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6. Brouhaha
"What is important is that you're able to have the fearlessness of a brigand and the heart of a kind mother"
people are gorgeous collections of chemical fires.
Last week I got really excited about a new research idea. I mentioned it to my advisor and he began to nod, offering a few words of encouragement.
Soon enough, I was waxing poetic, talking about how powerful this idea could be and the word ‘paradigm shift’ slipped out. Oops.
He stopped me there. “That’s more for the others to decide than us.”
He went on to explain that research ideas are like children; it’s easy to get too attached to them and forget that they will eventually take on a life of their own. The best you can do is to prepare them for the harshness of the world by preparing them for all the criticisms they might face. Oh and there are a lot of them so it’s okay to let even the ones that seemed precious die… wait, what?
At this point we realized the analogy broke down but…
I find this tension in doing new things fascinating. The skillful creator holds both faith and no faith. Without faith, the risky bold idea never receives the light of attention it needs and decays in the dark. Yet if we let the brouhaha consume us, the idea never becomes strong enough to stand under its own support.
(The idea is related to something I mentioned in a past newsletter, but I’m being deliberately vague because the idea is still seeding.)
Otherwise things are going swimmingly, for the most part. I’ve come to accept that my initial thesis plan is now useless, and that I don’t have a concrete set of experiments lined up. But that’s alright, because I’m moving forward.
It feels like the bubbling bubbling of a thought beginning to form — I don’t have the word yet but it’s just on the tip of my tongue— the inhalation before the ‘aha!’, and it’s an exhilarating place to be.
Writing
Notes
Philosophy seems to be a field uniquely filled with detractors; thinkers who have a distaste towards the field itself yet continue to exist within it. Wittgenstein thought we needed liberation from the prison of pseudo-problems within philosophy; liberation from traditional philosophy. Mikhail Bakhtin, William Buckingham, Martin Heidegger are all philosophers from somewhat different backgrounds but who share an independent distaste towards academic philosophy. Maybe because philosophy is relatively ungrounded, consensus can’t cluster around ‘verifiable results’
Prestige as a means of categorizing different groups. The marker of prestige among the academically inclined high school student is the selectiveness of the college. For the fledgling college student it is the exclusivity of the clubs they are part of, the difficulty of the internship they secured, or unbelievable amount of work that they have to do. For many a budding technology worker it is a combination of their salary and their relative seniority within an organization. I’ve noticed for me and some of my friends, prestige is associated with the freedom to pursue one’s passions, how much play is in one’s life. See also Melting Asphalt’s post on social status among human-like animals.
External Links
Two Ethical Moments in Debian, from Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom.
Useful for speaking about the culture of an FOSS project in a sophisticated way.Generally, the lens of looking at a moment during conflict free situation (“enculturation”) and of looking at a moment of contention (“punctuated crisis”) is quite helpful.
It's also noteworthy to me how big an element the ideology behind FOSS was in shaping Debian. How has ideology changed among OSS devs since then?
Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. Agre is important in AI research especially circa mid 80’s. He and David Chapman left the field and started turning much towards the humanities and social sciences. This post is a great birds-eye view of the blind spots within AI research historically (which are still highly relevant)
The strategic vagueness of AI vocabulary, and the use of technical schemata to narrate the operation of technical artifacts in intentional terms, is not a matter of conscious deception. It does permit AI's methods to seem broadly applicable, even when particular applications require a designer to make, often without knowing it, some wildly unreasonable assumptions. At the same time, it is also self-defeating. It has the consequence, at least in my own experience, that AI people find it remarkably difficult to conceptualize alternatives to their existing repertoire of technical schemata.
Heidegger, Marcuse and the critique of modern technology. Honestly I really don’t understand Heidegger but a lot of smart people I admire mention him and this seems like a decent primer (even though I come away still confused)
As Heidegger explains it, our most basic relation to reality is not perception as we usually understand it. That is a theoretical construction. Abstracting from our actual experience, we tell ourselves about such things as light rays entering the eye and activating the retina, sound waves causing vibrations in our ear drums, and so on. But we originally encounter our world not through causal interaction between nature and the senses, but rather through action directed at meaningful objects. These primordial encounters later become objects of reflection, but Heidegger rejects the notion that we can explain them in a philosophically significant sense from that standpoint. Instead, we need to start out from what is first, our actual experience, and treat it as an irreducible ontological basis.
Books
Roadside Picnic, Strugatsky brothers. Soviet Union sci-fi — disinterested aliens, inexplicable technology, strange phenomena. Ursula Le Guin writes a flattering foreword. (h/t Reboot newsletter)
Planning
Review
Update my research timeline (Q4 plan)
Create document outlining an approach to estimating value in the OSML space. (Panel data approach, approach using fractions of existing estimates of OSS value?)
Start reading through version updates of the packages I am interested in (not done)
Keep up weekly conversations with range of people (done)
Reach out to DW (done)
Next Two Weeks
Assessment of fraction of ML research papers that use open source software
‘Towards Assessing Value in MLOS’ skeleton
Update proposal and send to DW + DM
Read about Chinese OS strategy
Notes on OS business strategies