Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Inside The Sane Asylum...virgin wool

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From Inside The Sane Asylum
Journal Entry: 4/24/19
The Human Conservancy Series
Virgin Wool...
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It is a sad fact but most of us no longer know how to grow the food we eat or build the homes we live in. After all, we don’t understand animal husbandry, or how to change the spark plugs in our car, or perhaps even how to change the spin wool. 

Spinning wool reminds me of a joke about virgin wool. If I were to ask you where virgin wool comes from, you would likely say, Sheep. But the truth of the matter, it comes from sheep that run the fastest.

In today's reality,  we just don’t need to know these things because we are members of what social psychologists call ‘transactive memory networks’. I always wanted to be a social psychologist. It sounds good.

We are constantly engaged in ‘memory transactions’ with a community of these ‘memory partners’, throughout most of our daily activities.

As a member of these networks, most people no longer need to remember most things. This is not because that knowledge has been entirely forgotten or lost, but because someone or something else retains it. We just need to know whom to talk to, or where to go to look it up. The inherited talent for such cooperative behaviour is a gift from evolution, and it expands our effective memory capacity big time. These social psychologist don't know if that is good or a curse on mankind.

What’s new, however, is that many of our memory partners are now smart machines.  An Artificial Intellence – such as Google search – is a memory partner like no other. It’s more like a memory ‘super-partner’, immediately responsive, always available sits right on our counter tops and it gives us access to a large fraction of the entire store of human knowledge. Amazing! And just think, my teacher made me memorize all 64 parishes in Louisiana. I still remember them today, but now with just a quick request to my memory partner, I not only have their names but their entire history by just asking this cute device with a cute name.


Researchers have identified several pitfalls in our current situation. For one, our ancestors evolved within groups of other humans, a kind of peer-to-peer memory network. Yet this information from other people was invariably coloured by various forms of their bias and motivated reasoning. They dissembled and rationalised. They could have been mistaken, yet we have learned to be alive to these flaws in others, and in ourselves. 

But perhaps the presentation of these AI algorithms inclines many people to believe that these algorithms are correct and ‘objective’. Put simply, that would be magical thinking since algorithms are produced by humans...that's the way I see it on this cloudy day in April...Doc


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