Category: Briefings

I should have put Questions in that title but it was getting a bit wordy. Hopefully it will make sense in a minute.

Let’s gets straight to the catchy bit. Like many living things, cuttlefish reproduce by mating and one common tactic in the mating game is for males to try to become dominant or ‘alpha’. Unlike most of us, cuttlefish can change their surface colouring (other than by adding makeup or foolishly sitting too long in the sun). They do this in response to stress and as a way of sending messages, like bird calls.

Now, people who look at evolution to simplistically see the ‘dominant’ word and think that is all that matters. The rush out and buy supplements and sit staring at themselves in gyms. This applies to all genders and sexual preference because dominance applies in a groups.

The cuttlefish is a good example of alternative strategies. The males, especially smaller ones, can adopt female colouring on the side facing the dominant male and a male display pattern on the other side. Clever. Some males also herd females into a hollow and sit over them, getting exclusive access. Other clever males can eve adopt female colouring and sit in the pile under the dominant males quietly mating when the chance comes.

So far so very male minded. The male cuttlefish is either a bulky bully or a sneaky smally. Evolution is way more complicated than that and females instinctively know it (they have evolved that way). The classic male interpretation of the herding into a hollow habit is that the females trade some loss of freedom for protection and access to the dominant gene. How simplistic.

I have said elsewhere that evolution is the survival of those that happen to survive, to try to emphasise this complexity. The statistics will indicate that there is no one way for a single individual to predict what will make their offspring survive. There are options that are simpler to adopt and that also sit higher up in the pile of options but there is also variation in both mating and offspring care adopted. This indicates that the statistics often favour those who adopt each way bets. So females let the dominant male sit there on edge guarding his harem and then sneak off and mate with other males who have shown the resilience not to give up and the with to appear in the right place for the opportunity to arise. That ensures the most favourable balance of gene survival to deal with the complexities of survival.

So what has all this to do with reasoning? The first stage of reasoning is hinted at above. You only get past the simplistic understanding of evolution if you ask questions. The questions to ask here is ‘how does the male cuttlefish decide which range of colours to adopt?’ and ‘how does it decide that fighting is not the best option but sneaking into the hollow has chances? If you think a bit further on from that you can ask how the successful adoption of a tactic get passed on to offspring? Is it a better instinctive colouring ability or a brighter brain?

Of course I don’t know the answers to those questions but the existence of the questions has wider implications for the ways we reason about all sorts of things. Sadly the habit of asking questions seems to have got a bit lost in some of the narrower results led approaches to education that we have adopted. We already had a habit of using reasoning to show dominance in various ways. As well as helping people recruiting others to jobs and courses, exams and qualifications have always been used in that way. I think we are in danger of losing the habit of asking questions about our own reasoning. As with evolution and the cuttlefish we need to keep our options open. We must remember that ‘fitness’ to purpose of a person can’t simply be measured by exams but involve adaptability and the ability to ask relevant questions.

And anyone else’s children and grand children

I’ve just been drilling holes through several strips of corrugated roofing at a time. It is a slow and boring job. Hard on old wrists too. That is just one of the many things I now do (as a retiree) to please myself and to help other people.

It made me think about schooling, because I failed (the word they used then) to get into the more academic school that my brother ended up going to. That meant that I went to a school where I did woodwork, metalwork and pottery. All skills I have used in one way or another throughout my life. We also did technical drawing, like an architect or someone designing a machine would use. I was absolutely awful at that and still am.

What I’m writing is not about how useful practical skills are but about how early failure, or failure at some things, does not define you or hopefully limit your chances.

When it came to the exams at age 16, I didn’t do well at those either. I aced maths but not others that I was supposed to be good at and failed several of the nine I was put in for. I didn’t care much because I’d decided to try Art School. It seemed better for me than the hair dressing option anyway.

At school I had been kind of adopted by people for whom art was a normal part of life but when I got to Art School, I realised just how little I knew about it. I also came across my first ‘posh’ people, with different sorts of names, different schooling and assumptions about life that were alien to me. Not everyone of course, but it was an eye opener. I also realised that I could not imagine how I would make a living from art, other than as a teacher and I was still off teachers. Oh well try again.

At Technical College I met again with others from my school who hadn’t flown through it acing everything either. I still couldn’t decide what to do but at least the sandwich course I did gave me work experience beyond stacking shelves and other bits and pieces I’d done for years. The result was that I didn’t ace things again, despite it becoming even more obvious that I could have done better if I’d tried. I was also socially awkward and embarrassed (though I think I hid it well) and often went along with things like heavy drinking that didn’t help anything.

The tale goes on but there is no point here in listing my series of failures to live up to expectations. I never found a course or job that completely felt like what I wanted to do. But I’ve had jobs all my life that keep me going. I slowly realised that I could make things better by using my skills and also that I could explain things clearly to people. I discovered that sticking at things was easier than I thought. I’ve always tried to keep on doing other things that help make me happy too.

I hope you can find a way through all the ups and downs too. Love from a grandad.

Ruth just introduced me to the idea for the need for the Friction given by human interaction and debate for keeping our brains active and developing. Aside from dismissing it as the next fad in brain training circles and Ruth’s understandable need to remind me of of reclusive tendencies, I realised that it gelled with earlier things I have written and said. When calculators started to become compulsory for schooling I saw that students started to trust them too much. They didn’t have the general estimating ability to see that their answer was way too small or large. My own struggles with mental arithmetic have at least schooled me in checking those problems of scale. Those struggles are one form of stimulative friction. I started giving lessons in estimating to counter the calculator tendency.

The huge rise in the trust in AI, at the same time as the rise in doom stories, is another calculator moment. We need to find ways of helping people to see through the mist of AI to recognise what is trustworthy and what is not.

I’ll be mulling over that from now on.

My last AI briefing was https://valleycreations.me/wp-admin/post.php?post=5083&action=edit

I’ve been asked to see if I can simplify and summarise an article in the Guardian about the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Iran by the US military

The article is both very good and also very bad. As far as I can tell, it tells a detailed and accurate story. Sadly it is absolutely crammed with details and acronyms that are often superfluous to the message. This despite it mocking the constantly changing jargon.

One example is that it prominently refers several times to the acronym LLM without explaining it. The only real reason that LLM is at all relevant is that some commentators thought that the missiles were targeted by a Chatbot. Chatbots use Large Language Models to make sense of the conversations.

As well as cramming too much history and historic factual detail in, the article also cherry picks the detail to take aim at particular targets such as the US and Palantir. The people in those, and other, organisations may well warrant criticism but not as a way of boasting about other’s superiority.

I think the gist of the situation is that there are systems (a combination of technology and people) that provide information to inform decisions about targeting in a combat situation. There are also systems that allow greater accuracy and speed in the delivery of the actual munitions. The technology used in delivery can now be faster, more accurate and can be controlled remotely, either directly by an operator or automatically by a technological system. Some of these systems now include some AI to analyse increasingly greater amounts of data including satellite imagery, mapping and coordinate details, weather and technological capability.

The development argument is that politicians and military high-ups make faulty decisions about strategic developments, often based on ignorance and ego. Even if the actual developers show a conscience about what is proposed, they will simply be by-passed and replaced. I can tell you from personal experience that it takes a lot of resilience, mental agility and a persuasive personality to re-direct strategies in a more valuable direction. The other area of failure in the development of all technologies is that each level of people involved loses interest when it comes to the testing the system against the objectives and also re-examining the objectives to ensure they still make sense.

The usage argument is on several levels. The first is that the more capable a technology appears to be, the less attention those operating it pay to whether it is working properly. The second is that the further away that the operators are from the effects of the technology, i.e. dead bodies and destruction, then the less likely they are to question what they are doing. This distance is even greater for the original strategists and many members of the public. The main crux of the argument is that this situation is not new and people of all sorts fail to pick up the nuances of how it all works and therefore who or what is to blame.

Finally on AI, I have written elsewhere about what it can and can’t do but the main message is that you can’t rely on it in all situations. It is trying to mimic human intelligence capacities while adding much better data processing capability. Donald Trump apparently has some intelligence but, personally, I wouldn’t rely on anything he said or any decision he made.

I hope that is helpful. On a personal level such situations always remind me of the cartoon film ‘Up’. There are some scary dogs and as a pack when one of them thinks they see a squirrel, they all turn their heads in unison and growl ‘Squirrel’. The other thing about those dogs is that, like the ‘wizard’ in the Wizard of Oz, they are really also babies wanting to be cuddled and fussed.

I’ve suffered from social anxiety all my life and usually feel sick before I go anywhere social. It troubles my illusional self image as a person who is cool and under control in most situations. Only age has allowed me to see that getting hyper when I was very young and the consequent drop the other way afterwards, has led me to adopt this mythical persona. Anyway, that is just background to the positive sides of a couple of social situations and the magic of the weird connections between us all.

I’m writing this because I enjoyed someone’s 60th Birthday party last night (thank you Sarah) and it made me think of another group that I chat to, who all met via looking after cycle paths for the National Cycle Path people. We have kept on chatting and meeting up long afterwards and have been on cycling and other holidays together. The chats make me smile and laugh.

Leaving them for a minute, the reason for the party last night is a social worker. One group of invitees were social workers who walk/cycle/holiday together. Of course there are partners as well, who often walk/cycle/holiday too. There was a crossover with badminton players and of course there were family and other friends. Most of us had probably come across each other at previous events. What struck me was the variety of different connections there were before that. It struck me as a positive in our fracturing times.

Before we had even got into the venue, we said hello to another set of arrivals of the social work/walk/cycle set. One of these is the sister of another member of that set, who I met with one of my own cycle path group on a ride from Morecambe to Bridlington. After saying hello, I ended up chatting to one of the others about their imminent month long cycle trip from St Malo to Nice before people started to organise us.

The party was a murder dinner occasion and I then ended up chatting to the organiser because of my own experience of writing/running/acting in them. We were put on a table with two old friends and a newer member of the walking/holidaying group and her partner. At some point I heard Barrow-in-Furness mentioned. It turned out that, from the age of seven, the newer walker had lived and been to school in Barrow. My dad was born in Barrow, as was my grandad who worked in the shipyard from age 12 to 70. This couple met when the other one was working for the shipyard as a technical illustrator. He was from the Wirral by the way. My cycling friend from the Morecambe/Bridlington went to school in Barrow too.

In the follow up to all this I found out that he had trained as an illustrator in Blackpool and in fact had digs on the same road as the first hotel/boarding house that my parents owned there at a similar time. He also made furniture, so we had that in common. As my other old table friend runs his own business mending organs and keyboards, we were in a very practical and technical focus group of our own.

My mixture of age and experience have made me more at ease on such occasions and got me into the habit of finding out people’s stories. I have also learned to open up about problems such as anxiety, without burdening people, and this has often allowed me to make connections to younger people. There were some there last night. We didn’t end up chatting much but we hugged and acknowledged each other because we’ve chatted about things before.

There were people there last night with family backgrounds in the Indian subcontinent, England, Scotland, Ireland (and the hybrid Northern Ireland), Wales, Poland and almost certainly a whole variety of other places. My new illustrator friend reminded us that people from the Wirral are often keen to stress that they are not Scousers (a Scandinavian derived term for people from Liverpool) and that got me thinking about connections rather than fractures. Some people at the party were born and bred in the same locale where they still live, where some have never lived anywhere where people didn’t think they were from elsewhere. Whether locally, nationally or around the world, plenty have moved around and made new connections. Groups there often didn’t know other groups and yet the chat was happy and varied.

Like with my cycle path friends, the key is looking for the connections rather than the divisions. Try to look for the positive experiences in your life to pass on and listen to other people’s stories too. I’ve managed to pick up stories from people all over the world and they have become part of my story to tell as well. I’ve never been a great fan of longevity but I look forward to the smile from creating my own new experiences and to sharing other people’s as well.

Thanks again Sarah and Dav

In a previous post, on AI, I wrote that we still don’t really understand quite how we think. A comment by Ruth while looking at an animated weather map suddenly brought together for me a whole mass of observations and ideas that I thought might be worth putting down on Cloud paper.

So how do we get those sudden moments of apparent clarity? We know that it is to do with our constant monitoring and building of synapses, but we don’t really know what is going on.

Let’s get back to some basics. I used the word Thinking in the title, but for most of us that means just the tiny percentage of brain work that we are somehow also aware of as we do it. There is a whole complex set of process going on behind that. Those processes also do not end where our brain is either, they are affected by and have effects on our bodies. Recent research has unpicked some of the complexities of how birds manoeuvre , through foliage for instance, and it has highlighted just how complex and integrated all the information processing is.

Of course it doesn’t end at the periphery of our bodies either. Hive minds and the communication signals that pass between trees have entered popular imagination in recent years. On a personal level, I have been astonished many times by the speed of my reactions to outside stimuli over the years (and a few times by their failure too). While I have no chance of controlling the fastest reactions, my brain and body are also instantly busy categorising, analysing and planning further actions. Amazingly the same brain is also observing all this happen. In windy conditions, a huge branch nearly came down on me in the New Forest one year. I escaped injury, more by luck than reaction times, but it is still in my brain as some sort of learned experience. Not only that but I can now abstract from it and realise that the tree would have picked up signals from the falling and landing branch and my clumsy evasive dance would have been registered as well by both the tree and other life forms in the vicinity, whose own reactions would have effects and so on. It wasn’t just Ruth and I who were on alert that day.

Thinking about all that, we must remember that the complexity may mean that everything cannot be processed and analysed perfectly. Our brains have to sacrifice some detail for more useful gains in learning. Different living things and individuals inevitably have different abilities to process and use their experiences. I have always had difficulty holding onto names and numbers but that hasn’t stopped me from being fairly good at things, such as maths, that involve numbers for instance. Others will outshine me in some areas but fall behind in others. Everything is a compromise in one direction or another.

The same is true of AI and AI has another layer of difficulty to deal with, in that it often needs to find effective ways to communicate what it has found. Communicating involves reaching an agreed sense of meaning and importance with those you are communicating with. That is hard for us but it why AI is built, so there is another level of importance.

Continuation addition 2 – All round the world there are data centres churning away, using huge amounts of energy to do the work of our subconscious. Think of all those books being ‘read’ to look for patterns that may later be re-used to ‘create’ new works. The revelation, that this gave me, is that our (and other animals) brains are doing the same thing all the time, making links for patterns that might be used later. Ruth says that is why I’m skinny, because my brain never stops.

This takes us back to our maps. What prompted the discussion Ruth and I had, was zooming in and out on the map and the choices that the app made on what to include on the map at the different levels. Not surprisingly it failed to realise the relative importance of different pieces of information to us. IT, with or without AI, has always had this problem. In earlier days the compromise decisions were made by humans but they are now frequently made by code. Human decision makers are far from perfect but they often have an instinctive understanding of other human understanding. Despite all its advances and amazing powers, code still has trouble realising what is obvious to us.

This post ended previously here but I knew that I would end up adding more. Sadly, like all technology that humans have invented, AI is being implemented everywhere with little thought of balancing its positive and negative effects. I have just been searching for the likely origin of a phrase and the ubiquitous AI summary at the top of the search results made me laugh because it was preposterous. Not only that but there was a contradiction between the AI summary on the first page of results and that on the second page.

That reminded me of looking for information on help pages and chat sites. As a technical person I have been solving problems for people all my life but I always tell people that if someone talks jargon at you then that usually means that they have an imperfect grasp of what they are talking about. I’m used to separating answers with understanding behind them from those that either haven’t understood the question or are just repeating something else imperfectly understood. Currently, and sadly probably permanently, AI is often unable to separate sense from nonsense and is often providing answers that are the equivalent of the whispers of conspiracy theorists. It has moved from taking verified knowledge, to allow it to infer answers to questions, to using unverified statements for the same purpose. Take care.

Still to be continued…..