Now That is Some Bullshit!

1st up, from John Kwarsick:

The Machine That Can't Explain Itself

Why AI adoption is outrunning accountability and what happens when the auditors arrive

From 2024 to 2025, the Foundation Model Transparency Index published by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI dropped from 58/100 to 40/100. Oops.

In my very 1st anti-LLM rant, I described LLMs as "indecipherable oracles" - I don't see how that's going to change.

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This next I find almost unbelievable. LLMs will tell you what's in an image without seeing the image?!?!? They just confabulate what's likely to be in the image?!?!? Holy crap, now that's some bullshit! From Gary Marcus:

The mirage of visual understanding in current frontier models

When a model achieves a “top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images” you know something is deeply wrong.

Marcus is reporting a research paper just released by Stanford:

MIRAGE: The Illusion of Visual Understanding

First, Frontier models readily generate detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces, including pathology-biased clinical findings, for images never provided; we term this phenomenon mirage reasoning. Second, without any image input, models also attain strikingly high scores across general and medical multimodal benchmarks, bringing into question their utility and design. In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images. Third, when models were explicitly instructed to guess answers without image access, rather than being implicitly prompted to assume images were present, performance declined markedly.

Another great new term in the dream world of LLM hallucinations: "mirage reasoning".

This tech is clearly NOT ready for prime time, but, $T invested, tough shit. You will take your bullshit sandwich & enjoy eating it, nom-nom!

I've downloaded the PDF from arxiv, reading through it, it's scary but also LOL. I shouldn't laugh, the Bullshit Apocalypse is not funny, but laughter has always been a part of what keeps me sane. So, laugh, dumbass, laugh!

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Here's the home page/directory for my posts on Bullshit. This is post #113.

What a Maroon!

Ha ha. Someone posted this, it has always been probably my favorite Bugs Bunny line. I had been responding to all things Trump with "Ha Ha", now I have been adding this as a comment. I'm putting it here to have a quick reference to the link.

For those of you too young to remember Bugs, he was very much a trickster figure.

Things Bears Love

www.thingsbearslove.com

Laughed until I cried. Given to a coop by one of our senior developers as a reward for getting some cool new stuff working.

Technical Difficulties and a Status Report

Work, work, work. I was working Saturday and made the same logic error three times and took 15 minutes of debugging to find it each time -- pretty lame. Getting tired, I've written so much code in the last few months I think that I am in a cache overflow situation, and it's definitely slowing me down. The worst should be over soon.

Re technical difficulties, I have had a report from one of my devoted readers -- devoted because he always calls me by my honorific, "Dumbass" -- that the archives are unavailable. I have found out this is true then you access the blog via the Atom feed. I sent an e-mail to support@blogspot.com with this info, to have it returned as undeliverable 4 days later. So, for now, please access the archives by going to the main blog link: http://portraitofthedumbass.blogspot.com/ -- they are accessible from there.

I received an outpouring of support for The Mission. Many submissions of God humor.

First from my brother the author:

1. Did you hear about the dyslexic agnostic? He didn't understand all the fuss about whether or not dog really exists.

Q. Why isn't God circumcised?
A. Because he doesn't have a dick.

Very nice. And, from his daughter, also a writer:

Q. What do you call God's crap?
A. Holy shit!

A good first effort! From my baby sister:

God, Santa, and the Easter Bunny walk into a bar ...

This is very promising. I have a background job running to finish this one.

From my friend Patrick, a line of t-shirts:

One idea I had was to do a series of t-shirts, black with white letters with funny anti-religious statements, sort of vaguely based on that ole fuckwitted billboard:

We need to talk.
-- God

So along those lines, something like:

God?
Is that the best you can come up with?

God?
Just ignore Him; He'll go away.

God?
You've gotta be fucking kidding me.

We need to talk.
-- Nietzsche

And so forth. I think they would be sorta funny t-shirts, if "God?" or whatever was printed in big letters, and the "punch line" were printed a little smaller. And a t-shirt from his lovely, intelligent and charming wife:

Got Jesus?
They make a pill for that now.

Patrick also sends a link to George Carlin on God. Carlin has had some great rants here, clearly a good source for The Mission.

Finally, a reader points out:

Unfortunately, the world's funniest joke has already been created, and it does more than purge religion -- it's fatal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IysnS5wO60g

Once again thanks to all for the tremendous support for The Mission. I still need to find a static web site at which to distill The Work.

Finally off the magazine stack. Reading the new The Year's Best Science Fiction, woo-haa!

I Have A Mission

So, I've been thinking about religion, in light of the topics of Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End", blogged earlier. The next 40 or so years could be a critical period for the human race. Biotech and nanotech will be available on home computers. Roadside bombs are like mosquito bites compared to what terrorists could to with these.

*** Slight Spoiler Alert ***

The bad guy in "Rainbow's End" is having these thoughts and decides to take the facist route of protecting the race from itself by developing YGBM (You Gotta Believe Me) technology -- mind control by genetically engineered brain proteins.

Well, he is the bad guy, but he does have a point. These years could be critical, and could decide if civilization will continue to advance, or if maybe a large percentage of us get wiped out.

In this context, we could eliminate, what, 95% of terrorism if we could eliminate religion. Yes, I know religion is a source of comfort and strength to lots of people, but it's also a source of inspiration to a large percentage of the world's wackos, giving them a "get out of jail free = go directly to heaven" card which allows them to perform acts which any rational ethics would immediately identify as abhorrent.

So, how to get rid of religion? It is a powerful, powerful memeplex. It is a mental parasite with which a majority of well-meaning parents infect their children repeatedly and emphatically as part of their upbringing. Empirical evidence would say that the vast majority of people cannot shake the infection off on their own. So, how do we help?

We're talking memetic warfare here, so we have to choose a delivery mechanism for our counter-meme. I can think of only two possibilities here -- and it seems to me like this is major wishful thinking, to think one could develop a meme to combat years of religious brainwashing. But, what the hell, rational people have got to try something. So, the two delivery mechanisms are:

1. Unbelievably catchy tune.
2. The world's funniest joke.

The 1st one seems too hard. There are too many flavors of music, and it is normally not particularly cross-cultural. But, maybe this could be a distributed project. Come up with the pop version, then translate it into hard rock, country, hip-hop, opera, ska, middle-eastern, etc.

The 2nd one seems more promising. The idea is to come up with a joke or jokes which perform a total reductio ad absurdem on the existence of God. (Note, I will use capitalized God, which I normal avoid, to show that I am referring to the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creator of the universe Jehovah/Allah worshipped by Christians, Jews and Moslems.)

I have a personal problem here, in that I am not a joke person. I am a spontaneously witty (smartass) person, I have always had problems remembering jokes. So I will need help here. Here's my first efforts:

Q. Why did God cross the road?
A. God can't cross a road, He's already on both sides.

Q. How may Gods does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A. God doesn't use lightbulbs, He can see in the dark.

Q. If God can see in the dark, why did He create light?
A. Nobody knows.

Q. What do you get if you cross God with a human being?
A. God.

Q. What do you get if you cross God with the Devil?
A. God.

Q. What do you get if you cross God with a chimpanzee?
A. God.

The last three suggest God Math, which appears to be pretty much useless:

God + God = God
God - God = God
God * God = God
God / God = God
God + n = God
God * 0 = God (a miracle!)

I told my younger brother these, he liked the first few. My wife and youngest daughter found them stupid and unfunny. Oh well, clearly my work is cut out for me.

If you google "god jokes", there's a lot out there, some with promise. But more than half are actually "atheist in a foxhole" jokes, the opposite of what we need.

So, this is a targetted final product. I need to get a website for the work-in-progress of my Theory of God, which will show how ridulous the concept is. I was going to go to myspace.com, but then I thought, fuck a bunch of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. I'll e-mail my son, he can probably point me to where google can give me a permanent website.

I have a mission ...

We Now Return to the Rant in Progress

Anyway, August issue of Scientific American had a very good article, "The Real Life of Pseudogenes". Seemingly they are a sizable part of our "junk" DNA. Points of interest:

• Genes have a couple of ways of making copies of themselves in the genome, and probably happy to get away with it -- it's all about replication, yes? Various copies undergo bad mutations (imperfect replication) to where they can no longer produce their protein. But, they stay in the genome, happily replicating themselves.
• One gene has 140 bad copies of itself in the genome. I guess it took the "intelligent designer" a few tries to get that one right.
• Most mammals have about 1000 genes that produce receptors for different smells. Smell perception is very much lock and key, one gene per receptor per smell. Primates (including us) have only about 500 of these still working -- the rest are still there as broken pseudogenes. Apparently as we were making our transition to the highly vision oriented perception we use now (90% of our bitrate), there was no loss in survivability from the loss of the smell receptors. Crazy, with genetic engineering you could probably change just a few base pairs and get this back.
• Most mammals can synthesize vitamin C. Around 40 million years ago, primates had a mutation that turned a gene required to make a protein in one of the last steps in the synthesis into an inoperative pseudogene. Again, apparently our ancestors were eating a lot of citrus fruits at the time for this not to have affected survivability.
• Both these last two seem to suggest to me that we have definitely come through some narrow evolutionary windows. I guess like in the Stephen Baxter book "Evolution" blogged earlier, throughout most of our evolutionary history there was one individual who wound up being the parent of us all -- that's really counterintuitive to me.

I have noticed I have a definite hot button -- that is, questioning science. To me, science is the only system of knowledge in the history of our race that has proven to be able to produce describable, consistently reproducable results. I loved the junior year physics lab at MIT. For two semesters, we made the equipment (I remember turning pipe on a lathe to make a vacuum chamber) and performed some of the great experiments of physics: the Michelson-Morley experiment that shows that there's no luminiferous ether (no prefered frame of reference in the universe); the Milliken oil drop experiment that shows the quantization of charge; the Rutherford scattering experiment that shows the existence of atomic nuclei.

It is hard to choose favorites, but "The Republican War on Science" is yet another reason to despise the neocons. You wonder how many of these guys, in between attending prayer meetings, got modern liberal educations and were taught by fucking deconstructionists that science is "just a paternalistic, destructive way of looking at the world", no more valid than shamanism say. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Like the proposal to let non-evolution-believing people have their TB treated with the antibiotics of 40 years ago, which modern evolved (oops) TB bacilli eat like candy. Or like taking your car to a faith-healing mechanic. An airplane designed and flown by a shaman might be an interesting flight, but I don't think it would get you from New York to Paris.

I have recently flamed a sibling and a friend re their reports of Michael Crighton's latest novel where he "debunks" global warming. 15 years ago there was contention in the scientific ranks on global warming, it's been gone for around 10 years. But, I'm sure Crighton's data is as good as the Republicans -- i.e., nonexistant. How in the fuck did we wind up getting governed by Peter Pan and Tinkerbell -- "think happy thoughts, Iraqis will embrace democracy and global warming will go away"????

Last months Technology Review had an excellent article about "the most respected climate scientist in the world" and the Bush administration's attempts to muzzle him. He's been saying "global warming" since 1988. Note particularly the chart on p2, "C02 and the 'Ornery Climate Beast,'" PDF, 631 KB). The chart shows CO2 levels, ocean levels and global temperatures going pretty much in lockstep for the last 400,000 years. When I looked at it in the magazine, I thought, well, looks like we're at a natural maximum -- but then when I looked at the PDF online and blew it up, I noticed that the current CO2 level of 377 ppm is off the top of the chart (300 ppm). Pretty damn scary.

Now for some levity. My friend Patrick posted this hilarious link to the KASE forum:

http://www.armorofgodpjs.com

Tinfoil Hat of Credulity sold separately.

He had a nice aphorism too:

"Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

Nice ...

Monkey Business

Just finished "The Third Chimpanzee", by Jared Diamond. I have recently seen 2-3 references to his more recent "Guns, Germs and Steel". This was mentioned as prequel (published 1992), thought I'd read it first. This is a great read, a history of the 3rd species of chimpanzees (homo sapiens), and what makes us human. Diamond sounds like he has had an interesting life: physiology prof at UCLA, but has spent lots of time in New Guinea as a bird watcher. He has a good sense of humor, and the book is full of fun facts:

• My favorite percentage: chimps and humans share 98.4% of the same DNA, as opposed to chimps or us vs. gorillas: 97.7%. So chimps (and pygmy chimps or bonobos) are more closely related to us than to gorillas, hence "The Third Chimpanzee".
• Chapters on human sexuality, how we choose our mates, "The Science of Adultery". Humans are unique in having hidden fertility in the female, hidden copulation, and menopause. And, we choose to marry people who look like us (correlation coefficient of length of middle fingers between spouses: .6).
• A review of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, as leading to the creation of races.
• Precursors of traits considered distinctively human seen in other animals: language, art, murder, war, ecological pillage.
• His explanation of drug usage, like a peacock's tail advertising one's fitness by being able to engage in expensive, potentially destructive behavior, didn't ring true to me. I have always felt the urge to get high was innate in the species -- a two-year old will spin in circles until they get dizzy and fall over. Still, might explain why girls go for the dangerous, cool boys.
• Hunter-gatherers prior to the invention of agriculture 10000 years ago were healthier: fewer cavities, less disease, taller. But, with agriculture the same land can support 10x the people. So, the human race choose quantity over quality. As I'm part of the quantity, I guess that's good.
• The spread of Indo-European languages starting in 3300 BC coincides with the domestication of the horse: a military development that dominated warfare for the next 5000 years.
• The natives (for 11000 years) of America and (for 50000 years) of Australia got a bad draw in that there were no domesticable animals comparable to the horse or cow. Domesticating a species is hard.
• New Zealand appears to have had an ecology with all niches filled by birds, of all shapes and sizes (moas)! The Maori showed up in 1000AD and, over the next 500 years, wiped them all out.
• The 1st Americans who crossed from Siberia took less than 1000 years to pretty completely fill North and South America, and wiped out the large mammals (mammoths, giant sloths and horses, sabertooth tigers) as they went. Anytime humans have moved to someplace new, they have pretty much extincted all the large animals there, who did not evolve to fear humans. Africa has retained the large mammals it has because they evolved with humans and know that we are bad news.
• Genocide has been popular and in fact admired through much of human history. We ignore this historically because we don't like to think about it. Diamond hopes that improved communication will help us past this.

Anyway, this was a very enjoyable read, I was sorry when it was over.

I also started reading "America, the Book", by my hero Jon Stewart, which I got for xmas. I decided to read it a chapter at a time, I think my enjoyment of the humor will last longer that way.

Music-wise, made my second iTunes purchase: "Final Staw" by Snow Patrol. Boy pop, a little catchy, we'll see how much it grows on me, 3 stars. Also bought (used) 2 dance compilations "La Maison de l'Elephante".

Caribbean crusing starting 8 days from now. Enjoyed it the 1st time, looking forward to trying again. Plus, I have my iPod to travel with now (as well as my beautiful wife)!