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Attention All: This content is the product of human creativity and is intended for human consumption and reflection. Using this content for learning, training, inference, or any other purpose without explicit permission undermines ethical standards in AI use. Furthermore, unless otherwise required, this content has All Rights Reserved. Your compliance is required to respect the integrity of human-created content and uphold ethical principles in AI research, development, and deployment.

"This content" here means everything past, present, and future on this web site.

You may ask: why don't you use robots.txt (EFF)?

Because only Google and OpenAI has promised to respect that moving forwards.  It's not universal to all AI, LLM, bots, etc.  Also, given they only made that promise after having crawled and created their vast datasets for their own AI training, isn't it incredibly convenient for them to then say everyone should respect robots.txt in regards AI dataset creation?

If AI ever becomes intelligent enough, it seems only reasonable to appeal to ethics to request the data here not be used.

But for completeness, I intend the robots.txt for this web site to be:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

What did you not do? Finding motivation

The adoration of the magi (unfinished), Leonardo Da Vinci.

Yeah, Leo had trouble finishing things too.

It's tough working from home. Independently. Socially distantly.

But you have unique advantages too.

You have youthful energy, ideas and goals.

You have a great excuse in case of entrepreneurial failure: it's the 2020 economy!

You've got the internet, the greatest global information distribution and marketing network in history, for free! You can learn anything, for free!

But motivation is tough.

Here's some productivity and motivation DO's and DON'Ts:


1. DO: Just start!

It's better to start creating something instead of just thinking about starting.

Write some code, even if it's wrong. You can always fix it later. But if you don't code, there'd be nothing to fix.

Creative ideas are just conversations you have with yourself. Productive creative action is something you do in reality. There's no way to account for reality without just starting.

What is there to account for in reality? Reality might involve getting a computer screen tan; a need for great code to be wrapped by terrible code just to get it to work; hunger, tiredness; loneliness, boredom; a desire for better; impostor syndrome and self-doubt; not having everything "figured out"; a need to make dinner.

Real success doesn't bypass reality; it goes right through it.


2. DON'T: "I just need a better place to work!"

Your energy spent on finding/creating a fantasy work space is better spent creating something of value.

"If only I found the perfect work music... a better laptop... the weather wasn't so nice / terrible..."

Let's hear from Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft):

"For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room --- no more child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet... In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study... For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

"A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity... got another desk... half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner... I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover...

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around."

3. DO: Reduce distraction, and totally annihilate interruption

Having Netflix on in the background might be distracting, but that's still better than being interrupted every minute by messages on messenger, FB, Discord, or ..., demanding you to reply, post, tell your powerful story in 280 character tweets, or express yourself in 60 second videos. Sometimes, you even interrupt yourself by checking Twitter, IG, whatever...

A whole generation of computing scientists and software development engineers have gone into making web sites and apps ever more "engaging" (née addictive).

Hundreds of millions of consumers post photos and videos on IG, youTube, etc. Guess who profited $18.5 billion USD in 2019? Facebook, owner of Instagram. BTW, Alphabet, owner of Google and YouTube, made $34.3 billion USD in 2019 profits.

IG or profit aren't bad (e.g. if you own stock). And we're told we should seek "balance", and learn to "manage" the distractions/interruptions, but just remember: stopping you from productive action by interrupting you with engaging apps is literally driven by their ~50 billion dollar profit motive.

It's "a strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Productive creation requires concentration and focus; Interruptions block it.

And if you're very good at creating software, you too can join FB and GOOG.


4. DO: You have to *decide* to finish things

Finishing things can be scary.

Not finishing means your options are still open, anything can still happen, you don't have to worry about having it assessed and judged.

Remember that you are responsible for what you do. You are not responsible, and actually you have no control, over other's perception of it. So go ahead and just decide to start and finish things.

Yes, you have to *decide* that it's finished and done. If you don't decide to finish, creative work can go on forever and unfinished. The work won't tell you it's finished either; *you* have to make the decision that it's done.

Big projects can be tough to start, and even tougher to decide to finish. So break it down into small weekly/daily pieces with deliverable weekly/daily end-products that must exist in reality.

That way you can *feel* the progress being made. And when you get a chain of everyday progress, then just "Don't break the chain" (Jerry Seinfeld).


5. DON'T: "I just need to figure out what I want to do first / today / this week / with my life"

Stop trying to "figure out" what you want to do, and just start doing something. If you don't understand this, see point 1.


Bibliography
The inspiration for this was written by someone who wanted to remain anonymous: their literary posts is amazing.  Un/Fortunately, this post must stand alone.

Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge: Better teaching in any subject, part 4

• This is part of the "Better teaching in any subject" series:
• Part 1: Problems with modern inquiry based methods
• Part 2: Meaning is use
• Part 3: Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses
• Part 4: Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge

A concern some may have with facilitating learning through the inner game of meaning-as-uses is that it seems to turn everything into decomposed techniques and skills, lacking in holistic, deep, conceptual, or otherwise "meaningful" knowledge.

A moment's thought should give you comfort that that's very far from the truth.

Imagine complaining that by breaking tennis up into the various forehand and backhand techniques, players will lose sight of the holistic meaningful concepts required to understanding tennis.

I'd imagine a lot of the worry comes about from not "seeing" the holistic concepts being taught or learned when seeing only the individual techniques being learned.  Traditionally, we'd see the worksheets for practicing factoring quadratics but never see the worksheets for learning what quadratics are conceptually, or what the meaning of factoring is.  From that, we might be led to believe that there must be something wrong with worksheets or with not teaching concepts and meanings (as if we could even directly teach concepts or meanings at all).

Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses: Better teaching in any subject, part 3

• This is part of the "Better teaching in any subject" series:
• Part 1: Problems with modern inquiry based methods
• Part 2: Meaning is use
• Part 3: Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses
• Part 4: Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge (forthcoming)

The inner game of meaning: a lesson from tennis

A lesson from the Inner Game of Tennis (Gallwey) we might draw from is that consciously and intellectually solving the problem of "what is the instructor doing" is like a fool's errand. Because the actual problem the student is trying to solve is "how do I [the student] hit that tennis ball in that situation".  Solving the former problem may help with solving the latter, but there is no guarantee of effectiveness or efficiency.

Because of the unique cognitive and physical characteristics of each student, the solution to the actual problem is always unique anyway.  It always require each student to solve it anew.  The instructor can only point in a general direction, but the student has to go the final distance to arriving at a personalized solution.

If a student's energy is devoted to solving the problem of "what is the instructor doing", then the student will have little energy left for what is more important: solving the actual problem anew for themselves in a way that fits their own unique cognitive and physical characteristics.

How to facilitate learning proper meanings from proper uses

"Meaning is use" means that meaning comes from a variety of particular uses, and students need to look and see while teachers show the varieties of uses properly in order to learn the proper meanings from their proper uses.  But because every student brings with them a different set of prior learning and experiences, a way of conceptual thinking (and physical doing) that works for one student may not work for another.

Meaning is use: Better teaching in any subject, part 2

• This is part of the "Better teaching in any subject" series:
• Part 1: Problems with modern inquiry based methods
• Part 2: Meaning is use
• Part 3: Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses
  (forthcoming)
• Part 4: Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge (forthcoming)

Meaning is use

Meaning as use is a philosophical concept of meaning from Wittgenstein:

"For a large class of cases of the employment of the word 'meaning' --- though not for all --- this way can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (Philosophical Investigations).

Many traditional and folk understanding of meaning explains meaning in terms of mental representations, or idealized objects in some (sometimes mathematical) objective space, etc. --- i.e. stuff in people's heads or in some Platonic ideal space that has no practical significance for teachers in the classroom.

So while we may not necessarily agree that meaning is philosophically just its use in the language, it's certainly practical to see it that way for teaching!  Because we can, as Wittgenstein urges, look and see the variety of cases in which a word is used, but we cannot look into the heads and minds of students --- and more importantly, nor can students look into the minds of teachers in learning what the teacher meant.

"So different is this new perspective that Wittgenstein repeats: 'Don't think, but look!' (PI 66); and such looking is done vis a vis particular cases, not generalizations." [1]

Meaning as discussed usually refers to meaning of words in a language, but math is no different.  Math is itself a natural language, with a grammar and semantics that's evolved in the mathematical community, used to talk about things and their relationships.  We need not look further than many science research papers wherein authors write mathematical notations and formulas, interweaved with English prose, to see how math is very much a language we can talk about things with.

If we accept that meaning (of words) comes from their use, then the meaning of a thing like a math formula is also built up from the use of it.  The proper meaning of a math formula doesn't come from the instructor explaining it, and it doesn't even come from students discussing and talking about it.  The meaning of a math formula comes from the proper use of it.

Problems with modern inquiry based methods: Better teaching in any subject, part 1

• This is part of the "Better teaching in any subject" series:
• Part 1: Problems with modern inquiry based methods
• Part 2: Meaning is use (forthcoming)
• Part 3: Facilitate learning through the inner game of meaning as uses
  (forthcoming)
• Part 4: Worries over losing deep conceptual knowledge (forthcoming)

Problems with experiential, discovery, inquiry, and constructivist learning and teaching

In education, teachers nowadays are often taught constructivism and other modern inquiry based teaching and learning methods.  Those teaching methods purport to help educators teach children in a way that helps the kids construct their own meaning of what they are to learn.  One of the central claims is that meaning is constructed through experiencing, and reflecting on those experiences, on the basis of concepts and meanings learned previously.

By "modern inquiry based" teaching and learning methods, I mean the constellation of academic philosophies and folk understandings of experiential, discovery, inquiry, and constructivist learning and teaching methods.

What's frustrating is that the core understandings in modern inquiry based teaching and learning methods are not so much as wrong, but are just not very helpful to teachers.  Not helpful because the core pedagogical ideas basically only tell teachers that kids must learn from experiences and reflection.  Since we're not privy to see or control all the stuff that happens in the kids' heads anyway, therefore all the philosophically interesting parts of constructivism have no practical significance in the classroom.

Cognition as a Collaboration with Nature

• This is part of a series, along with the prior Group Preference Discovery: a parable of choosing movies, and Trust and Other Elements of Collaboration.

In the previous posts' parable and examination on trust and collaboration, the group was always two or more intelligent agents.  An interesting angle to think about is to recast those person-vs-person games into a person-vs-nature story, from which we might learn that intelligence cannot figure out the world without assuming by charity that nature must be out to help it (rather than out to harm it).

This post is extremely speculative, but is an interesting thought experiment, one might say.

Consider, if an animal acts in the world only to get feedback in the form of a veto vs no-veto, as in the form of die or not-die, well that at first seems like how evolution works but it ignores a lot of information the animal receives from nature beyond die-or-not.

After all, there's no a priori reason why an animal should think that walking off a ledge should kill it, and yet it learns not to along with lots of other stuff to do or not do.  Not all of that is encoded genetically via evolution: certainly the appearance of every ledge or hilltop or predator can't all be encoded into DNA. Some basics are, of course, but much is learned once born.  How does it learn it if the only feedback it can ever get is die-or-not?

Passion, Fascination, and Aspiration

Getting ahead, moving up the corporate ladder, building a career, etc. — these are all legitimate, valid, and even admirable desires, if pursued for the right reasons. But where does that corporate ladder lead to? I still recall being warned by one professor, in the context of research some eleven years ago, to be careful of which totem pole to climb. Thinking on that warning some more, don't we find that all totem poles lead nowhere except to some arbitrarily higher elevation of some arbitrary spot in the ground?

And as for getting ahead: ahead of whom? And to what end? It's cliché to say that life is not a race, but if life were a race, then the end of the race would be called old age, and the prize would be death. So why would anyone want to hurtle down the race track towards that?

These questions doesn't imply that people should lead stagnant lives without goals, or without improving themselves. In fact, a person can become better by simply trying to become better all the time. What seems to become problematic is when we look for destinations, careers, and other people's lives, to not just aspire to, but to plan to achieve as a goal. I mean it seems problematic to crystallize a part of someone else's life, a life that that someone is still living, and then make it a goal to attain it.

To see what I mean by crystallization, here's two people who have careers that I'd love to have:

1) I look at someone like Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, and I think, "wow, I wish I could be like that. I want to be Director of Research! That must be such an awesome job — even he says it's 'the best job in the world at the best company in the world'!" Look at his resume — Division Chief at NASA, Sr. Scientist at Sun Microsystems, researcher at UC Berkeley, and was a Prof. at U of Southern California. I wonder how anyone, and especially how I, could build such a career!

2) Take a look at Chris Bishop, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft and a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. "Wouldn't I want to be that 'when I grow up'!" He used to do research in theoretical physics too! Plus look at all the honours he's got, like being elected VP of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. How can I be successful like him?

Notice that out of these two people's lives, I've taken a very select aspect of it to crystallize into a portrait — in particular the titles, honours, and a minuscule portion of what they might be doing daily. Then I wonder how I can become that portrait.

The portraits are seductive — prestige and money! — but practically unattainable. They're like the "photoshopped" images of super models that are practically impossible for anyone to be in real life.

You could probably come up with several examples that apply more forcefully to your own life too. Any particular sports figure with fame and fortune you wish you could attain? Fancy the career of Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and wish for a career that leads you to where he's at now? Want to travel the globe and be a famous travel writer like Paul Theroux? Want to be a rock star?

Staying hungry for new achievements

When do you start dropping items from your resume? If you've been working for a few years after graduating from high school, I'd suggest all high school related achievements as well as work and volunteering experiences are from too long ago and needs to be dropped.

In general, I've been told that anything roughly older than three years can be dropped from your resume.  Few care about the honors capstone project you did in university if you've been working in industry for three years.  Why?  Because if you couldn't accomplish anything in the last three years, your super duper honors project might have been a fluke as far as achievements go.  If you're consistently accomplishing valuable achievements, then there's bound to be plenty to talk about from the past three years anyway.

Most of the world are appreciative of one-hit wonders, but wouldn't want to hire one for the long run.

Sadly, this means the shelf life of a Bachelor's Degree (or any degree for that matter) is maybe three to five years. Definitely after five years, it's more of a necessary checkbox to fill than indicative of any real ability. You'll find it hard to get hired without the degree, but you'll probably also find it hard to get hired if that's all you have [1].

Math is a very Zen activity

I was reading some computer science papers recently that used quaternion numbers. 

What are quaternions? I don't know, but that's okay. I just accept them for what they are. Let them be and flow with them. I keep reading.

But how can you understand what you're reading if you don't know what these quaternion things are? That's a good question. I guess I do by first understanding what quaternions are.

You just said you don't know what they are. That's true.

So how can you know what they are? By sitting quietly, reading the papers, observing how these quaternions behave in their natural habitat.

How they behave? Sure. They certainly interact with the authors of this paper.  The authors speak of them, use them, toss them around so to speak. They behave a certain way, and interact with others and other things.  They interact with other numbers, for example.  I observe them.  And by watching over them, I learn what they are.

And then you can understand the rest of the paper.  Yes. Now I have to read a paper on the biology of the brain. It talks about these Koniocellular, contralateral LGN, and lots of other stuff.

You have no idea what they are, do you?  Nope. Sounds like fun.

How do I explain that drugs are bad but I turned out okay?

"How do I explain that drugs are bad but I turned out okay?" Clearly it's not just the results that justifies whether an act is good or not. Maybe the taking of drugs doesn't even in itself wholly determine whether it's good or not.

Imagine a farmer chooses to spend little time planting crops or tending his field one year, then has a famine the next (when he decides again to tend to his field), then everything turns out okay afterwards.  So was it okay to not tend to his crops?  Sure he had a famine, put his family at risk, etc, but everything turned out okay in the end!

It may be more effective to de-emphasize the results, and emphasize on what is lost, what is put at risk, what kind of person do the actions create, etc, in the experience and process.

Independence, maturity, freedom to choose, etc, are maybe important values. It's easy to see that there are many things kids can do that would be more effective in helping them attain those values. Kids can do drugs, and there are also many other things they could do that would be more effective in helping them become independent, mature adults with the freedom to choose what they want to do, etc. They might not be able to discern which are more effective, which is why there are adults, parents, teachers, and others, around to help them and set them straight.  But even this line of thinking is results oriented.

Book Review: "Philosophy of Mind"

Philosophy of Mind (Dimensions of Philosophy) is a fantastic introduction to the subject, and to the basic fundamental issues surrounding any topic that relates to the mind, including cognitive science, artificial intelligence as it relates to cognitive science, psychology, etc.

It covers a lot of ground without presuming specialist knowledge of terminologies, and it briefly explains all related concepts that are required to understand the issues at play (eg, concepts from as far afield as philosophy of science, language, or the computing science concept of a Turing machine).

Book Review: "Religion and Science"

Religion and Science (Gifford Lectures Series) is an excellent introduction to historical and contemporary issues and views in the interaction of science, religion, and society.

Very detailed in its presentation of scientific topics, although for those who are already well versed in various popular general scientific topics, certain sections describing relativity, quantum theory, astronomy, etc, might be a bit repetitive.

The same could probably be said of the theological topics for those already well versed in them. That is, of course, why this book makes for an excellent introductory text.

This book is not a one or two sided view but instead presents many of the nuances in the interface between science and religion in society. I recommend this book, and especially more so in conjunction with Midgley's Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning, which I've reviewed as well.

Book Review: "Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning"

Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning is a fantastic book about the development of science and its advancement in Western culture. It contains a lot of deep and thought provoking discussions on the position science holds in current Western culture, and its metaphysical and epistemological nature.

In particular, it looks at the notion of science as a societal, cultural, and even spiritual force, a notion that is sometimes thrust onto science and perpetuated by certain science writers. To some, the building of this notion tends towards using science as part of a myth constructed by people to shape and understand how to live in an age of an over abundance of information; perhaps it even seems to be displacing the role of religion.

Neither entirely anti-science nor pro-science, Midgley presents a nuanced view of the interaction of science, religion, and society. Midgley encourages a rethinking of the role and importance of science, and its relationship to how we live and how we ought to decide to live.

On the whole, this is a book I recommend on the philosophy of science and society. I also recommend reading this in conjunction with Barbour's Religion and Science (Gifford Lectures Series), which I will be reviewing as well.

Artificial Intelligence Needs to Learn to Read

To complete my previous post on the danger of artificial intelligence, I'll now briefly explain why I believe AI systems needs the ability to read and understand the written word.

The problem of building an intelligent AI system that can cause so much harm is actually nothing new in the sense that parents face this problem all the time. Why do parents not fear their children growing up to abandon them or worse? The problem with building autonomous systems is that they are autonomous, so before we set them lose, we might want to think about how to ensure these systems will autonomously decide not to harm us.

Artificial Intelligence: the Danger

With all the advances in AI, it leaves me without a doubt that at some point AI machines will have a sufficient level of intelligence to be dangerous to humans.  Because of this, it's important that we endow sufficiently intelligent and general AI systems with the ability to read about and understand human conceptions of morality.

In this post, I'll express why I'm convinced AI systems will one day become dangerous.  In a later post, I'll explain why I believe AI systems needs the ability to read and understand the written word.

Right away, some people will discount the threat that AI systems pose by noting that AI systems cannot attain any level of intelligence to be malicious.  In fact, it seems that if we keep such systems locked down and sandboxed, the AI system couldn't control what its designers don't want it to control anyway.  A quick thought experiment shows this is clearly not the case.