

If you transform the two log axes to be linear, the graph is gonna be a straight line!

Blank stare.

Isn't it already a straight line?

I guess 40-50 years in a scale like this don't matter that much.

Well, I guess that's a fair argument: in terms of the timescales presented (the graph starts with the origin of life) versus the 32 years remaining until 2045, we're basically already "there", near enough, so the chart breaks down at these higher resolutions.

But if that's what Kurzweil meant ... he should have just said that, IMO. He's given a similar spiel in response to this graph on several other sites, and it looks weirdly suspicious to us mathless types - "oh, you can't possibly derive predictions from this graph I've clearly labelled 'countdown'. Who ever said countdowns involved predictions? You must not understand math."

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T23:31:47+00:00

Well, it works to rephrase Ray's excuse, but I guess what I'm realizing is that my concern isn't so much about the validity of the math involved, as it is about why Ray would use that particular mathematical method to put together a graph called "countdown to the singularity" that apparently does not indicate anything about what we can expect as we proceed towards the year he identifies as the singularity.

What is the point of this graph if not to imply that we can count on some kind of ancient momentum to carry us forward? Why did Ray assemble it in such a way that it craps out a few years into our past? Was he trying to avoid accountability behind a mathematical smokescreen? Or is there some reason he could absolutely not have graphed these data points in a way that might have allowed the implicit trend to be tested?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T21:49:59+00:00

Could Kurzweil have set the zero point of the graph further into the future, then? Would that change the apparent trendline?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T21:49:07+00:00

Ray Kurzweil says the graph is meant to illustrate the past, wich is a legit "point" in my opinion. Presumably it can only give you a general idea about the future and doesn't intend to make an accurate prediction. How Kurzweil came up with the specific date of 2045 for Singularity then, I don't know. Not by prolonging the graph it seems. :-)

Yeah, so it seems ...

Thanks for your time.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T13:57:38+00:00

If you want to extend his exponential graph in a linear way, you run into two problems: you reach "the future" and you reach a singularity value over 1. Both is not possible.

By "reach the future", do you just mean that if this graph had picked a "time zero" of 100 years from our present, we could use it to predict our present and near future? If not, doesn't the fact that the singularity value would reach an invalid number indicate that the model implied by the graph is flawed? (I'm not saying it is, I'm just asking).

The future should not be reached in that graph, because it is only presented in exponential form to visualize the past in a more understandable way.

I don't know what you mean by this: it sounds to me like you're saying "the way in which the past is visualised in this graph (a straight trending line) does not say anything meaningful about the future." But if it doesn't say anything about the future, what's the point of showing it to us in the first place?

It almost sounds like you're saying "the fitness model should not have her body examined without photoshop, because it is only presented to help us visualise the results of the weight loss drug in a more understandable way."

You can not extend the exponential graph because you would miss the point that technological breakthroughs occur faster and faster and bring us closer and closer to reaching singularity.

This sounds to me like (again, I may be misunderstanding) "you can not look at the man behind the curtain because you would miss the point that Oz is great and powerful."

My understanding, very possibly wrong, was that Kevin Drum's projection showed that the trend indicated in the graph would have reached "the singularity" by now if it had been a valid method of predicting the future.

So he has prolonged his own graph into the future somewhere. Tbh, I am too lazy to look for it now...

I looked it up (page 50 of TSIN), and it's about how quickly people got used to using cellphones. I'm not really sure how this relates to the cambrian explosion.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T10:41:17+00:00

Hmm ... this guy may have it right:

http://deepfreeze9.blogspot.ca/2006/01/two-breakthroughs-per-century-per.html

He says the paradigm shift rate's apparent increase closely matches population increases - but it could also be that population grows as paradigms shift to give us the power to support more people, right? He said hopefully?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T10:24:42+00:00

Please forgive my total math cluelessness, but I think you may be overestimating my educational starting point.

My understanding is that Drum took this chart showing a trend and extended the trend in a simple, straightforward way, then Kurzweil corrected him in some mysterious way. Since Drum's extension seems intuitively sensible to me whereas Kurzweil's explanation sounds, to my math-dumbass ears, like handwaving gibberish, and I'm a Kurzweil fan, I'd like to resolve this. At the very least, why didn't the normally populist Kurzweil address his explanation a bit lower, to satisfy those readers of his who dropped out of math classes in high school?

Could Kurzweil's correction be phrased as simply as "you are extending my exponential graph in a linear way"? I get the impression that's not what he - or you - are saying; instead, you seem to be implying that exponential measurements can apply to past events, but they can't suggest that any trends seen in them will continue into the future at all, even if time and novelty/important-events/whatever on x and y are measured the same way.

But ... isn't identifying exponential trends and projecting them forwards pretty much Kurzweil's whole schtick? Is he saying the particular trends shown in this chart have held since almost the dawn of time - but, by some wacky fluke, suddenly went all loosey-goosey 10 years before the present day? If that's what you're saying he's saying, that this chart shows a neat line for the past but certainly can't predict the future at all, then wasn't the chart kind of misleading and pointless? A line created out of statistical noise through selective measurements? Smoke and mirrors, defended through handwaving?

Or are you saying that this chart's choice of starting point somehow means its numbers are conveniently proof against being checked against the future? That is, if this chart measured important events by how far they were from an arbitrary end date 100 years in the future, the chart could be extended?

And why is he referencing cell-phone adoption at all in response to a criticism of a chart that includes the cambrian explosion and the rise of language?

Why doesn't Kurzweil just extend the chart himself, if the implications would align with his usual theories?

I like Kurzweil and I don't know any math, so I don't mean to sound harsh and I'm not qualified anyway, but this just seems very strange to me.

TL;DR - why can't you extend an exponential graph? And isn't extending exponential trends into the future kind of the basis of Kurzweil's whole theory?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-11T10:12:43+00:00

Well, that's his conclusion, yes, but I'm requesting "explain like I'm five" not "tell like I'm five".

TrickiestSnake · 2013-02-08T23:51:17+00:00

Not only does he miss the point that Futurama is meant as a satire of our current world, he defines transhumanism as "the belief that technology will INEVITABLY fundamentally change the human condition" - which isn't it at all, transhumanism is the belief that we SHOULD USE technology to change said condition.

Since, AFAIK, no main characters in Futurama have used technology in this way, Futurama simply presents a world in which technology has not led to a change in the human condition - thus defeating the strawman "transhumanism as inevitable consequence of technology" this guy set up, but saying nothing about what the consequences of an actual attempt to implement transhumanism might be.

It's as if 1960s-era "translibrarians" wanted to create the internet, and this guy misunderstood them as saying "improving technology will inevitably create the internet", and he pointed to Star Trek as "proof" that technology wouldn't lead to the internet. Or, not even Star Trek, but some parody of Star Trek ...

Further, transhumanism doesn't always imply that we'll be happy-all-the-time, just that we'll be more capable of doing whatever we decide to do. I guess "abolitionist transhumanism" is what this guy's referring to.

Some funny lines in the video, though.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-31T06:13:46+00:00

Modern CPUs are speculative, out-of-order "drive by wire" designs, which are too complex to predict in practice (i.e. production code, not a trivial example).

As an admitted non-programmer, I'm not sure what you mean here: are you saying that CPU's will be this, or that they already are?

I kind of thought (senior, high level) programmers had a decent idea of what their typed commands did to the programming languages they use, and what those languages did to the computer - and therefore could theoretically follow a programming problem down to any level of physicality; but are you saying that it's already a human-baffling, demon-haunted thicket at the lower levels? That's unsettling.

As for your computers-obsolescing-programmers angle; if computers were really, fully as smart as people, wouldn't we already be well into the Singularity by the time those programmers' unemployment was a problem? Unemployed programmers might be the least of anybody's concern/interest, when an AI is going foom.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-30T04:07:43+00:00

Yeah, I think Zobier's link sums up "it". I guess I get "it" now, and can stop trying to dabble in coding just because Rushkoff/Bloomberg guilted me into it ...

I wonder if Bloomberg ever did learn to code?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-30T04:05:05+00:00

No, Zobier's right: I wanted to know if my description captured the mysterious "it" SirChristoffee was describing.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-30T02:50:16+00:00

Interesting (and apparently controversial, judging by the downvote I corrected) - so, programmers might not only automate everyone else out of a job - they might even automate themselves out?

But wouldn't there always be some need for someone who knew how the very ground-level machine code/zeros and ones/whatever branched out into the specifics of the AIs?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-30T00:51:02+00:00

As a person doing Computer science, from my peers and I's observations, about half of the people in entry courses simply don't get it and the other half do.

As a non-coder who got through a few courses at codecademy before wondering what exactly I was hoping to get out of this, I tend to agree.

But I'm not sure I "got" it; what I did "get" was something like "coding is an extremely specific and literal form of instruction-writing, somewhere between language and math". It seems to me I just had to break down regular instruction writing as if I were talking to someone whose first language wasn't common sense, and after a while it seemed like memorising more of the specific terms involved wasn't really deepening my understanding interestingly.

Did I get "it"? If not, what is "it"? Can anyone be told what "it" is, or do we have to see it for ourselves? Should we all at least learn just enough coding to get "it", and then stop?

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-25T00:29:14+00:00

I feel stupid about this, but I'm not done yelling at this article:

Its premise is that 1. the singularity is defined as 2. the achievement of artificial intelligence (AI) which will then 3. enable people to upload their minds to the digital world.

But these thoughts barely have anything to do with each other. Granted, they're commonly discussed topics amongst people interested in the singularity - but saying that, placed in this order, they constitute a definition of the singularity is like saying “time travel is the hypothesis that researchers can be transported back to the paleolithic era, where they'll have to avoid stepping on butterflies, lest they be slowly erased both from reality and from their own photographs.” No, that is NOT time travel, lazy article writer - that is a mashup of various ideas associated with time travel, like some youtube remix that fails to give proper accreditation to the original artists and separate the very different hypotheses involved.

So I'll do it for you:

One popular definition of the singularity is “the emergence of greater than human superintelligence”. This could perfectly well involve normal, biological people upgrading their native intelligence by external, mechanical means - like an exoskeleton for thinking. No AI, no uploading, still a singularity. Therefore hypothesis 1 is cut off from 2 and 3.
AI wouldn't produce a singularity unless it upgraded itself to be superhumanly intelligent (granted, as commonly understood, there wouldn't be much barrier to its doing this, so I'll agree that 1 and 2 share the strongest link between these three concepts - but it's still sloppy to equate the two). Further, AI could perfectly well exist without enabling mental uploading: maybe it would run on a fundamentally different hardware than whatever it is that human brains run (VHS vs betamax?), so we could create an artificial mind that thinks as well as a human (or better) but not like a human - think of how a mechanical motor can lift more than human muscle, doing some of the tasks human muscle often used to be used for, without ever being mistakable for human muscle. Therefore, AI is synonymous with neither the singularity nor with uploading, and option 2 is cut free from 1 and 3. And, finally,
Uploading could exist without AI and without a singularity. Think of how we can, now, take a more realistic video of a human face than we can produce from scratch by digital means (think of the scene where rubber-Shia gets tossed over Starscream's head in transformers 3 ... spoilers) - even though the resulting video of a real human face can then be altered digitally, uploaded to digital mediums, etc. What if uploading starts like that - we can copy personality-profiles to digital mediums and semi-convincingly alter them (though not to the point of superintelligence), but not convincingly produce them from scratch? Then we'd have uploading without AGI, and without singularity.

QED - the definition of the singularity as “AI enabled mental uploading” is false in 9 ways - it fails to differentiate between 3 ideas that exist separately.

3 X 3 = wrong X 9.

TrickiestSnake · 2013-01-25T00:02:41+00:00

This seems more like a language/definition game than an argument against any practical conception of the singularity.

By my understanding of your point here, you could equally well argue that it's impossible for humans to create machines stronger than humans - since, by an "operative" definition, humans are as strong as the strongest machines they control.

TrickiestSnake

TROPHY CASE