[HN Gopher] What Does It Mean to Learn?
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What Does It Mean to Learn?
Author : wallflower
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-09-02 14:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| knighthack wrote:
| 'Educability' sounds a bit like the ancient Chinese saying, of
| how only empty cups can be filled:
|
| > The "Empty Cup" or "The Empty Vessel" parable: 'A cup that is
| already full, whether with knowledge, opinions, or experiences,
| cannot be filled again. It is only the empty cup that can truly
| learn and absorb new information.'
| agumonkey wrote:
| And then 'intelligence is compression' is often said.
| skydhash wrote:
| No, it's mostly realizing that the cup was not full as
| previously thought. Either by discarding wrong notions or
| discovering new themes to explore. In the end, we understand
| that there's no cup at all.
| adolph wrote:
| This is blogspam for a book:
|
| _Leslie Valiant, an eminent computer scientist who teaches at
| Harvard, sees this as a strength. He calls our ability to learn
| over the long term "educability," and in his new book, "The
| Importance of Being Educable," he argues that it's key to our
| success._
| Tomte wrote:
| This is commentspam for self-importance.
| wouterjanl wrote:
| So by your measure, would Hacker News be spam for websites and
| blogs?
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Admit it, you just wanted an excuse to say blogspam
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| You're absolutely right and it's a trollish question to make
| people think they have a novel definition to something everyone
| already knows.
|
| People really hate someone pointing out that they have been
| manipulated by clickbait and cheap marketing though.
| maxverse wrote:
| https://archive.is/fyhfi
| paulpauper wrote:
| _"The Importance of Being Educable," he argues that it's key to
| our success. When we think about what makes our minds special, we
| tend to focus on intelligence. But if we want to grasp reality in
| all its complexity, Valiant writes, then "cleverness is not
| enough."_
|
| Isn't' this IQ? "Educable" seems like the latest iteration of
| 'multiple intelligences' or the 'street smarts' vs. 'book smarts'
| distinction.
| wouterjanl wrote:
| The 'ability to learn' idea may not be so novel, but I am not
| sure if I agree with calling it ill defined or it having an
| agenda for more inclusivity. Generally, in schools, at least
| from my experience, it will still mostly be abstract thinking
| and memory capacities that are measured. Curiosity, and the
| ability to turn that curiosity in new knowledge, also broadens
| the mind (in addition to abstract thinking and remembering
| things), which can be an enormous quality that is highly valued
| on the job market, arguably more than what is mostly measured
| at schools. I think that's the point the author tries to make.
| aithrowaway1987 wrote:
| > But isn't the ability to learn also a major component of IQ?
|
| Not sure what you mean by this - it's certainly not something a
| single-day IQ test could possibly measure! The primary reason
| IQ is a discredited measure of intelligence is that people are
| perfectly able to learn how to perform better on IQ tests - any
| supposed influence of "intelligence" on IQ scores is hopelessly
| confounded with how much you've practiced similar tests /
| trivial logic puzzles / etc.
|
| This stuff about "attempts to broaden the definition of
| intelligence to something that is more inclusive" is backwards.
| The whole problem is that nobody has managed to scientifically
| _define_ (let alone measure) intelligence in any vertebrate
| species. IQ is dangerously misleading precisely because it is
| so narrow: its precision makes claims about IQ seem
| quantitatively rigorous when they are qualitatively
| meaningless.
| uncle_charles wrote:
| IQ is just the wrong way to approach the subject, to be honest.
| Metacognition plays the biggest role in learning by far and is
| trainable. But in order to think properly about your thinking,
| you need the requisite declarative, procedural, and conditional
| knowledge.
|
| Most people, including "intelligent" people, have no clue how
| learning works. Learning scientists actually study student
| perceptions of their learning and learners are terrible at
| selecting appropriate learning techniques. Even when forced to
| use effective learning techniques, they rate the effective
| strategies (as determined by their outcomes) as least
| effective.
|
| We need to start teaching people how learning works to begin
| with.
| canjobear wrote:
| Leslie Valiant was on Sean Carroll's podcast to talk about the
| same topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHW-nBIZc2g
| dotsam wrote:
| This article doesn't do a good job of getting at the main points
| of Valiant's book Educability, in my view. You can see some of
| them in e.g. this talk he gave here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4fIoLGjFtM
|
| He makes various arguments in the book that I disagree with, two
| of which I've put below. On the whole I think it is directionally
| correct though, and worth reading.
|
| The first quibble I have is about humanity's most characteristic
| trait. In the book, he writes: "The mark of humanity is that a
| single individual can acquire the knowledge created by so many
| other individuals. It is this ability to absorb theories at
| scale, rather than the ability to contribute to their creation,
| that I identify as humanity's most characteristic trait".
|
| I don't think that ability to acquire knowledge from other people
| is our most most characteristic trait. Creativity is. Learning is
| a form of knowledge-creation, and it is a creative process. We
| don't passively "absorb" theories when we learn from someone
| else. Instead, we actively look for and attempt to resolve
| problems between our existing ideas and the new ideas to create
| something new.
|
| Another thing I disagree with is when he touches on AGI. He makes
| the argument that "we should not be fearful of a technological
| singularity that would make us powerless against AI systems".
| This is because it will "asymptote, at least qualitatively, to
| the human capability of educability and no more".
|
| This is reminiscent of David Deutsch's argument that people are
| universal explainers, and AGI will also be a universal explainer;
| there is nothing beyond such universality, so they will not
| fundamentally be different from us (at least, there is nothing
| that they could do that we couldn't in principle understand
| ourselves).
|
| I think this is true, but it misses something. It doesn't address
| the point that there is a meaningful difference between a person
| thinking at 1x speed (biological human speed) and a person
| thinking at e.g. 100000x speed (AGI running on fast hardware).
| You can be outsmarted by something that wants to outsmart you,
| even if you both possess fully universal educability/creativity,
| if it can generate orders of magnitude more ideas than you can
| per unit time. Whether we should be fearful or not about this is
| unclear, but I do think it is an important consideration.
|
| His overall message though, is good and worth pondering:
| "Educability implies that humans, whatever our genetic
| differences at birth, have a unique capability to transcend these
| differences through the knowledge, skills, and culture we acquire
| after birth. We are born equal because any differences we have
| are subject to enormous subsequent changes through individual
| life experience, education, and effort. This capacity for change,
| growth, and improvement is the great equalizer. It is possible
| for billions of people to continuously diverge in skills,
| beliefs, and knowledge, all becoming self-evidently different
| from each other. This characteristic of our humanity, which
| accounts for our civilization, also makes us equal."
| visarga wrote:
| > there is nothing that they could do that we couldn't in
| principle understand ourselves
|
| It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After
| 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still didn't
| get this level of insight in its strategy.
|
| The core ability of humans might not be learning but search.
| Creativity is just an aspect of search. AlphaZero was both
| searching and learning. It's what we do as well, we search and
| learn. Science advances by (re)search. Art searches for
| meaningful expression. Even attention is search. Even walking
| is - where will I place my next foot?
|
| Why is search a better concept that creativity? Because it
| specifies both the search space and the goal. Creativity,
| intelligence, understanding and consciousness - all of them -
| specify only the subjective part, omitting the external,
| objective part. Search covers both, it is better defined, even
| scientifically studied.
| dotsam wrote:
| > It is trivial to prove otherwise - AlphaZero move 37. After
| 4,000 years of gameplay (yes, it is that old!) we still
| didn't get this level of insight in its strategy.
|
| Are you saying that AlphaZero contains knowledge that we
| can't understand, even in principle? It is somehow beyond
| science, beyond all explanation?
|
| > Why is search a better concept that creativity?
|
| Search suggests a fixed set of options, whereas what is
| crucial is creating new ones.
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| A very accomplished older professor once told me in grad
| school that "research" was a process of first intuiting
| patterns, and then "searching" for further examples of said
| pattern, and then "re-searching" until you had statistical
| confirmation.
|
| I very much agree.
| dotsam wrote:
| You don't keep searching until a point of "statistical
| confirmation". This implies you have arrived at an
| infallible truth. Instead you look for ways you could be
| _wrong_ , and try to correct any errors you find.
|
| For instance, if you guess 'all swans are white', you
| don't ever get "statistical confirmation" that your guess
| was right. When you eventually see a black swan, you find
| out you were wrong. Then it's time to come up with a new
| theory.
| skybrian wrote:
| There are very large search spaces. Consider the space of
| all text documents (Borge's Library of Babel), which
| includes all research papers and all novels. Also, the
| space of all mathematical theorems, the space of all
| images, all videos, all songs, whatever evolution searches
| over.
|
| These cover many creative activities.
|
| But it's true that some search spaces are less well-
| defined.
| HPsquared wrote:
| AlphaZero was an example of "learn by doing", not education.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think one thing we've learned in the past 5 years or so is
| how inadequate our vocabulary is to describe all the different
| aspects of intelligence and consciousness (and really just
| psychology in general). Everything is so handwave-y. What is
| educability, exactly, in a formal sense -- how could we
| quantify it and measure it? Mostly we've tried to answer
| questions like that by writing tests and trying to tease out
| some reliable measure from it, but that requires so many layers
| of indirection -- it would be much better to examine the
| internal state and activity of a "thinking system" directly,
| something that is rarely possible in humans. I think one way to
| show that the tests are inadequate is to read the responses to
| people when those tests are applied to AI. People insist that
| they simply don't measure what they're supposed to measure in
| people when they're applied to AI, and for all anyone knows,
| they may be right -- but _why_? What _exactly_ are those tests
| measuring, and how could we measure it in a way that _would_
| apply to artificial intelligence?
|
| These are philosophical questions that really, despite our best
| efforts, have never transitioned to a true science, and
| philosophy has been working on it for thousands of years. We've
| been hamstrung by the fact that as far as we knew, we were the
| only intelligent beings in the universe, so it's extremely
| difficult take any aspect of "the way we think" and separate
| it, by finding some system that thinks in some ways like us,
| but in other ways doesn't. It's really only been since we've
| had large neural networks that anything has approached the way
| we think in _any_ aspect, so this is probably a once-in-history
| opportunity to formalize and systematize all of this.
| trott wrote:
| > I don't think that ability to acquire knowledge from other
| people is our most most characteristic trait. Creativity is.
|
| Chimps (and some other animals) can be very creative:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPz6uvIbWZE
| wrs wrote:
| "At least qualitatively" is doing a lot of work in that
| sentence. A computer has the same capability as a human to do
| any computable algorithm, "at least qualitatively". But Google
| search (to name one example) is so far beyond human practical
| ability that calling it "qualitatively" equivalent is not
| useful.
| golergka wrote:
| > This sounds chancy and vague, until you reflect on the fact
| that knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its
| application. You take a class in law school today only to argue a
| complicated case years later; you learn C.P.R. years before
| saving a drowning man; you read online about how to deter a
| charging bear, because you never know.
|
| Law students write papers, ER students to CPR on dummies, and
| when I learn any new concept, framework or language, I build
| something with it. Don't toy and learning projects count?
| fhdsgbbcaA wrote:
| Yes but that's like a robot learning in a simulation (which is
| rapidly accelerating now).
|
| No matter how accurate the simulation, the real world is the
| true test. One could easily see a scenario where a robot is
| trained to handle a rare event and may or may not ever use that
| training.
| brudgers wrote:
| I don't know what to learn means. But I know what it feels like.
| It feels hard. It feels like sucking at the thing I am learning.
| It feels like if I stick at it, I might be good in in twenty
| years. It feels like loving doing things I do badly. YMMV.
| marhee wrote:
| "Knowledge is not free; you have to pay attention"(Feynman)
| swayvil wrote:
| You have to give up a piece of sanity too. Because knowledge
| ain't real. And, for the true philo of sophy, there's a tipping
| point.
|
| (To paraphrase HP Lovecraft.)
| mrinfinitiesx wrote:
| To learn is to teach one's self!
| munchler wrote:
| > knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application
|
| Anyone who has used StackOverflow (or ChatGPT) to solve a
| programming problem knows this is completely false. Has the
| author never heard of "learn by doing"?
| HPsquared wrote:
| Experience vs Education.
| YVoyiatzis wrote:
| Experience is part of education.
| nyrikki wrote:
| Mimicry is not mastery.
|
| A correct answer is not necessarily imply understanding.
|
| Code reviews and incident reports should prove that true.
| authorfly wrote:
| He raises an important point that human learning is continuous
| and to some extent unavoidable, unlike LLMs (and basically most
| computing models) which freeze at some point, and as amazing as
| they can appear, do not update with each interaction (and more or
| less his point is that even if some system did start updating
| weights after each interaction, whether that is learning from
| mistakes or just a model with 1000001 examples instead of 1000000
| is debatable.
|
| But the argument that we should not learn while young because
| "It's not useful to us then" is a ridiculous premise to argue
| with. Perhaps I misunderstand it. Then saying that things benefit
| us far down the road, long after the original moment of
| learning...
|
| I don't understand this line of thinking at all. Linking this to
| "educability" as a sort of hidden superpower makes me say "oh,
| really now?".
|
| Like most scientists, he has to focus his ideas on a track with
| research directions which expand outwards, excite, and provide
| new directions and conversationality. He may not be aware of
| doing this.
|
| Rare is the day when we see a psychologist studying things like
| how applying a new learning technique to class A effects all the
| other classes the student takes.
|
| Rare is it we study flow state and motivation of the long term
| and find meaningful ways at a cohort intra-country level to
| increase happiness at school or final grades across the board,
| rather than just one course which the researchers focus on. And
| when that has been done in Scandinavia, who lead in PISA and
| happiness as adults and teens, scientists in the US ignore the
| research by and large. It's sad.
|
| This is what I don't like about education research and theories.
| They can be worthwhile research directions, but diminished to
| theorizing, rather than application.
| phreeza wrote:
| There is nothing stopping you in principle to keep learning on
| every interaction in an LLM. Practical benefits are likely
| small though.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Read Gadamer's _Warheit und Methode_ (unless you have a
| pathological aversion to continental philosophy in any form). All
| understanding is hermeneutic and thus infinitely wheeling us
| around the hermeneutic circle. It's the entry-point (without an
| exit) to answering Plato's questions about questions. It's how we
| learn and deepen language understanding. It's how we interpret
| texts. It's how science works, except that science enshrines its
| _Methode_ as a sine qua non. It's how we come to understand other
| people and why we can be continually surprised (or not!) by them.
|
| The real shame is that academic fashion jerked violently in the
| direction of Derrida and company in the mid-to-late-60s before
| anyone had time to really dwell with and appreciate the power of
| Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. His masterpiece was only
| published in 1960, when he himself was 60! It's a mature and deep
| reflection on themes he had been studying for 40 years. Ricoeur
| grasped its power, of course, but the whole Habermasian-Derridan-
| Foucauldian critical project flavored Ricoeur's approach. Richard
| Rorty gestured in similar directions, with less depth (and
| certainly far less phenomenological power).
|
| But invest the time to read Gadamer. It's worth it.
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