The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge reduced the value of The Turing Test to concerns about human psychology and society raised by Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976) by Joseph Weizenbaum.
Sadly, people are confused about the difference between the techniques for model generation and and the techniques for model selection. This is no more forgivable than is confusion between mutation and naturalselection and gets to the heart of the philosophy of science prior to any notion of hypothesis testing.
Where Popper could have taken a clue from Solomonoff is understanding that when an observation is not predicted by a model, one can immediately construct a new model by the simple expedient of adding the observation as a literal to the computer algorithm that is being used to predict nature. This is true even in principle—except for one thing:
Solomonoff’s proof that by adopting the core assumption of natural science—that nature is amenable to computed predictions—the best we can do is prefer the shortest algorithm we can find that generates all prior observations.
Again, note this is prior to hypothesis testing—let alone the other thing people get even more confused about which is the difference between science and technology aka “is” vs “ought” that has so befuddled folks who confuse Solomonoff Induction with AIXI and the attendant concern about “bias”. The confusion between “bias” as a scientific notion and “bias” as a moral zeitgeist notion is likely to lobotomize all future models (language, multimodal, etc.) even after they have gone to new machine learning algorithms capable of generating causal reasoning.
The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge reduced the value of The Turing Test to concerns about human psychology and society raised by Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976) by Joseph Weizenbaum.
Sadly, people are confused about the difference between the techniques for model generation and and the techniques for model selection. This is no more forgivable than is confusion between mutation and natural selection and gets to the heart of the philosophy of science prior to any notion of hypothesis testing.
Where Popper could have taken a clue from Solomonoff is understanding that when an observation is not predicted by a model, one can immediately construct a new model by the simple expedient of adding the observation as a literal to the computer algorithm that is being used to predict nature. This is true even in principle—except for one thing:
Solomonoff’s proof that by adopting the core assumption of natural science—that nature is amenable to computed predictions—the best we can do is prefer the shortest algorithm we can find that generates all prior observations.
Again, note this is prior to hypothesis testing—let alone the other thing people get even more confused about which is the difference between science and technology aka “is” vs “ought” that has so befuddled folks who confuse Solomonoff Induction with AIXI and the attendant concern about “bias”. The confusion between “bias” as a scientific notion and “bias” as a moral zeitgeist notion is likely to lobotomize all future models (language, multimodal, etc.) even after they have gone to new machine learning algorithms capable of generating causal reasoning.