Here are a few assorted short takes that are on my mind right now. They are worth exactly what you paid for them.
Is Donald Trump losing his edge? Kamala Harris has been the Democratic nominee for a week now, and she's hardly immune from criticism. But so far Trump has called her a "bum" and "the most liberal person ever in US history"—not exactly biting attacks. What's going on?
I just finished a biography of John von Neumann, and it prompts a question: Is game theory actually useful for anything? It got famous in the '60s as the foundation of Cold War nuclear planning, but it never really told us anything we didn't already know without the math. I gather it's had some useful things to say about the design of auctions, but what else? There are some things like kin selection that you can explain in a game theoretic way, but you can usually explain them in other ways too. So what is its real-world value?
Why do so many people object to their content being used for AI training? I understand copyright infringement, if that's going on, but it generally isn't. The words and images are just used as part of an ocean of input that makes AI better. Why would I care, for example, if Google or OpenAI trawled my blog and turned it into tokens for use in AI training? Am I losing anything?
Am I the only one who didn't care much for the Paris Olympics opening ceremonies? My main complaint is that, until the very end, it was essentially a pure TV event. You couldn't really watch it in person since it was so spread out, and it included video snippets that only made sense (barely) as part of a TV show. That didn't sit right with me. (My other complaint is that so much of it seemed amateurish. How can that be with the kind of budget they have to work with?)
By the way, I'm now done with four weeks of radiation therapy (two to go) and so far I've had no big side effects to speak of. Hooray. I've been getting more and more tired, though, but I'm not sure if that's because of the radiation or the hormone therapy.
I've had to read or review a lot of game theory papers in political science - mostly in legislative studies. I've never found a single game theory model that told me anything that a simple paragraph of narration couldn't, and a few that came up with bank shot predictions which make no sense on closer inspection.
When data was a lot less available in the 80s and 90s, researchers used a lot of game theory to substitute for observation. There's no excuse today.
The opportunity to collect rent. When the AI accumulates knowledge from your site and myriad others and regurgitates it from its own, people can go one stop to the AI rather than the sources. So the sources lose eyeballs and clicks … and ad revenue.
This, plus the fear that the AI will glean all your secrets and make your work pointless.
There's a lot of people who would ask the same question about trigonometry or algebra. Hell, there's people who would ask the same question about multiplication.
I think game theory yields some results that potentially shed some light on deep tendencies in human nature. Eg the famous result that the “Tit for Tat” strategy won Robert Axelrod’s computer tournament for the Prisoners Dilemma in the 1980s. That suggests how there could be deep evolutionary pressures toward motives of reciprocity in the development of a social species like ours. More recent research has offered even more refined versions of Tit for Tat.
In short, game theory yields some insight into the evolutionary of moral instincts, potentially.
I also think that, for some people, quantifying the payoffs of different behaviors helps them to understand the various incentives involved in interactions. I suspect that the academics actually doing game theory are not among those people, so the game theory doesn't increase the professional knowledge.
The "tit for tat" as explanation for evolution of coopretaion/reciprocity is just non-sense.
The main task that determine the success of a line is growing children, a process that in humans take years and require years of interaction between the parent(s), the child and other group members. This process is complex, and evolved over millions years. Something like Tit-for-Tat cannot tell you anything about it.
The more recent research haven't got much closer. They simply ignore of the question of what is actually evolved.
“Nonsense” is surely far too strong. I’d recommend that interested readers take a look at Bowles and Gintis’s book *A Cooperative Species* for the state of the art.
For "tit-for-tat", I think it is not to strong. For latest research, maybe not all of it.
Do Bowles and Gintis actually say that "tit-for-tat" can give insights about human evolution of cooperation? Do they discuss children growing? Cooperation among Chimpanzees?
The latest I read was this in Nature (open access):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07077-w
In this article there is no attention at all to growing children.
I can't recall exactly. Looking at the Google books preview, I see it has a chapter called "Ancestral Human Society" (with sections like "Prehistorical Warfare" and "Genetic Evidence" and a chapter called "Socialization" (with sections like "Cultural Transmission" and "Genes, Culture, and the Internalization of Norms"). That means it likely contains some of what you're after.
Thanks.
By the time humans had children, we had single celled creatures in symbiosis and multi-celled creatures in existence for billions of years. The difference between the single iteration and repeated iteration Prisoner's Dilemma games resolved a lot of mathematical and philosophical problems in evolutionary theory. No, Tit-for-Tat doesn't explain automotive streamlining either.
Is Donald Trump losing his edge? Kamala Harris has been the Democratic nominee for a week now, and she's hardly immune from criticism. But so far Trump has called her a "bum" and "the most liberal person ever in US history"—not exactly biting attacks. What's going on?
He did call Harris "the most far-left vice president in American history," mispronouncing the phrase "Henry Wallace."
admittedly, he was only 2 years old foe wallace's last presidential run, 76 years ago.
Why would I care, for example, if Google or OpenAI trawled my blog and turned it into tokens for use in AI training? Am I losing anything?
You aren't trying to make a living with your writing, and you aren't really the type of writer that AI is intended to make obsolete and replace.
bam!
Game theory is a framework and a set of tools for certain types of problems. IMO, a lot of it got subsumed by far more powerful computational methods.
And what’s with the implication that auctions are a small thing? A massive fraction of internet revenue derives from automated auctions of advertising slots. It doesn’t look the same anymore because it’s loaded with machine learning and other techniques; but that’s different from saying the original ideas were useless.
All he has is insults. Unless it's written for him, the best criticism he can come up with at the spur of the moment will always be an insult or a childish nickname. Much like a good percentage of his cult.
Re game theory, I did a dissertation in it, and the answer is, yes it CAN be mathematically somewhat abstruse, but the PRINCIPLES are important and have substantial practical application. Some principles are central to what otherwise is considered non-game-theoretic microeconomics, eg "response functions" and leader-follower behavior in economic oligopoly (which characterizes most industries). Game-theoretic structures are essential for describing some common real-world situations, eg Prisoners' Dilemma and the Compliance Game, and for common situations such as Nash equilibria. Even highly formal solutions have been used in very important problems, eg nuclear brinksmanship(!). And as I was able to show, combination of game-theoretic structures with well-known principles from empirical decision literature can yield very neat derivations of some common behaviors that otherwise don't have satisfactory analytical foundations.
So yeah, it's useful. It's the only framework for analyzing interdependent multi-party decision making, and that's ... uh ... a pretty common thing lol.
Correction: The principle (singular) is important. Indispensably important. "Principle" is a dichotomy, and its two mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive parts are the "treat others the way you would want to be treated if the shoe was on the other foot" principle (aka positive sum game, aka everyone wins), and the "do unto to others before they do unto you" principle (aka negative sum game, aka everyone loses). The appearance that a between-human conflicts is a zero sum game is a self-inflicted delusion.
Interdependent multi-party decision making is common because we all live our lives within a single internally interdependent social system. The only question is the extent to which we are willing to acknowledge that reality.
"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." —MLK
I would recommend that every undergrad take a good game theory class. It's a great way to get kids to think about problems differently. Having that background makes people better problem solvers. If you ever had a dog, you'll notice they tend to be very linear thinkers. If they see something they want, they'll go straight for it. If their leash gets caught on something, it's very hard to get them to come back a go around. A good game theory class will help students break out of strictly linear thinking.
As for "real world" uses, it's like any branch of math and/or statistics, it's easy to do poorly and hard to do really well. If the project involves people's behaviors, then all bets are off. Maybe chaos theory?
Trump is boring now. He finally broke through the Harris noise by saying you'll never have to vote again"--and even that is now taking a back seat to the Olympics.
And yes, the opening ceremonies were a bit odd--I've only caught snippets. Not sure how much better it would have been if the weather cooperated. Since only a small piece of it would be in your section if you were there, you'd have to watch most of it on a screen. As for the bits I did see, the narrators on the TV explained the story--which was very useful--and the concepts sounded good, though I doubt I would have figured out what they were doing on my own.
It's great to hear you're tolerating the radiation therapy well. Stay strong.
Today the role of Andy Rooney will be played by Kevin Drum.
He'll need eyebrow implants.
I disagree about game theory. I’ve always considered it the most important thing I learned in college (not in class, unsurprisingly). Being able to recognize Prisoner’s Dilemmas and their variants in a wide variety of contexts from the length of peacock tails to gerrymandering is a powerful tool for adapting solutions from one situation to another.
There is, of course, a deeper level for specialists, but just the basics are enough to help contextualize a wide variety of issues.
Game theory is like classical economics: it presumes rational actors, but there aren't any.
But there are pseudo-rational actors, so it can be an approximation, and sometimes a good one.
Figuring out when it is a good aproximation is not easy, but sometimes it is possible.
There are rational actors. We are all rational actors. To act is to act rationally. The only question is, what interest am "I" intending to serve? I will appear to be irrational to you if I'm serving an interest that excludes you AND you assume I'm serving an interest that includes you.
I understand your point, but your definiton of "rational" renders the word useless. Let's just go with the accepted dictionary definition on this.
I didn't care for the opening ceremony at the beginning but I became really engrossed as it went on, then Celine Dion simply blew the house down.
So she huffed and she puffed??
One deep breath was all she needed.
her allveoli will go on.
"Why do so many people object to their content being used for AI training? ..."
Because they think they deserve a cut whether or not they are currently legally entitled to one. And AI has the potential to put a lot of people out of work which naturally makes them nervous and inclined to put spokes in the wheels where they can.
It has nothing to do with “wanting a cut”. The things I write and put on the internet are meant to be consumed that way. They are not meant to be decontextualized and taken elsewhere and wrongly displayed to readers without any credit to verify what was actually said in the first place. Not by another person and certainly not by some dipshit Silicon Valley computer.
"...The things I write and put on the internet are meant to be consumed that way. They are not meant to be decontextualized and taken elsewhere and wrongly displayed to readers without any credit to verify what was actually said in the first place. Not by another person and certainly not by some dipshit Silicon Valley computer."
Under current law for the most part people can do what they want with stuff you post on the internet regardless of your preferences. The exception being extensive quotes or close paraphrasing.
Do you always work this hard at missing the point? Are or you just so reflexively contrarian you can't help making an idiot of yourself?
Are or you just so reflexively contrarian you can't help making an idiot of yourself?
This ought to be good: Explain, precisely, what you mean. I'm sure you can do that, right?
As far as ScentOfViolets is concerned, the purpose of living is to insult other people. It sometimes makes them look like an idiot, but it is really just the urge to insult.
Your writing being used to train an AI that's going to make you obsolete is the same thing as being laid off, but first you get to train your cheaper replacement.
MAD Magazine ran into this with their song parodies. They'd often publish parody lyrics for popular songs, and they were sued for it. Mad won the case because parody is protected use, but there are limits. A friend of mine edited a long running comic book starring Elvira the hot horror show host up against her arch-rival Spooky Susie. He had a couple of excellent Harry Potter parody episodes. I asked him if he was going to do another, but he pointed out that one can do a parody now and then, but at a certain point one is infringing.
There are other areas like this. One can cover a song if one buys mechanical rights to use the music and lyrics. One can run a tribute band if it clearly operates as such. One can parody particular performances. There are clear free fire zones, and there is clear infringement. There's also some area in the middle. Impersonators can copy someone's voice and appearance. Again, this about specific performance.
AI is about doing parody at production scale. It's doing Elvira at Hogsworth without clearing the rights with Rowling. It's performing in concert as Taylor Swift. It's writing Barbara Cartland novels without her estate's approval. It goes far beyond the protected realm.
"I've been getting more and more tired"
Old age.
No side effects is a big deal.
Well, first things first: congratulations on the treatment going as well as it has. May it continue, and without too many side effects.
Second, the observation about Trump got me thinking that one of the great hidden* campaign stories of the past month is: 1) Trump is barely campaigning, and 2) he's campaigning badly when he does.
Trump's own (overshadowed) debate performance was pretty terrible. Since then it seems he's on the golf course as much as or more than he's on the campaign trail (2-3 days/week?). And his appearances have been increasingly gaffe-filled.
Again, it's largely gone unnoticed, and it's likely to go unnoticed for the next month while attention is focused on the Olympics, Harris' VP pick, the Democratic convention, and whatever August silliness grips the attention of our media masters.
But it does seem like the kind of situation primed for a media feeding frenzy sometime after Labor Day.
*By Biden's disastrous debate performance, the ensuing slow-motion collapse of his campaign, the shooting at Trump's rally, Biden's withdrawal and the Democrats' consolidation behind Harris.
99.9999 percent of people who watch the Olympics watch it on television. So yeah, it was geared to television.
I have attended only one Olympics, and I was blown away by how different it is in person.
But it’s not wrong to cater the opening to the billions of people who are watching on TV, rather than the VIPs and executives of Coke and McDonalds and their paramours who are lucky enough to hold tickets to the opening ceremony.
My rule: watch pro football on TV in a bar or with friends and all other sporting events in person.
I also favor high school productions of musicals, community theater over Broadway (in New York or traveling), and community orchestras over professional. But I am a sucker for our professional opera company.
It’s the 21st century. I bet most of the people watching in person were also streaming the video coverage on their phones. Few missed anything.
I hadn't considered that. I remember going to the Gaspe Peninsula in 1972 to watch the solar eclipse. The folks in the car next to ours had a small portable TV tuned to a nearby station. As the eclipse neared, the skies got cloudier and cloudier. They covered the sky completely. We wound up watching live coverage the eclipse on TV. The sky darkened, then light returned. Having done their work, the clouds parted. It's just as well they had brought their portable set.
It seems to me that letting AI train on copyrighted material is effectively allowing the material to be reproduced without permission. The AI easily accumulates the exact original information within its store of knowledge, and there is no inherent bar to its spitting out the original on demand. The AI designers try to stop it from providing verbatim quotes to any great extent, but users seem to be able to extract a lot with workarounds.
AIs aren't reproducing the material they're trained on. They're doing a reasonable analog of reading the material and learning from it. I say " a reasonable analog" because artificial intelligence is not (yet) actually intelligent and the heuristic things they do are similar to human intellectual processes but a long way from identical.
look at this guy!
he's the implied oral consent of the office of the commissioner of baseball.
Thanks for the counterpoint. I shouldn't generalize too much, but in some instances reported by the New York Times, a chatbot presented direct quotes when asked about certain articles. I don't believe it gave out all or even most of the article the questioner asked for, and I'm not sure it went beyond what search engines have been doing for years.
Got to admit the number of people told to lose their shit over that Last Supper imagery--and then losing it--was pretty funny.
I'm in the final days of an amazing AI Crash Course at Section School and it has finally explained what AI is going to do for me. I think the broadest complaint is that a lot of people imagine that their creative output is a) wholly special and b) should only be monetized by them. This ignores that all creative work is built on the creative work of others. No creative ever created without being first inspired by someone else's work.
Creativity is all about hiding your sources and adding your own spices to the recipe. Used by someone who knows what they are doing, AI finds things that you hadn't even considered and allows you to speed up the process. It doesn't replace humans, it's not that good yet and probably won't ever be - but it does rapidly accelerate the time it takes you to get stuff done.
People who should be shaking in their shoes are those who refuse to or cannot learn to use a new tool. Also, anyone who's business model is built on selling attention via advertising -- that doesn't specialize in entertainment - is in deep trouble. For example, Google search is about to become a dinosaur. Facebook will survive because it delivers entertainment.
In the past week I've used AI to craft the basics of a project management plan (Claude), a new strategy to achieve a goal (Copilot), find some methods to deal with spider mites (Planty), and ideate on a name for a business (ChatGTP).
How would someone like Kevin Drum use AI? To copy edit posts, make sure they follow a format that delivers good content, gather data to back up theories, run a deep dive search through scientific papers.... Maybe to write a post using the voice from his existing content and later polishing himself because AI doesn't replace humans at this time, it augments them.
I cannot recommend this class I'm taking enough.
" I've been getting more and more tired, though, but I'm not sure if that's because of the radiation or the hormone therapy."
C'mon Kevin you MISSED a prime opportunity man.
"or the hormone therapy which has made me a raging sex maniac which pleases Marian to no end, something, something something................................"
He's lost his cockiness. Once Harris replaced Biden, they lost a year's worth of planning and messaging. They're now trying to test out different narratives which looks like people throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks.
Isn't it foundational to quantify potential outcomes, and therefore useful in war games?
Because, if the AI is trained on your work, you can be replaced and therefore, faked. Editor: "Why should I pay you, when I can just ask GPT to give me a paragraph, in your voice, on the uselessness of Game Theory IRL?"
I stopped watching the Olympics several years ago after it became clear to me that at its core, it was a corrupt institution used by authoritarian governments to spread propaganda and reinforce its own values even while it shut down athletes' silent protests against these regimes. The Russians and Chinese had/have state-sponsored cheating and the IOC would have preferred if no one had brought it up to their attention. What if the Olympics did not discern between nationalities and there were no "teams"?
Maybe it would have been a wiser choice to go with an Estrogen patch/cream than with an Androgen blocker?
"... but it never really told us anything we didn't already know without the math." I. Am. Gobsmacked. Kevin wants us to return the Egyptian notion of math: 'Construct a triangle whose length of sides are in proportion to 3:4:5. You will find that it is right.' Sorry, I prefer my eternal truths to be on somewhat firmer foundations.
"Is game theory actually useful for anything? ..."
A few things. A real world example is shooting penalty kicks in soccer. Obviously if you are the shooter you shouldn't aim at the same spot every time. So you need to adopt what in game theory is called a mixed strategy by varying your aim location at random. I expect some simple game theory models while just approximations would provide some useful insight into what that strategy should look like. However I have no idea how the players are actually coached to take penalty kicks in the real world.
“ it never really told us anything we didn't already know without the math”
See also: advanced sports analytics
Game theory plays a role in experimental economics. Yes, there is such a thing.
In AI, it is part of a set probabilistic methods for uncertain reasoning.
Why do I object to my content being used for AI anything? Because I don't know if the net effect is beneficial or detrimental. If we can verify it's beneficial, we should trust, but if we can't verify, then there's a reason, and we should assume it's because someone is benefiting at our expense and doesn't want us to know.
Complaints of AI in the arts are twofold: you mentioned copyright and the other is "Write a blog post about Trump's kid glove approach to Harris IN THE STYLE OF KEVIN DRUM." Creative artists and writers are up in arms about the ability to churn out passable work, cf Amazon books written by AI and visual stuff on ... well, everywhere that's almost as good and/or mimics established creatives. The latter is putting photographers and models out of business. (Well, not quite yet, but it's pointing in that direction...)
A lot of it is that AI is all about copying style. That cuts to the heart of every creative endeavor. The reason you buy a murder mystery from one author as opposed to another is the writing style. That goes for literature, visual art, music, comedy, drama, fashion and just about every other creative profession. There is content, but the style drives the content.
Ever since computers made it easier to build statistical concordances back in the 1960s, the technical treatment of style has been controversial. Jane Austen was seen as more than her word use pattern. AI systems are based on the reverse premise, that all artistic style is simply a matter of quantized patterns.
Artists spend their lives developing their style. Their customers and fans come to them to experience that style. AI claims that it can freely adopt anyone's hard earned style and mechanically duplicate it. The arts are full of tales of stolen voices, hidden paintings and other horrors and for a good reason.
low energy don.
he's on his third presidential campaign in a row & tenth year as a professional candidate/politician. & it's the first real job of his life. he's burnt out. people were not made to pickup first careers after retirement age.
he doesn't have the mental or emotional wherewithal to comeup with the pithy zingers lamestreamers like chris cillizza & kevin drum love so much.