There is also a considerable level of politics, if you read Egan’s writings about Iran and Australia’s handling of migrants—anything which distracts from the real important issues, like how Iran is mistreated by the world, is the enemy.
(Plus a certain degree of mathematician crankery: his page on Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI, or his complaints about people linking the wrong URLs due to his ISP host—because he is apparently unable to figure out ‘website domain names’ - were quite something even when they were written.)
his page on Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI
The page in question is complaining about Google search’s “knowledge panel” showing inaccurate information when you search for his name, which is a reasonable thing for someone to be annoyed about. The anti-singularitarian snark does seem misplaced (Google’s automated systems getting this wrong in 2016 doesn’t seem like a lot of evidence about future AI development trajectories), but it’s not a claim to have “disproven AI”.
his complaints about people linking the wrong URLs due to his ISP host—because he is apparently unable to figure out ‘website domain names’
which is a reasonable thing for someone to be annoyed about.
No, not really. The most fundamental problem is not the stupid claims about what Google will ‘ever’ be capable of (although that aspect is highly notable, in case you needed any evidence how Egan blew it on DL, that he wrote this ~2012 and kept doubling down on it), but rather his stubborn insistence on misunderstanding what a search engine does. That is why I am citing it: as an example of his mathematician-like crankery (ie. cognitive rigidity and fanaticism and perfectionism) - he has an idea about what a search engine does, and Google doesn’t satisfy it, but he is unable to admit his idea is wrong.
The point of a search engine like Google is to be best-effort and show the best possible Internet results to the user for them to use as they will: it is not to ‘show the one true correct answer’. A search engine which showed only 1 correct answer, or nothing, would not be a very useful search engine. (For example, in almost all of my search case-studies a search engine which operated in the way Egan expects Google to operate would be completely useless.)
I wouldn’t call that a “complaint”, exactly, but a hacky band-aid solution from someone who probably has better things to do with his time than tinker with DNS configuration.
He had that problem for something like a decade, and his solution was to insert spam in every page of his website for a self-inflicted problem that would’ve taken 5 minutes to fix in his registrar (which I know because I was also running a similar setup c. 2009 in terms of a domain name to content hosted on a shell account), and probably resulted in bugs or emails on a monthly basis the entire time (also based on my experience running a similar site).
Precisely because he had better things to do with his time, his not fixing it and instead complaining about everyone else was an embarrassment and an illustration of his cognitive rigidity & fanaticism. (“Am I wrong? Am I screwing up in a dumb simple fixable way which results in constant problems as people keep linking to the very URLs I insist on redirecting to them and then ordering them to fix my screwup by a nag notice and mysteriously some of them don’t do so? Am I out of touch? …No. The children are wrong.”)
Also as an additional example: I have never once emailed, replied to, or tweeted at Egan that I can recall. He nevertheless preemptively blocked me on Twitter so long ago I don’t know when.
But he’s not complaining about the traditional pages of search results! He’s complaining about the authoritative-looking Knowledge Panel to the side:
Obviously it’s not Google’s fault that some obscure SF web sites have stolen pictures from the Monash University web site of Professor Gregory K Egan and pretended that they’re pictures of me … but it is Google’s fault when Google claim to have assembled a mini-biography of someone called “Greg Egan” in which the information all refers to one person (a science fiction writer), while the picture is of someone else entirely (a professor of engineering). [...] this system is just an amateurish mash-up. And by displaying results from disparate sources in a manner that implies that they refer to the same subject, it acts as a mindless stupidity amplifier that disseminates and entrenches existing errors.
Regarding the site URLs, I don’t know, I think it’s pretty common for people to have a problem that would take five minutes to fix if you’re an specialist that already knows what you’re doing, but non-specialists just reach for the first duct-tape solution that comes to mind without noticing how bad it is.
Like: you have a website at myname.somewebhost.com. One day, you buy myname.net, but end up following a tutorial that makes it a redirect rather than a proper CNAME or A record, because you don’t know what those are. You’re happy that your new domain works in that it’s showing your website, but you notice that the address bar is still showing the old URL. So you say, “Huh, I guess I’ll put a note on my page template telling people to use the myname.net address in case I ever change webhosts” and call it a day. I guess you could characterize that as a form of “cognitive rigidity”, but “fanaticism”? Really?
I agree that Egan still hasn’t seen the writing on the wall regarding deep learning. (A line in “Death and the Gorgon” mentions Sherlock’s “own statistical tables”, which is not what someone familiar with the technology would write.)
I agree that preëmptive blocking is kind of weird, but I also think your locked account with “Follow requests ignored due to terrible UI” is kind of weird.
But he’s not complaining about the traditional pages of search results!
He is definitely complaining about it in general. He has many complaints laced throughout which are not solely about the infobox, and which show his general opposition to the very idea of a search engine, eg.
But the self-appointed custodians of the world’s knowledge can’t cope with that tiny irregularity in the data, so they insist on filling the gap with whatever comes to hand:
Yes! That’s the idea! Showing whatever comes to hand!
The photo is gone again, probably because I managed to get it taken down from the Russian site a few days ago. But the underlying problem remains: Google’s software has no ability to distinguish reliable assertions about the real world from random nonsense that appears on the web, created by incompetent or malicious third parties.
The ‘underlying problem’ is the problem, even when what, according to you, the problem is, has been fixed.
For the people being falsely portrayed as “Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan”, this is probably just a minor nuisance, but it provides an illustration of how laughable the notion is that Google will ever be capable of using its relentlessly over-hyped “AI” to make sense of information on the web.
“Make sense of information on the web” obviously goes far beyond complaints about merely a little infobox being wrong.
This seems to have helped, slightly, but only in the sense that photos that shouldn’t be included here at all no longer come first in line. The current clumsy mash-up is shown in the screen shot on the left: a few copies of the decoy images that I put on my site in the hope of letting humans know that there are no actual photos of me on the web, and a couple of my book covers as well
“Decoy images”!
And so on and so forth, like the 2016 entry which is a thousand words criticizing Google for supplying not in the infobox about a bunch of other, actual, Greg Egans.
Again, Egan is being quite clear that he means the crazy thing you insist he can’t mean. And this is what he is talking about when he complains about “And by displaying results from disparate sources in a manner that implies that they refer to the same subject, it acts as a mindless stupidity amplifier that disseminates and entrenches existing errors.”—he thinks displaying them at all is the problem. It shouldn’t be amplifying or disseminating ‘existing errors’, even though he is demanding something impossible and something that if possible would remove a lot of a search engine’s value. (I often am investigating ‘existing errors’...)
if you’re an specialist that already knows what you’re doing, but non-specialists just reach for the first duct-tape solution that comes to mind without noticing how bad it is.
I was an even worse programmer and web developer than Egan was ~2009 (see eg his mathematics pages) when I solved the same problem in minutes as part of basic DNS setup. Imagine, I didn’t even realize back then I should be so impressed at how I pulled off something only a ‘specialist’ could!
I agree that preëmptive blocking is kind of weird, but I also think your locked account with “Follow requests ignored due to terrible UI” is kind of weird.
The blocking, whenever it was exactly, was years and years before I ever locked my account, which was relatively recent, because it was just due to Elon Musk following me. (It would be even weirder if he had done so afterwards, as there is even less point to preemptively blocking a locked account.)
Regarding the site URLs, I don’t know, I think it’s pretty common for people to have a problem that would take five minutes to fix if you’re an specialist that already knows what you’re doing, but non-specialists just reach for the first duct-tape solution that comes to mind without noticing how bad it is.
It should take significantly less than a decade to ask someone “is there a way to fix this problem?”. Or, say, to Google it. Or, just in general, to ponder the question of whether the problem may be fixed, and to make any effort whatsoever to fix it.
For the people being falsely portrayed as “Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan”, this is probably just a minor nuisance, but it provides an illustration of how laughable the notion is that Google will ever be capable of using its relentlessly over-hyped “AI” to make sense of information on the web.
He didn’t use the word “disprove”, but when he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!) be able to merely “make sense of his information on the web”, I think gwern’s gloss is closer to accurate than yours. It’s 2024 and Google is already using AI to make sense of information on the web, this isn’t just “anti-singularitarian snark”.
he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!)
The 2016 passage you quoted is calling it laughable that Google-in-particular’s technology (marketed as “AI”, but Egan doesn’t think the term is warranted) will ever be able to make sense of information on the web. It’s Gary Marcus–like skepticism about the reliability and generality of existing-paradigm machine learning techniques, not Hubert Dreyfus–like skepticism of whether a machine could think in all philosophical strictness. I think this is a really important distinction that the text of your comment and Gwern’s comment (“disproves AI”, “laughable that AI will ever”) aren’t being clear about.
(I agree; my intent in participating in this tedious thread is merely to establish that “mathematician crankery [about] Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI” is a different thing from “made an overconfident negative prediction about AI capabilities”.)
someone who probably has better things to do with his time than tinker with DNS configuration
I find such excuses to be unconvincing pretty much 100% of the time. Almost everyone who “has better things to do than [whatever]” is in that situation because their time is very valuable, and their time is very valuable because they make, and thus have, a lot of money. (Like, say, a successful fiction author.) In which case, they can pay someone to solve the problem for them. (Heck, I don’t doubt that Egan could even find people to help him fix this for free!)
If someone has a problem like this, but neither takes the time to fix it himself, nor pays (or asks) someone to fix it for him, what this means isn’t that he’s too busy, but rather that he doesn’t care.
And that’s fine. He’s got the right to not care about this. But then nobody else has the slightest shred of obligation to care about it, either. Not lifting a finger to fix this problem, but expecting other people to spend their time and mental effort (even if it’s only a little of both) to compensate for the problem, is certainly not laudable behavior.
(Plus a certain degree of mathematician crankery: his page on Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI
I’m starting to wonder if a lot/all of the people who are very cynical about the feasibility of ASI have some crank belief or other like that. Plenty of people have private religion, for instance. And sometimes that religion informs their decisions, but they never tell anyone the real reasons underlying these decisions, because they know they could never justify them. They instead say a load of other stuff they made up to support the decisions that never quite adds up to a coherent position because they’re leaving something load-bearing out.
This is a fairly well-documented phenomenon: the narcissism of small differences.
Also:
is clearly an instance of the same phenomenon.
There is also a considerable level of politics, if you read Egan’s writings about Iran and Australia’s handling of migrants—anything which distracts from the real important issues, like how Iran is mistreated by the world, is the enemy.
(Plus a certain degree of mathematician crankery: his page on Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI, or his complaints about people linking the wrong URLs due to his ISP host—because he is apparently unable to figure out ‘website domain names’ - were quite something even when they were written.)
The page in question is complaining about Google search’s “knowledge panel” showing inaccurate information when you search for his name, which is a reasonable thing for someone to be annoyed about. The anti-singularitarian snark does seem misplaced (Google’s automated systems getting this wrong in 2016 doesn’t seem like a lot of evidence about future AI development trajectories), but it’s not a claim to have “disproven AI”.
You mean how http://gregegan.net used to be a 301 permanent redirect to http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au, and then the individual pages would say “If you link to this page, please use this URL: http://www.gregegan.net/[...]”? (Internet Archive example.) I wouldn’t call that a “complaint”, exactly, but a hacky band-aid solution from someone who probably has better things to do with his time than tinker with DNS configuration.
No, not really. The most fundamental problem is not the stupid claims about what Google will ‘ever’ be capable of (although that aspect is highly notable, in case you needed any evidence how Egan blew it on DL, that he wrote this ~2012 and kept doubling down on it), but rather his stubborn insistence on misunderstanding what a search engine does. That is why I am citing it: as an example of his mathematician-like crankery (ie. cognitive rigidity and fanaticism and perfectionism) - he has an idea about what a search engine does, and Google doesn’t satisfy it, but he is unable to admit his idea is wrong.
The point of a search engine like Google is to be best-effort and show the best possible Internet results to the user for them to use as they will: it is not to ‘show the one true correct answer’. A search engine which showed only 1 correct answer, or nothing, would not be a very useful search engine. (For example, in almost all of my search case-studies a search engine which operated in the way Egan expects Google to operate would be completely useless.)
He had that problem for something like a decade, and his solution was to insert spam in every page of his website for a self-inflicted problem that would’ve taken 5 minutes to fix in his registrar (which I know because I was also running a similar setup c. 2009 in terms of a domain name to content hosted on a shell account), and probably resulted in bugs or emails on a monthly basis the entire time (also based on my experience running a similar site).
Precisely because he had better things to do with his time, his not fixing it and instead complaining about everyone else was an embarrassment and an illustration of his cognitive rigidity & fanaticism. (“Am I wrong? Am I screwing up in a dumb simple fixable way which results in constant problems as people keep linking to the very URLs I insist on redirecting to them and then ordering them to fix my screwup by a nag notice and mysteriously some of them don’t do so? Am I out of touch? …No. The children are wrong.”)
Also as an additional example: I have never once emailed, replied to, or tweeted at Egan that I can recall. He nevertheless preemptively blocked me on Twitter so long ago I don’t know when.
But he’s not complaining about the traditional pages of search results! He’s complaining about the authoritative-looking Knowledge Panel to the side:
Regarding the site URLs, I don’t know, I think it’s pretty common for people to have a problem that would take five minutes to fix if you’re an specialist that already knows what you’re doing, but non-specialists just reach for the first duct-tape solution that comes to mind without noticing how bad it is.
Like: you have a website at myname.somewebhost.com. One day, you buy myname.net, but end up following a tutorial that makes it a redirect rather than a proper CNAME or A record, because you don’t know what those are. You’re happy that your new domain works in that it’s showing your website, but you notice that the address bar is still showing the old URL. So you say, “Huh, I guess I’ll put a note on my page template telling people to use the myname.net address in case I ever change webhosts” and call it a day. I guess you could characterize that as a form of “cognitive rigidity”, but “fanaticism”? Really?
I agree that Egan still hasn’t seen the writing on the wall regarding deep learning. (A line in “Death and the Gorgon” mentions Sherlock’s “own statistical tables”, which is not what someone familiar with the technology would write.)
I agree that preëmptive blocking is kind of weird, but I also think your locked account with “Follow requests ignored due to terrible UI” is kind of weird.
He is definitely complaining about it in general. He has many complaints laced throughout which are not solely about the infobox, and which show his general opposition to the very idea of a search engine, eg.
Yes! That’s the idea! Showing whatever comes to hand!
The ‘underlying problem’ is the problem, even when what, according to you, the problem is, has been fixed.
“Make sense of information on the web” obviously goes far beyond complaints about merely a little infobox being wrong.
“Decoy images”!
And so on and so forth, like the 2016 entry which is a thousand words criticizing Google for supplying not in the infobox about a bunch of other, actual, Greg Egans.
Again, Egan is being quite clear that he means the crazy thing you insist he can’t mean. And this is what he is talking about when he complains about “And by displaying results from disparate sources in a manner that implies that they refer to the same subject, it acts as a mindless stupidity amplifier that disseminates and entrenches existing errors.”—he thinks displaying them at all is the problem. It shouldn’t be amplifying or disseminating ‘existing errors’, even though he is demanding something impossible and something that if possible would remove a lot of a search engine’s value. (I often am investigating ‘existing errors’...)
I was an even worse programmer and web developer than Egan was ~2009 (see eg his mathematics pages) when I solved the same problem in minutes as part of basic DNS setup. Imagine, I didn’t even realize back then I should be so impressed at how I pulled off something only a ‘specialist’ could!
The blocking, whenever it was exactly, was years and years before I ever locked my account, which was relatively recent, because it was just due to Elon Musk following me. (It would be even weirder if he had done so afterwards, as there is even less point to preemptively blocking a locked account.)
It should take significantly less than a decade to ask someone “is there a way to fix this problem?”. Or, say, to Google it. Or, just in general, to ponder the question of whether the problem may be fixed, and to make any effort whatsoever to fix it.
He didn’t use the word “disprove”, but when he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!) be able to merely “make sense of his information on the web”, I think gwern’s gloss is closer to accurate than yours. It’s 2024 and Google is already using AI to make sense of information on the web, this isn’t just “anti-singularitarian snark”.
The 2016 passage you quoted is calling it laughable that Google-in-particular’s technology (marketed as “AI”, but Egan doesn’t think the term is warranted) will ever be able to make sense of information on the web. It’s Gary Marcus–like skepticism about the reliability and generality of existing-paradigm machine learning techniques, not Hubert Dreyfus–like skepticism of whether a machine could think in all philosophical strictness. I think this is a really important distinction that the text of your comment and Gwern’s comment (“disproves AI”, “laughable that AI will ever”) aren’t being clear about.
Well, to be clear, that too has been solidly falsified. Gemini seems plenty capable of making sense of information on the web.
(I agree; my intent in participating in this tedious thread is merely to establish that “mathematician crankery [about] Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI” is a different thing from “made an overconfident negative prediction about AI capabilities”.)
I find such excuses to be unconvincing pretty much 100% of the time. Almost everyone who “has better things to do than [whatever]” is in that situation because their time is very valuable, and their time is very valuable because they make, and thus have, a lot of money. (Like, say, a successful fiction author.) In which case, they can pay someone to solve the problem for them. (Heck, I don’t doubt that Egan could even find people to help him fix this for free!)
If someone has a problem like this, but neither takes the time to fix it himself, nor pays (or asks) someone to fix it for him, what this means isn’t that he’s too busy, but rather that he doesn’t care.
And that’s fine. He’s got the right to not care about this. But then nobody else has the slightest shred of obligation to care about it, either. Not lifting a finger to fix this problem, but expecting other people to spend their time and mental effort (even if it’s only a little of both) to compensate for the problem, is certainly not laudable behavior.
Yes, while there are limits to what kinds of tasks can be delegated, web hosting is not exactly a domain lacking in adequate service providers.
I’m starting to wonder if a lot/all of the people who are very cynical about the feasibility of ASI have some crank belief or other like that. Plenty of people have private religion, for instance. And sometimes that religion informs their decisions, but they never tell anyone the real reasons underlying these decisions, because they know they could never justify them. They instead say a load of other stuff they made up to support the decisions that never quite adds up to a coherent position because they’re leaving something load-bearing out.