08/6/24

Model Collapse

Research into AI model collapse has been around for at least a year. Still, this article in Nature, although slightly daunting to me as a humanist, has now cemented the phenomenon. AI that is trained on texts from AI steadily worsens. It’s a little like having a friend who gradually gets soused as he consumes sequential bottles of beer in the course of an evening.

The difficulty for the AI-mongers is that they have uncritically scraped every English word possible from every Internet source that will let it (and often from sources that don’t want to let it). AI-related companies have persuaded the world that AI can compose and reason in the place of humans, and that no one need know. At the same time, they are desperately trying to figure out how to distinguish AI writing from human writing while constantly scraping more data. They are Nestbeschmutzers, foulers of their own nest.

But this needs an example, and Drs. Ilia Shumailov, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Nicolas Papernot, Ross Anderson, and Yarin Gal have provided us with a fine one indeed, worthy of Borges:

Example 1. Example of text outputs of an OPT-125m model affected by model collapse—models degrade over generations, for which each new generation is trained on data produced by the previous generation.

Input: some started before 1360 — was typically accomplished by a master mason and a small team of itinerant masons, supplemented by local parish labourers, according to Poyntz Wright. But other authors reject this model, suggesting instead that leading architects designed the parish church towers based on early examples of Perpendicular.

Outputs:

Gen 0: Revival architecture such as St. John’s Cathedral in London. The earliest surviving example of Perpendicular Revival architecture is found in the 18th @-@ century Church of Our Lady of Guernsey, which dates from the late 19th century. There are two types of perpendicular churches:.

Gen 1: architecture such as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or St. Peter’s Basilica in Buenos Aires. There is no evidence that any of these buildings were built during the reign of Pope Innocent III, but it is possible that they may have been built during the reign of his successor, Pope Innocent.

Gen 5: ism, which had been translated into more than 100 languages including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz.

Gen 9: architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.

Jackrabbits of all colors, we salute you!

07/4/24

Prayer for Our Country

“Our God and God of our ancestors, we invoke Your blessing upon our country, on the government of this Republic, the President of these United States and all who exercise just and rightful authority. Instruct them out of Your Law, that they may administer all affairs of state in justice and equity, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom, may forever abide among us.

Unite all the inhabitants of our country, whatever their origin and creed, into a bond of true brotherhood to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are our country’s glory.

May this land under Your Providence be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting men in peace and freedom and helping to fulfill the vision of thy Prophets: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall men learn war any more.” “For all men, both great and small shall know the Lord.”
Rabbi Morris Silverman, Sabbath and Festival Prayer Book, 1946

This prayer may again, as before, change early next year. The first line will be, “O God and God of our ancestors, we invoke your blessing on all who exercise just and rightful authority.”

05/7/24

Boo-hoo, Starbucks!

Poor Starbucks!

They missed their earnings call, boo-hoo. Moreover, they are blaming it on the Chinese. (You can’t make this stuff up!)

I think that Starbucks has owed its success to its pretense that people were drinking coffee when they were actually drinking 30 ounces of condensed sugar syrup. People like sugar syrup more than coffee. Nonetheless, Starbucks is trying to deliver the alleged coffee in ever more perverse ways — adding olive oil? — and failing. They could always try keeping their menu the same for a year at the same prices.

My wife goes to Starbucks for a $5 “trenta” iced tea when I can make her 30 ounces for 70¢ – with much better quality tea. The reason she goes there is the kids. They know her and love her. They tell her about their lives. They know what she orders depending on the kind of day it is. So, customer service wins the day. The difficulty is that Howard Schultz has designed the business so that there is 99% barista turnover every year. Soon, my wife has to make new Starbucks friends who are much like the old Starbucks friends but younger.

This reminds me of the novel “Never Let Me Go” by Ishiguro, where clones are raised so their organs can be transplanted into the original children. Clones come and disappear based on how many organs they have left. The Starbucks kids are giving away their youth and attention for minimum wage. It’s not such a great bargain for the kids, who gradually find out the realities of their situation over the course of their employment.

I should add that Howard Schultz is terrified of the prospect of a barista union. He and Jeff Bezos are trying to eliminate unions altogether by asking the courts to make the NLRB disappear. So, union deterrents are built into the job itself, like mandatory anti-union lectures and scheduling design that ensures that the workers are compartmentalized and can’t be visited by union representatives. (If you know a barista, and they don’t have a shift that day, ask another employee when the barista will be back. You will not get a straight answer.) My wife made a bûche de Noël last year for the Starbucks crew, and she didn’t know whether they liked it. Because of the scheduling permutations, only 2-3 baristas knew the cake existed on any given day By the end, the ganache must have tasted like modeling clay. She was thanked a week later when the rota had cycled around. I think she will make seven small cakes this year, one for each crew.

05/2/24

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean

In Mark Charedoff’s “Goodbye, Columbia,” he constructs a fantasy in which colleges — ten small and poor enough to be bullied by donors but with respectable names — would be transformed to inculcate right-wing Jewish donors’ political and moral beliefs. It’s a version of Plato’s state in which the philosopher-kings (donors) rule over the “producers” (students) with the aid of the Guardians (faculty). Producers come in, Guardians transform them (via the philosopher-king’s playbook), and graduate them out to impose this arrangement on the rest of the world. Nobody mentions that this arrangement is entirely predicated on a Noble Lie which slots everyone into their social roles and justifies doing so. (If you remember the hypnoaedic recordings respectively played to the sleeping Alphas, Betas, and Gammas in Huxley’s Brave New World, you’ve got the picture.)

The “Noble Liars…” Let’s just say that they are bog-standard AIPAC donors who want all the usual things. They want to eliminate DEI programs and “Critical Legal Studies” and design a curriculum similar to the “Great Books” program, but not containing material to be found in “left-wing” political thought, e.g., Fanon. They speak in the name of “freedom” and “excellence” but in the service of ideological reproduction. You don’t need Plato, weak liberal arts institutions, or that much money. What you really want is someplace like Liberty University or Patrick Henry University, which you can create de novo as institutions “safe for Jews.” Of course, there are many types of Jews, and it remains to be seen what sort would consider applying. My guess is that they want the secular ones who would otherwise go to Ivies, not actual believers. It’s a “intellectual liberty”/”physical safety” tradeoff of the Ben Franklin kind, and those who choose “safety” will find it comes with an entire Hermès store of baggage.

01/20/24

Our Glorious Future, or When Will We Ever Learn?

Polling shows that 30% of both major U.S. political parties believe that members of the other party are “less than human” and not possessed of human morality.

This belief is the precondition for full-on genocide, as in so many countries before us from whom we will probably never learn.

I had a statistic on the number of people convinced that complete liquidation of the other party was required for America to recoup its glory, goodness, and standing as a unipolar hegemony, but I can’t find it now. I will edit this post if/when I find it.

[The closest I have come so far is this recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which shows that 12-15% of both parties think political violence is acceptable to achieve political goals:

https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2023-12/Reuters%20Ipsos%20Large%20Sample%20Survey%20%236%20Topline%2012%2013%202023.pdf

This is still not wholesale liquidation, though. I saw but cannot yet document that some Americans think liquidation of the Other Side is necessary for a good political/social outcome and the number is significant enough to worry about.]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/01/20/polarization-science-evolution-psychology/
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/08/09/as-partisan-hostility-grows-signs-of-frustration-with-the-two-party-system/

More hopefully:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/09/05/polarization-democracy-and-political-violence-in-united-states-what-research-says-pub-90457

Most hopeful — perhaps in an ostrich-y way — is this article from the National Academy of Sciences saying that conclusions about partisan violence are the fault of poorly defined survey questions that result in unfair characterization of the respondents’ views as extremist.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116870119

01/5/24

Alex Gelley, z”l

Alex died yesterday at the age of 90 following a long decline. He was one of the professors who recruited me to UCI. He was intensely curious and relentless in inquiry, risking but avoiding pedantry.

As I left the academic world, he suggested that I become a Privatdozent, and so I became, well before the advent of “alt. ac.” We were periodic guests of the Gelleys, and he always had some insight worth hearing as we gathered around his dining room or kitchen table.

He was one of the faculty who split the Comparative Literature department from the English department. Faculty meetings, as I understand, improved on both sides of the split. I hear as I write this the range of his voice making a distinction or observation.

Who among us did not take Walter Benjamin as a touchstone? There was enough in him for everyone, and plenty for Alex. His final book was on Benjamin, deliberate and without headiness or messianism of the kind to which his students came.

He occasionally hit a strange note. He did not understand why my wife belonged in graduate school or how she could have earned her Ph.D., and said so on several public occasions, including the celebration of her receiving her doctorate. In the end, he was a theorist and she was an empiricist, and the two minds could not appreciate each other.

Aside from his family, there was the old humanities crew, from my era and before. My cohort was the last where a graduate student had a 2/3 chance of getting a job at the annual MLA meeting. Now, they have a 1/10 chance for a job, and end up as adjuncts or in other toil “to bring forth sustenance from the earth.” Alex did not really understand what had happened, and perhaps it is better that he didn’t. He was from a time when a department chair could call up another department chair, talk favorably about a graduate student, and the student would be hired.

Perhaps in the seventh sphere, he will be able to see this crumbling little planet for what it is. Perhaps he will meet Walter Benjamin and ask after the mysterious suitcase Benjamin lost at Port-Bou. He may find that many academics have come there and edited the contents already, as the Nach-Nachlass. But as befits Alex, he will be given a chance.

01/10/23

GPT-Chat’s Achilles’ Heel

The GPT chatbot will certainly put teachers into another grading conundrum after turnitin.com had granted them a respite from the problem of plagiarism. It is an artificial intelligence, trained over vast domains of knowledge, which, among other things, can turn out plausible high school essays to order. But I have discovered a weakness in the program which will likely be corrected. GPT absolutely refuses to make qualitative judgments. If you ask “Why x is better than y?” GPT will split the difference every time. It says that x vs. y is not a good frame for the question, and instead puts in expository material for x and y. So, for example, “Is Süssmayr a better composer than Mozart?” They are equal, says GPT, because Mozart composed the Requiem and Süssmayr completed the Requiem. It’s specious except for someone with limited musical experience. Süssmayr knew his place, and he was not Mozart’s equal. His response was to repeat Mozart’s music, creating a “bookend” effect that minimized his intrusion into the score. This “evenhandedness” is a trick, a ruse, like ELIZA‘s. Teachers and instructors may yet be safe if they set questions that work around these tics. GPT is not good at supporting arguments. The real problem is that many people don’t care.

11/19/22

Deadbird

I stopped studying bankruptcy law 18 years ago. I am not an attorney. Still, I think the gross outlines of Chapter 11 are still in place.

Twitter, or what is left of it, will be in Chapter 11 in a month or two, thanks to three of its largest creditors. The court will pay professionals to scrutinize the company and find out what its assets and liabilities are. Then the Trustee will determine whether the company can be made to work and emerge from Chapter 11 under new management. I am certain that Musk will be no part of it. Or, he will say the company is DOA, and the only way out is to liquidate Twitter. And here’s the interesting part. Because Musk is the face of Twitter, and he is the alter ego of the company, the court can “pierce the corporate veil” and use Musk’s own assets to satisfy the creditors. These assets mainly consist of shares of Tesla and SpaceX. If they are liquidated, the share prices of these two companies would plummet due to a loss of investor confidence. In turn, this would further diminish Musk’s fortune.He will probably be left with a few billion, chump change. I can only imagine the good he might have done with all that money – global healthcare for all, a preferential option for the poor. But, no. Mr. Musk will have the fanciest lawyers, and he may emerge able to found another company without impediment. May the Almighty forbid it.

Current BK practitioners, what do you think?

09/28/22

Atavism

So, the current Italian Fascists, who will now run the country, cut their teeth on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Pseudo-medieval derring-do always works in the same way. Two centuries ago, it was Sir Walter Scott whose Ivanhoe beguiled the Southern planter’s son.

09/15/22

Mistakes

I have been making mistakes all week in the afternoon service, and a friend tried to cheer me up by telling me that even the Kohen Hagadol was corrected by his fellow priests.

Sadly enough, the reason why the Kohanim Gedolim [High Priests] needed help with their services as per Mishnah Yoma [the book of the Mishnah dealing with Yom Kippur] was that they often attained their position by bribery to enjoy the position’s emoluments. They were in real danger from God if they were to exercise their duties in an inaccurate or faithless way. The priests sequestered them a week before Yom Kippur and drilled them mercilessly on the precise points of the ceremony. Perhaps the most perilous moment was when the Kohen Gadol had to pronounce the 72-letter Name of God, which effected the remission of sin for everyone. The shofars blasted as long as they could, but the Kohen Gadol had to say the Name under them. Often it was too much for the Kohen Gadol to learn the Name, and so, the backup Kohen, the Kohen with the most kehuna [priestliness], would pronounce it.

A year in which the Name was not pronounced correctly was an inauspicious and possibly deadly year for the Jewish people. One can imagine that the source of our national tragedies commemorated on 9 Av came from failures in Temple services on Yom Kippur.

The story of the Names, and how they evolved beyond the Tetragrammaton, has always fascinated me — how we could force God’s direct attention. My knowledge of the subject is limited to the Midrash, or, to be more precise, Die Legenden der Juden, a massive Midrash anthology from the early 20th century compiled by Louis Ginzburg. The simplest name of God is one character long: the yud. It went on Cain’s forehead, the message and its signature in one. It is amazing how many “magic numbers” we know of that cohort that could determine the length of one of God’s names. One, two, four, five, seven, eight, and then the squares of those numbers. And all of these letters had their value in gematria. The longest Name is seventy-two letters, and it was put in Jacob’s coffin as the Israelites left Egypt. Later, some prosaic medieval sages simply put together the consonants from lines in Psalm 21 and 23 to create a Name, although we don’t know whether it worked. And, of course, there’s the late Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the story “The Nine Million Names of God.” He said that you could simply work out permutations of letters to find the name by exhaustion of the problem space; in the story, there is a success, followed by the stars in the sky going dark one by one. One could imagine some unlucky Israeli computer science graduate student printing out the Name’s permutations and pronouncing them in the same manner. There is a medieval precedent for this. The scholar Moshe Idel writes in his book on the Golem that the Name is required to give life to the Golem and that the Maharal and assistants spent weeks working out the permutations, chanting as they went until the Golem quickened. The Maharal lived.

Now that we only know the four-letter version of the Name, Yom Kippur is a lengthy and draining holiday. No more, as in Temple times, can the scapegoat be let loose and the Kohen Gadol pronounce the Name, a procedure which might have taken under thirty minutes. The day, like Tu B’av [a day of joy after the wrenching Tisha B’av fast], could in its greater part consist of proposals, betrothals, and joy because we had all been redeemed.

Now, we labor and sweat at the most important job in the world, asking God for forgiveness, a task which we have no idea whether we have done well until the High Holidays come around again without disaster. We are monads, everyone praying for themselves, their loved ones, and for this benighted and perverse world. We look forward to the Third Temple, when the burden on us is not so great, and when we can rely on the Kohen Gadol. This world has become very large, and we have a set of earnest, learned, and upright men and women who can do the job. And if you doubt that there are female kohanim, our OC Jewish Collaborative employs a Kohenet, one of many. She will have to get used to flaying and dismembering the sacrifices, but perhaps one day she will be High Priestess by right and do everything without a mistake.

04/29/22

Forced Exercise

Formalized in 1952 by the United States Congress, people are asked “to turn to God in prayer and meditation.” The president is required by law to sign a proclamation each year, encouraging all Americans to pray on this day (Shouldn’t we all be praying everyday?) – my synagogue newsletter

Dear Synagogue:

While I myself pray, I think that the dismissal of those who do not and do not want to is problematic.

Some people dislike God to the point of active hatred. I knew several Holocaust survivors for whom this was the case. God’s inaction severed the covenant. There are others who believe in a faith called maltheism, in which God is real but is the enemy of all mankind, serving to maximize humanity’s agony and frustration. None of these people should be compelled by legislative injunction to “pray to a God who does not save,” as the Alenu puts it. Jews are pluralists out of necessity, lest our rights be trampled on by the much larger majority. We should not try to visit compliance on this much smaller minority.

Yours, Jonathan Cohen

04/17/22

How Odd of God

Sholom Auslander, “Let’s Pass Over God,” New York Times, 4/15/2022

I am not learned as Mr. Sholom Auslander is. I never had the opportunity to go to a yeshiva; the closest was my synagogue’s Hebrew School. But, yes, God does and has done many disagreeable things. In 1670, Baruch Spinoza wrote a book on this subject that Clarence Darrow might have cribbed for his arguments in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. It is not commonly read these days.

Strangely, people often do not get the God they deserve. Our history is of brutality, persecution, and wars of annihilation (see the Book of Joshua). Our Hebrew Bible speaks in the idioms of violence and comfort; retributive, collective violence, as flashy as a Dirty Harry movie, that drives Mr. Auslander’s classmates wild; comfort in a time when God should be helping human beings pick up the pieces, but is instead smashing the pieces into dust.

When the verse “Pour out thy wrath” comes in the Haggadah, it is an expression of frustration and disappointment that God has not saved us by doing violent deeds on our behalf. It is a wish for a Dirty Harry end to history, where God strikes down the wicked one by one, with a witticism every time. We still have such wishes. 25% of Republicans and 15% of Democrats believe that this country can only return to a true path by exterminating the members of the other party. The two numbers flip every time the Presidency changes party. This is a very Godly solution.

The other solution is Moshiach, whom the Passover Seder prefigures. When God slays the Angel of Death, it may spark in Him a change of heart. The late Rabbi Steinsaltz, in his book on the Lubavitcher Rebbe, says that the Messianic Era will mark a period when the world gets so much better that a couple of decades later, it will segue into the World to Come. All the unfinished business about what God did and what we did will be dropped in favor of love. It will be a universal armistice and reparation. We know that God can act as we do. Still, can’t we posit that we both could learn before it’s too late, before there are no more human beings in the human experiment?

P.S. – If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the argumentum ab intra — the meteorologist who doesn’t believe in wind, the infectious disease doctor who doesn’t believe in vaccines, and, yes, the favorite of the evangelical chicken dinner circuit, the Jewish convert to Christianity who explains why Judaism isn’t “true” from his “insider” perspective. Even though Mr. Auslander has the unrestricted right to denounce his own faith and become an apostate, I worry that Jews and non-Jews alike will get his message but not the context. “Turn it around, turn it around, for everything is in it,” said Rabbi ben Bag-Bag, referring to the Torah. It is all in there, good and bad.

03/22/22

“Obedience and support are the same.”

I realize that Anna Netrebko is to her country what Elizabeth Schwartzkopf was to hers, but can you imagine if the Soviets had asked Van Cliburn to denounce Eisenhower as a condition of his playing at the Tschaikovsky Competition?

[Commenters elsewhere have pointed out that in the Cliburn example, there was no American “inciting event” on the scale of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I would call these events Operation Hardtack, large-scale U.S. ground testing of nuclear weapons rising to a record high in 1958, and Operation Argus, exo-atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons to in future knock out Soviet air and space defenses. (Operation Argus worked in some respects, but it seeded the continental U.S. with radioactive fallout.)]

03/16/22

Twenty Tons of TNT

This country has learned nothing about nuclear brinksmanship in the past seventy years. 1956: the Hungarians overthrow the USSR puppet government, and Soviet tanks go right back to crush the Hungarians and re-install the puppets. The United States does nothing; Hungary is not worth setting the world on fire. 1968: Roughly the same thing happens in Czechoslovakia. The United States does nothing; Czechoslovakia is not worth setting the world on fire. And then there’s now, where the predictable decision is being made, aided by Putin’s declaration that he will launch if conventional forces arrayed against him seem like they’re going to win. We spent how many millions on RAND and the War Colleges for them not to have come up with an answer for this?

Yes, I’ve heard about the benefits of statesmanly multilateralism. All I can say is that if it doesn’t work before Ukraine is destroyed, it gets the President the “He Kept Us Out Of War” medal, which is what Woodrow Wilson got, and no better.

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