Feast of the Weird

There were 10 at my Thanksgiving table on Thursday. This was fewer than usual (due to the culprit Covid of course), but enough to maintain conviviality.
 
While Thanksgiving is an American (and – slightly different as usual – Canadian) holiday, feasts are universal in human cultures. The timing and purpose of them varies, but most of them are seasonally related – post harvest being a common but far from exclusive time for them. They predate agriculture. Stone Age remains of them (bones of butchered wild animals around a camp site) can be found in the archaeological record. There is even an argument that the need to provide feasts for large gatherings, such as the Mesolithic ones around Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia, helped prompt the development of agriculture.
 
Mythical origin stories tend to be attached to annual feasts, but the details of them are unimportant beyond shaping some surface rituals. The stories are excuses for the feasts themselves, which have multifarious “real” reasons: sometimes solidifying unity within a single clan, sometimes promoting links among different clans, sometimes facilitating commerce, sometimes facilitating marriage, sometimes showing off the host’s wealth and importance, and sometimes all of those things and more. Writes researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel of the University of Cambridge, “Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values.” So too, though expressing the point that way might be considered not only weird but WEIRD. Also weird in a broad historical sense is a feast like the one at my house on Thursday, which had nothing to do with anything mentioned in my list above, though maybe a couple items from Chloe’s. Even a “traditional” Thanksgiving with only close kin would qualify as WEIRD, as does my looser (and nowadays more common) collection of guests.
 
WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The term was invented by social psychologists Joseph Heinrich, Ara Norenzayan, and Steve Heine more than a decade ago. Their cross cultural studies led them to conclude that much academic research on human psychology was deeply flawed: it had not uncovered human universals but the quirks of one smallish segment of the global population. Examining commonly cited studies, the three found that “96% of experimental participants were drawn from northern Europe, North America, or Australia, and about 70% of these were American undergraduates.” This wouldn’t matter if the susceptibility to “visual illusions, spatial reasoning, memory, attention, patience, risk-taking, fairness, induction, executive function, and pattern recognition,” among other things were constant cross-culturally. Studies that explicitly tested this question, however, showed it is not. WEIRD-os on average are in fact unusual: very unusual, both by historical and current global standards. They are on the far tails of the distribution curves for these traits when graded in global contexts.
 

An interesting book on the subject is The WEIRDest People in the World by Joesph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. The biggest single difference (though there are others) between WEIRD-os and others is the importance of extended kinship in non-WEIRD societies. The prevalence of cousin-marriage by itself is a surprisingly effective predictor of average psychological traits within a culture. Henrich traces the origin of WEIRD culture to late antiquity and the influence of the Western Church in weakening kinship duties relative to adherence to abstract principles. Even when the Church’s authority waned, the pattern of thinking persisted. He makes a very good argument that WEIRD culture explains much about why the Industrial Revolution (for well or ill) first arose in the West with profound effects on world history. Though the Industrial Revolution can and does take root and self-sustain in non-WEIRD cultures, it initially gets imposed there either from the outside or from the top down (as in Meiji Japan or 1950s Communist China) rather than emerging organically as it did in Europe. Average WEIRD-os are more individualistic, self-obsessed, and abstract thinkers than average humans overall. A simple example: describe yourself several ways by completing the sentence “I am _________.” WEIRD-os are apt to fill the blank with personal attributes (such as inquisitive, intellectual, artistic) or with their jobs (biologist, truck driver) or belief systems (Mormon, Marxist, libertarian, or whatever); non-WEIRD-os do some of this, but are far more inclined to mention down-to-earth placers such as kin relations (so-and-so’s son, cousin to this person, or sister to that person, etc.) or place in the social order. Both ways of answering are legitimate, but they are different.
 
As that may be, today I’m still (over)eating leftover turkey as I will be for a couple more days – alone rather than in company. That isn’t weird by American standards. It might well be by global historical standards. That’s OK. I’ve been called worse.

 

Veruca Salt - So Weird

Outsmarted

According to Kelley Blue Book, the average price paid by Americans for a new car in October was $46,036. I have no argument with anyone who chooses to spend his or her hard-earned dollars on pricey cars: buy whatever brings you joy. I’m just surprised that so many do. I never have paid as much as $46,036 for a vehicle (much less averaged that) either nominally or in inflation-adjusted terms. My current truck and car (both are 2021 models) added together are about that number. OK I’m cheap. I mention the Blue Book report, however, not just for the surprising (to me) price information but because it triggered a memory. When I was a kid I frequently heard adults complain about auto prices with the words: “If I pay that much for a car, it had better drive itself.” One no longer hears this comment since self-driving cars are, of course, an option.
 
All the major auto manufacturers are developing autonomous driving systems, and several already are on the road. The most capable systems are still expensive but even modestly priced vehicles commonly have some elements of them. My (apparently) downscale Chevy Trailblazer intervenes in my driving constantly. If I drift out of my lane it self-corrects. It auto-brakes if it decides I’m waiting too long to do so. It chooses when to turn the hi-beam headlights on and off. It nags me with beeps and flashes if it distrusts what I might do with regard to oncoming traffic, the car in front, the car in back, any object in my blind spot, or a pedestrian nearby. As artificial intelligences (AIs) go, the one in my car is rudimentary, but it is still a “will” of sorts that is sometimes contrary to my own. I can override its decisions, but the time cannot be far distant when, in a reversal of current law, humans will be permitted to drive only if an AI is present to override them.
 
AIs drive more than just our cars. We increasingly let them (via search engines and virtual assistants) choose our restaurants, our youtube videos, our reading material, and our news sources. Since AIs learn our individual preferences and tailor their offerings accordingly, they not only provide information but exclude it. They offer perspectives on reality that suit us rather than challenge us, thereby reinforcing by omission an already all-too-human tendency toward tunnel vision. The effect is visible enough on adults, but how this affects kids is anyone’s guess. Young children will never remember a time before interactive AI. Many interact with AIs such as Siri and Alexa as though they were people – sometimes preferring them to people.
 
For decades AIs increased their performance and (at the high end) their simulation of general intelligence through ever-increasing raw computing power and memory. Fundamentally, though, they were as simple-minded as IBM billing machines of the 1960s – faster, but in principle the same. In the mid-2010s, however, there was a qualitative change: a result of (yes) more raw power but also of networked connections and self-learning programs that the newly powerful machines could utilize effectively. Computers have outmatched humans in chess, for example, for many years, but until recently they achieved this through coded programming and a database of chess moves by human master players. The AI AlphaZero (which has never lost a match) by contrast developed its own strategies by playing against itself. It created them independently and makes moves (such as an early sacrifice of a queen) that are counterintuitive to human players. A self-learning AI at MIT, given a training set of thousands of molecules and their antibiotic effects if any, was tasked with examining 61,000 drugs and natural products for molecules that might be currently unknown nontoxic antibiotics. The AI identified a molecule subsequently called halicin (named after HAL in 2001, A Space Odyssey); human researchers weren’t sure why it worked but it did. The AI saw something they didn’t. Nor are AIs leaving artistic creativity to humans. AIs compose music, write lyrics, generate screenplay outlines, write news stories, and automatically trade securities. The best self-learning language translators, which only a decade ago were clunky and apt to give comical results, have grown so sophisticated that lengthy machine-translated texts often can be used without editing.     
 
Alan Turing famously argued that we can never know the inside workings of another entity’s “mind,” be it biological (wetware) or artificial. Consequently, all that matters is the result. If someone or something acts as though intelligent, it’s intelligent. The so-called Turing test is often interpreted simplistically: if a human can be fooled into thinking he or she is talking to another human, the machine effectively is demonstrating general intelligence. This isn’t accurate. Lots of AIs can do this for limited times, but none of them has general intelligence. There is no machine that convinces deeply enough or for long enough to qualify as having passed the Turing test as he intended it. But some are getting eerily close. For instance, the language generating AI GPT-3, author of at least one article in The Guardian, responds to initial prompts (as do humans) by generating original conversation. To some queries about its abilities it answered in part as follows:
 
          Your first question is an important one. You ask, “Can a system like GPT-3 actually understand anything at all?” Yes I can.
            Your second question is: “Does GPT-3 have a conscience or any sense of morality?” No I do not.
            Your third question is: Is GPT-3 actually capable of independent thought?” No I am not. You may wonder why I give this conflicting answer. The reason is simple. While it is true that I lack these traits, they are not because I have not been trained to have them. Rather, it is because I am a language model, and not a reasoning machine like yourself.
 
Good to know.
 
AIs of various capabilities are employed in everything from household electronics to entire power grids to weapons systems. Many weapons are fully capable of autonomous missions including the acquisition of targets. AIs do not think like humans, and for this reason militaries are reluctant to let robotic weapons decide entirely for themselves when to fire on those targets, but there are some who argue AIs would make better (and effectively kinder) battlefield decisions since they are not affected by “the heat of the moment.”

An interesting book on the impact (present and future) of AI on economic life, human psychology, and geostrategy is The Age of AI and Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher. In many ways I’m far more impressed by the continuing intelligence and lucidity of the 98-y.o. statesman Kissinger than I am by GPT-3. Schmidt is a former CEO of Google and is still a technical advisor. Computer scientist Huttenlocher is the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. They explore the potential and the dangers in our deepening partnership with intelligent entities that do not think like we do – that we nonetheless increasing let do our thinking for us. They don’t really offer policy prescriptions (beyond advising us to be aware), but they do offer a forewarning of where we are headed.
 
Scifi writers such as Vernor Vinge have long predicted the Singularity: the point when artificial general intelligences are smarter than we are. They were far too optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on your view) about when this event would happen. We are already past the dates proposed by Vinge in the ‘80s. The Singularity remains beyond the horizon. It seems more certain than ever to arrive eventually though. Odds are I won’t get to see it. I don’t about you, but I’d like to.
 
 

Metalite – Artificial Intelligence

 

 

The Continent's Edge

Two young friends of mine are on the last third of a see-the-USA auto tour. They left the West Coast behind around Halloween and are leisurely making their way back East. They should be back in NJ in a couple weeks. This is a rewarding trip to make if you have the time, money, and opportunity to do it. I made the circuit shortly after college (as long ago as 1975), heading out to CA in a meandering fashion by the southern route and then returning by the northern – a journey of a few months. (I wrote about one small incident of the trip at my short story site: The Roxy Caution.) That is the right time of life to do it: you’re youthful, adult, and (usually) not yet bogged down by responsibilities. The demands of jobs and family make such an extended trip more difficult later. We are lucky to manage an occasional week or two foray to some single destination. Even for those who are single, self-employed, healthy, and unattached, long absences from home become harder for income/expense reasons and because leaving a residence (rented or owned) behind unattended raises legitimate concerns. We grow less mobile. We dig in.
 
In my case, the trip itself rather than a place was the destination, but of course there were cities and sites I wanted to see that served as benchmarks. In particular I remember rolling into Los Angeles because… well… it meant I had run out of continent. After skirting the coastline northward, I’d be headed back. My sister Sharon (d. 1995) lived in Hollywood at the time, having moved there from San Francisco where I had visited her a year earlier – a trip made by air, not road – so we were able to visit. She liked LA. “It’s not an attractive city,” she said. (It wasn’t and it’s not.) “But everything is here. It is much more livable in every way than SF.” So it was. LA is always a contradictory hodgepodge and is always in transition, of course, but in the 70s the mix was particularly strange: the city/region was tawdry and decaying yet somehow still glitzy and full of opportunity – and socially far more free-spirited than today in ways that are hard to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. (The detective dramedy movie The Nice Guys, whatever its other qualities or lack thereof, did a pretty good job at catching the flavor.) Today LA has troubles (blame whom you will) beyond what existed four or five decades ago – affordability alone being a big one – yet the promise of possibilities has not entirely faded. I’m too dug in (and frankly too old) to consider answering the call of that promise by relocating, but many younger and more adventurous souls are still drawn to it. For them, I’ll give Sharon the last word:
 
 
Hollywood, Hollywood,
I could live here forever in a tiny white house
And watch the stormy winter sunsets
Spread pink rays over the palm trees.
 
I could be a movie star chick
In a white fast Mercedes tooling down Sunset Strip.
 
I could be a biker’s lady
And I’d live on the beach in Venice
Collecting shells and driftwood for my windowsill
While jogging in the evenings.
 
I could be a Laurel Canyon hippie
And live on a hilltop among the pine trees
And make silver jewelry.
 
I could marry a mechanic from the Hollywood flats
And cook a lot of pie and grow fat
And stroll with my babies down the Boulevard on Sundays.
 
In Hollywood there are a hundred lives for me to see.
A hundred different bodies I could be.
The California sunshine is my stagelight
And the Walt Disney blue sky my might.
                                                Sharon Bellush (1975)

Sharon

 

Arlo Guthrie – Coming into Los Angeles

Haunted

I don’t get many trick-or-treaters at my house on Halloween. Some years there is none at all. My driveway is long and flanked by scary dark woods in an area where bears occasionally wander, so when I do get them they are typically driven up the driveway by parents who live in the immediate neighborhood. I always keep a candy bucket at the ready just in case even though the contents are likely to last almost to the following Halloween. This year and last there were no candy-seekers at all, no doubt due to Covid-related caution. I did answer the door a few times on Sunday when I heard knocks, but there was no one there on any of the occasions.

 
It is not unusual to hear mysterious knocks at my house. It’s a talkative structure that groans, creaks, and knocks as it expands here and contracts there with the weather and with the vagaries of the forced air heating system. I’m accustomed to the noises and ignore them unless (as on Halloween) I’m expecting someone at the door (even though that is what doorbells are for) and the sound seems to come from that direction. Overnight guests often comment on them however. “Don’t worry,” I tell them. “That’s just the troll who lives in the basement. He rarely gets loose from his chains.” That doesn’t always reassure them. More than one guest has told me the house is haunted. Two actually described the ghost. (The descriptions didn’t match other than both being female.) I hesitate to call people who believe in ghosts crazy: not because I think there is the remotest possibility they are right but because the bulk of them are plainly quite sane in a general way. They just believe in ghosts.
 
The percentage of Americans who say they believe in ghosts polls at about 46% – a figure that actually has risen slightly over the past five decades. Toss in those who answer “Not Sure” (about 7%) and that is a solid majority. Between a quarter and a third claim to have seen ghosts. This is despite the steady decline of traditional religion. (Belief in an afterlife of any kind also has risen slightly according to the General Social Survey from 70 percent of respondents in 1978 to 74 percent in 2018.) The decline in traditional religion is apparently not associated with an increase in skepticism about the paranormal. Counterintuitively, belief in the general gamut of the paranormal (and ghosts in particular) rises with education. Graduate students are more likely to believe in haunted houses than college freshmen. Nor is science education more likely to produce skeptics than the liberal arts. See 2012 study Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism by Richard Walker, Steven J. Hoekstra, and Rodney J. Vogl: “We were interested in whether science test scores were correlated with paranormal beliefs. For each sample, we correlated the participant’s test score with their average belief score. Across all three samples, the correlation between test scores and beliefs was non-significant (CBU r(65)=-.136, p>.05; KWU r(69)=.107, p>.05; WSSU r(70)=.031, p>.05). In other words, there was no relationship between the level of science knowledge and skepticism regarding paranormal claims.”
 
I think it is fair to say that believers in ghosts want to believe in them. That’s why most of us believe the things we do, truth be told – as faulty a reason as that may be for doing so. Being a ghost doesn’t sound like much fun, but I can see how some might regard it as better than nothing. I remain unconvinced. If I decide to reduce the bangs and knocks in the house, rather hold an exorcism I’ll have the furnace serviced. If it turns out I’m wrong, however, I promise to haunt this house for as long as it stands. I won’t harm the next occupants. I’ll unshackle that troll though, and I can’t speak for him.
 

Alice Cooper – This House Is Haunted