In other words, the "proof" of the pudding is in eating it :)
Yes, over a long period of time (economic incentives?), people who cling on to the Lakatosian defense, will indeed admit diminishing returns, a need for a paradigm shift, or even redefine their objective! What methods can accelerate this and enable more first principles architecting of ideas?
We have seen them all in the LLM world:
- Redefinitions: Reasoning is "thinking harder" before you answer.
- If only: Claiming that it is just around the corner, but we are hitting a scaling wall, we are running out of tokens, we are short a few trillion dollars
- Defending "Jagged Intelligence" as if it were a thing, leave alone intelligence.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it
Hah, that last sentence is always true. But I also think it's natural in the sciences to do this sort of rederiving and redefining. That said, it's funny to watch the LLM folks reinvent and recapitulate 20th century psychology.
Nits: You write that "substances are just combinations of substances and structures", which is probably not what you meant to write, and "states describe properties of entities," but entities are not part of your ontology. Perhaps you meant that states describe properties of substances?
More centrally, you write (to me, correctly) that in vision, language, and robotics, the defense of construct validity is mostly vibes, but isn't all this nomological networks stuff mostly vibes with extra steps? You've got a big complicated nomological network, but we can argue forever about whether you've got the *right* network, before running any experiments. Even if your predictions look good, it seems you've got the same problems with an LLM and a nomological network --- maybe you didn't give it the right test yet.
With regard to your first point, I wrote *structures* are "just combinations of substances and structures." I might be missing the place where I mistyped, though. Let me know!
States can be properties of any of the 5. These concepts are so weird and mushy. Like, you'd think that substances are the atomic building blocks, but a substance like water is made up of atoms...
There is a hierarchy of conceptual entities that connect to each other in myriad, iterative ways.
I usually tell people that its science if your parameters (weights, etc) have a name and machine learning if they don't (yet?).
But while I greatly personally enjoy the endeavor, I think trying to have a theory about the theory is destined to crash on the rocks of infinite regress. This is, incidentally, why the real™️ Occam's razor is so powerful. He was a Franciscan cannon lawyer who was arguing in favor of Franciscan poverty. His argument in favor of Franciscan poverty was an appeal to extreme nominalism: ownership as a category does not exist (perhaps we could call this a category error), only particular owners of particular objects. This move is not just useful in warding off greedy Papal Curia, but applicable to any theory: there is no meta theory, its just another theory.
In other words, the "proof" of the pudding is in eating it :)
Yes, over a long period of time (economic incentives?), people who cling on to the Lakatosian defense, will indeed admit diminishing returns, a need for a paradigm shift, or even redefine their objective! What methods can accelerate this and enable more first principles architecting of ideas?
We have seen them all in the LLM world:
- Redefinitions: Reasoning is "thinking harder" before you answer.
- If only: Claiming that it is just around the corner, but we are hitting a scaling wall, we are running out of tokens, we are short a few trillion dollars
- Defending "Jagged Intelligence" as if it were a thing, leave alone intelligence.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it
Hah, that last sentence is always true. But I also think it's natural in the sciences to do this sort of rederiving and redefining. That said, it's funny to watch the LLM folks reinvent and recapitulate 20th century psychology.
Nits: You write that "substances are just combinations of substances and structures", which is probably not what you meant to write, and "states describe properties of entities," but entities are not part of your ontology. Perhaps you meant that states describe properties of substances?
More centrally, you write (to me, correctly) that in vision, language, and robotics, the defense of construct validity is mostly vibes, but isn't all this nomological networks stuff mostly vibes with extra steps? You've got a big complicated nomological network, but we can argue forever about whether you've got the *right* network, before running any experiments. Even if your predictions look good, it seems you've got the same problems with an LLM and a nomological network --- maybe you didn't give it the right test yet.
With regard to your first point, I wrote *structures* are "just combinations of substances and structures." I might be missing the place where I mistyped, though. Let me know!
States can be properties of any of the 5. These concepts are so weird and mushy. Like, you'd think that substances are the atomic building blocks, but a substance like water is made up of atoms...
There is a hierarchy of conceptual entities that connect to each other in myriad, iterative ways.
I 100% agree with your second paragraph!
I usually tell people that its science if your parameters (weights, etc) have a name and machine learning if they don't (yet?).
But while I greatly personally enjoy the endeavor, I think trying to have a theory about the theory is destined to crash on the rocks of infinite regress. This is, incidentally, why the real™️ Occam's razor is so powerful. He was a Franciscan cannon lawyer who was arguing in favor of Franciscan poverty. His argument in favor of Franciscan poverty was an appeal to extreme nominalism: ownership as a category does not exist (perhaps we could call this a category error), only particular owners of particular objects. This move is not just useful in warding off greedy Papal Curia, but applicable to any theory: there is no meta theory, its just another theory.