Psychology – artdiamondblog.com

For Quicker Cures, Do Not Cancel Those Who See What We Do Not See

Dogs smell odors that we do not smell. They say Eskimos can distinguish 40 or more kinds of snow. Physical differences in biology and differences in past experiences allow some people to perceive what other people miss. We should encourage, not cancel, those who see differently. They can communicate and act on what they see, giving us more cures more quickly.

In the passages quoted below, a case is made that Pasteur’s artistic experiences allowed him to see a structural difference (chirality) in crystals; a difference that turns out to matter for medical drug molecules.

(p. D5) In a paper published last month in Nature Chemistry, Dr. Gal explains how a young Pasteur fought against the odds to articulate the existence of chirality, or the way that some molecules exist in mirror-image forms capable of producing very different effects. Today we see chirality’s effects in light, in chemistry and in the body — even in the drugs we take.

And we might not know a thing about them if it weren’t for the little-known artistic experience of Louis Pasteur, says Dr. Gal.

. . .

As a teenager, Pasteur made portraits of his friends, family and dignitaries. But after his father urged him to pursue a more serious profession — one that would feed him — he became a scientist. At the age of 24 he discovered chirality.

To understand chirality, consider two objects held up before a mirror: a white cue ball from a pool table and your hand. The reflection of the ball is exactly like the original. If you could reach into that mirror, pull out the reflection and cram it inside the original, they’d match up point for point. But if you tried the same thing with your hand, no matter how much you tried, the mirror image would never fit into the original.

At the molecular level some objects are like cue balls, and they are always superimposable. But other things are like hands, and they can never be combined.

. . .

During winemaking, a chemical called tartaric acid builds up on vat walls. In the 18th and 19th centuries, makers of medicine and dyes used this acid.

In 1819, factory workers boiled wine too long and accidentally produced paratartaric acid, which had unique properties that intrigued scientists like Pasteur.

. . .

When studying the paratartaric acid, Pasteur found that it produced two kinds of crystals — one like those found in tartaric acid and another that was the mirror opposite. The crystals were handed, or what the Greeks call chiral (kheir) for hand.

. . .

“Several famous or much more accomplished scientists, some well along their illustrious careers, studied the same molecules, the same substances,” said Dr. Gal. “Realistically you would think they’d have beaten him to the punch, and yet they missed it.”

So why did this young, inexperienced chemist get it right?

Dr. Gal thinks the answer might lie in the artistic passions of Pasteur’s youth. Even as a scientist, Pasteur remained closely connected to art. He taught classes on how chemistry could be used in fine art and attended salons. He even carried around a notebook, jotting down 1-4 ratings of artwork he visited.

And then Dr. Gal stumbled upon a letter Pasteur had written to his parents about a lithographic portrait he had made of a friend.

Lithography back then involved etching a drawing onto a limestone slab with wax or oil and acid, and pressing a white piece of paper on top of it. The resulting picture was transposed, like a mirror image of the drawing left on the slab.

In his letter, Pasteur wrote:

“I think I have not previously produced anything as well drawn and having as good a resemblance. All who have seen it find it striking. But I greatly fear one thing, that is, that on the paper the portrait will not be as good as on the stone; this is what always happens.”

Eureka. “Isn’t this the explanation of how he saw the handedness on the crystals — because he was sensitized to that as an artist?” Dr. Gal proposed.

. . .

We now know that many drugs contain molecules that exist in two chiral forms, and that the two forms can react differently in the body. The most tragic example occurred in the 1950s and ’60s, when doctors prescribed Thalidomide, a drug for morning sickness and other ailments, to pregnant women. The drug also contained a chiral molecule that caused disastrous side effects in many babies.

For the full story see:

Joanna Klein. “How Pasteur’s Artistic Insight Changed Chemistry.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 20, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 14, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The academic article in Nature Chemistry authored by Gal and mentioned above is:

Gal, Joseph. “Pasteur and the Art of Chirality.” Nature Chemistry 9, no. 7 (2017): 604-05.

Reductio ad Absurdum: When a Functional MRI Showed Activity in a Dead Salmon’s Brain

I have long thought that most college students would benefit from a course in practical reasoning. One topic in such a course would be to define and illustrate the Reductio ad Absurdum argument. The argument starts with a proposition, and then infers an absurdity from the proposition, thereby refuting the original proposition. The review quoted below mentions such an argument that implicitly starts with the proposition that fMRI scans are reliable guides to human thought. The absurdity is that fMRI scans sometimes light up in the presence of a dead Atlantic salmon, which would seem to suggest that the salmon is thinking. The conclusion: be careful what you infer from fMRI scans.

My favorite reductio ad absurdum argument starts with the proposition that all actionable knowledge must derive from randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs). The argument then shows that no RCTs have been performed to show the efficacy of parachutes. The absurdity is that before anyone uses a parachute when exiting a flying airplane, he must first find an RCT to prove the efficacy of parachutes. The conclusion: when you volunteer for the first such RCT, hope that you are not assigned to the control group!

(p. A15) In 2009 a group of researchers placed a dead salmon in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and showed the fish some photos of people in social situations. Their results, presented under the title “Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon,” were surprising. The scans revealed a red spot of activity centered in the salmon’s brain.

The authors of the study weren’t trying to pull a fast one on the scientific community. Nor did they believe in zombie fish. They were showing that statistics, used incorrectly, can demonstrate almost anything. Specifically, a certain type of data analysis, often used on fMRI scans, can find signal where there should be only noise.

Russell Poldrack, a psychologist at Stanford University, mentions the stunt in “The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal About Our Thoughts.” His book, ostensibly about fMRI and its use in studying how the brain functions (hence “functional”), serves as a lesson in how the science works—or should work. Through blunders and baloney, innovation and self-correction, the young field of cognitive neuroscience is quickly evolving.

For the full review see:

Matthew Hutson. “Bookshelf; Scanning For Thoughts.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, November 28, 2018 [sic]): A15.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 27, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘The New Mind Readers’ Review: Scanning for Thoughts.”)

The book under review is:

Poldrack, Russell. The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal About Our Thoughts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

The parachute reductio argument is in:

Smith, Gordon C. S., and Jill P. Pell. “Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge: Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials.” BMJ 327, no. 7429 (Dec. 18, 2003): 1459-61.

The Lovable, Frustrating, Vulnerable “Big Easy”

Our daughter is a loyal Notre Dame graduate, so we went to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl game, scheduled for January 1, but ultimately played on January 2. The day before the scheduled game, we were in Jackson Square on New Year’s Eve for the countdown to 2025. For us a little partying goes a long way, so we headed back to the Marriott about 12:30. About two and a half hours later, a couple of blocks from where we had been, the terrorist plowed his truck through the crowd, killing 14, and seriously injuring many more.

They call New Orleans “the Big Easy.” I appreciate its joy, its spontaneity, its libertarian tolerance. But I can only visit New Orleans, I cannot live there.

When I arrive in a hotel I want a glass of ice water. In our two most recent visits to Marriott hotels in New Orleans, the ice machines on our floor did not at first work. It never worked during our stay at the first hotel and worked only occasionally at the second hotel. When I complained at the first hotel, I got a joyful grin and a shrug–the ice machine had been that way for several days and who knows when or if it would be fixed? It’s “easy” to celebrate; it’s hard to fix ice machines and keep them running.

There were barriers on Bourbon Street that could have kept the terrorist from killing 14. But it has come out that they were not working and it was not “easy” to fix them. (There were also supposed to be levies that could have reduced the damage from Hurricane Katrina, but it was not “easy” to fix them either.)

I like visiting New Orleans. I like its joyful spontaneity. But what makes New Orleans “the Big Easy” also makes it “the Big Frustrating” and “the Big Vulnerable.” I like visiting New Orleans but I want to live in a city where type-A personalities do what is hard: build, fix, and protect.

Dislodging Entrenched Special Interests Requires the Courage to Be the Target of Ill-Will

Many years ago, for reasons I forget, I listened to an interview posted online with Charlie Munger, who for decades was Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway. One portion of Munger’s comments struck me as particularly insightful, so insightful, that I replayed that portion several times so I could write down a rough transcript of the comments. I am posting that rough transcript a few paragraphs below.

A lot of progress in healthcare, and in the world more broadly, depends on individual heroes who have the courage to be the target of ill-will in order to champion truth and virtue, against the powerful special interests that benefit from falsehood and corruption. Those who speak out are often cancelled and have their careers ruined. We remember a few of the names of those who eventually were vindicated. For example Ignaz Semmelweis was cancelled by the medical establishment for arguing that doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies. He eventually was vindicated and remembered, though long after he died of a beating in an insane asylum. Several much-more-recent examples can be found in Marty Makary’s thought-provoking Blind Spots. (Makary has been named by President-Elect Trump to head the Food and Drug Administration.)

Those like Semmelweis who suffered but were vindicated, are painful to ponder. How much more painful to ponder are those who fought the good fight but were never vindicated, and so are utterly forgotten? We justly honor the unknown soldier. We should find a way to also justly honor the unknown speaker of truth to power.

I cringe at Donald Trump’s occasional rudeness and bullying, but I hope that his courage to be the target of ill-will, allow him to succeed in unbinding the entrepreneurs who create breakthrough innovations.

Below is my transcript of a small portion of Charlie Munger’s comments at the University of Michigan in 2010. My memory is that Munger made his comments in answers to expansive questions from Becky Quick as part of a celebration to honor Munger’s donations to the University of Michigan. Munger’s story below is from health care, but the moral from the story applies much more broadly. (Munger’s interest in health care led him to chair the board of trustees of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles for over 30 years.)

And so there’s a lot of abuse in health care. And one of the ways you fix it is to, is for the people who have the power, they exercise it to prevent the abuse.

In a lot of places you have live and let live, in the hospitals it’s live and let live, because nobody wants to criticize anybody. That’s a huge mistake, a huge mistake.

In our leading academic hospitals (I’m sure this isn’t happening in Michigan); [1:41:03 of recording] but I have a friend whose daughter is head of infectious diseases and something at a medical school hospital, a great hospital.

And of course the doctors there are fishing the patients out of nursing homes, and bringing them in so they can walk by the beds, and bill them. And they are bringing in these terrible infections. And that takes a lot of treatment, and a lot of walks by the bed, and so on, and so on.

Of course the parents of this particular doctor recognize that she is sort of risking her life going through medical school because of the abuse of the system by some of the doctors in a hospital where nobody is stopping the abuse.

It’s like Burke said, for evil to triumph in the world, all that is necessary is that good men do nothing. And all over America some people are intervening to stop some of these abuses. And, and you have to identify them; you have to rationalize them; you have to be willing to take the ill-will.

I have a friend, this is another wonderful story on human nature, chief of the medical staff, southern California hospital.

A bunch of non-board-certified anesthesiologists, who came out of, I forget the sub-branch of medicine; but it’s not, it’s not chiropractic, but it’s . . . anyway they got in control of the anesthesia department of the hospital.

[1:42 of recording]

And he could see that they had created three totally unnecessary deaths and had covered up every single one. And he knew that this was just gonna to ruin his life. So he got rid of them all. Changed the whole system. He ruined families, he ruined incomes, he cleaned house. And he told me the story 20 years later, and I said what happened. And he said, to this day none of the people I cleaned out and none of their friends has ever spoken to me. He was willing to take all that ill will to do the Lord’s work, and do it right.

And you can say, why did he wait for the third death? Maybe he felt he needed that much horror to accomplish the fix.

But all over America, there are stories like that. That’s a GOOD story about human nature. That’s a story about wisdom and virtue triumphing; and of course they don’t always win.

Even in a bull fight, the bull sometimes wins.

[1:44 of recording– relevant segment over]

The interview with Munger is:

Quick, Rebecca (interviewer). “A Conversation with Charlie Munger.” University of Michigan Ross School of Business, Sept. 14, 2010.

(Note: at three places in the recording I roughly indicate in brackets the time into the posted recording, in case anyone wants to watch the video and check the accuracy of my rough transcript. Let me know if you find an error.)

The Marty Makary book that I praise in my initial comments is:

Makary, Marty. Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

Neuroscience Evidence that Our Brains Store Tacit Knowledge Separately from Articulate Formal Knowledge

(p. 10) On Aug. 25, 1953, a Connecticut neurosurgeon named William Beecher Scoville drilled two silver-dollar-size holes into the skull of Henry Molaison, a 27-year-old man with epilepsy so severe he had been prohibited from walking across stage to receive his high school diploma. Scoville then used a suction catheter to slurp up Molaison’s medial temporal lobes, the portion of the brain that contains both the hippocampus and the amygdala. The surgeon had no idea if the procedure would work, but Molaison was desperate for help: His seizures had become so frequent that it wasn’t clear if he would be able to hold down a job.

As it happened, Scoville’s operation did lessen Molaison’s seizures. Unfortunately, it also left him with anterograde amnesia: From that day forth, Molaison was unable to form new memories. Over the course of the next half-century, Patient H.M., as Molaison was referred to in the scientific literature, was the subject of hundreds of studies that collectively revolutionized our understanding of how memory, and the human brain, works. Before H.M., scientists thought that memories originated and resided in the brain as a whole rather than in any one discrete area. H.M. proved that to be false. Before H.M., all memories were thought of in more or less the same way. H.M.’s ability to perform dexterous tasks with increasing proficiency, despite having no recollection of having performed the tasks before, showed that learning new facts and learning to do new things happened in different places in the brain.

. . .

Several well-received books have already been written about Molaison, including one published in 2013 by Suzanne Corkin, the M.I.T. neuroscientist who controlled all access to and oversaw all research on Molaison for the last 31 years of his life.

What else, you might wonder, is there to say? According to the National Magazine Award-winning journalist Luke Dittrich, plenty. Dittrich arrived at Molaison’s story with a distinctly personal perspective — he is Scoville’s grandson, and his mother was Corkin’s best friend growing up — and his work reveals a sordid saga that differs markedly from the relatively anodyne one that has become accepted wisdom.

. . .

(p. 11) In her book, Corkin described Molaison as carefree and easygoing, a sort of accidental Zen master who couldn’t help living in the moment. In one of her papers, which makes reference to but does not quote from a depression questionnaire Molaison filled out in 1982, Corkin wrote that Molaison had “no evidence of anxiety, major depression or psychosis.” Dittrich located Molaison’s actual responses to that questionnaire, which had not been included in Corkin’s paper. Among the statements Molaison circled to describe his mental state were “I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve” and “I feel that I am a complete failure as a person.”

. . .

Molaison has long been portrayed as the victim of a surgeon’s hubris. Dittrich’s book, and the reaction to it, highlight why the lessons learned from his life cannot be limited to those stemming from a single act in the distant past. It’s easy to criticize the arrogance of researchers after they’re dead — and after we’ve already enjoyed the fruits of their work. With most of the principals in the tragedy of “Patient H.M.” now gone, the question at the core of Dittrich’s story — did the pursuit of knowledge conflict with the duty of care for a human being? — remains, in every interaction between scientist and vulnerable subject.

For the full review see:

Seth Mnookin. “Man Without a Past.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 4, 2016 [sic]): 10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 29, 2016 [sic], and has the title “A Book Examines the Curious Case of a Man Whose Memory Was Removed.”)

The book under review above is:

Dittrich, Luke. Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. New York: Random House, 2016.

The earlier book by Corkin mentioned above is:

Corkin, Suzanne. Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H. M. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

Loners Live Longer (At Least if You Are a Marmot)

(p. D2) For many mammals, a busy social life can be an important contributor to a long life. But some animals need more alone time than others, and failure to get it could be lethal, according to new research.

Consider the marmot. After spending 13 years tracking their interactions and life spans in Colorado, Daniel T. Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues found in a study published Wednesday [Jan. 17, 2018] in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that yellow-bellied marmots with more active social lives tended to die younger than those that avoided interactions.

For the full story see:

Douglas Quenqua. “Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots at Least.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018 [sic]): D2.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 17, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots.” The Latin words in the first quoted sentence appear in italics in the original version.)

The academic study of Marmots discussed in the passages above is:

Blumstein, Daniel T., Dana M. Williams, Alexandra N. Lim, Svenja Kroeger, and Julien G. A. Martin. “Strong Social Relationships Are Associated with Decreased Longevity in a Facultatively Social Mammal.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285, no. 1871 (Jan. 2018): 20171934.

Formal and Tacit Knowledge Are Located in Different Parts of the Brain

Brenda Milner turned 106 on July 15, 2024.

(p. D5) At 98, Dr. Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70-year career to clarify the function of many brain regions — frontal lobes, and temporal; vision centers and tactile; the left hemisphere and the right — usually by painstakingly testing people with brain lesions, often from surgery. Her prominence long ago transcended gender, and she is impatient with those who expect her to be a social activist. It’s science first with Dr. Milner, say close colleagues, in her lab and her life.

Perched recently on a chair in her small office, resplendent in a black satin dress and gold floral pin and banked by moldering towers of old files, she volleyed questions rather than answering them. “People think because I’m 98 years old I must be emerita,” she said. “Well, not at all. I’m still nosy, you know, curious.”

. . .

Dr. Milner changed the course of brain science for good as a newly minted Ph.D. in the 1950s by identifying the specific brain organ that is crucial to memory formation.

She did so by observing the behavior of a 29-year-old Connecticut man who had recently undergone an operation to relieve severe epileptic seizures. The operation was an experiment: On a hunch, the surgeon suctioned out two trenches of tissue from the man’s brain, one from each of his medial temporal lobes, located deep below the skull about level with the ears. The seizures subsided.

But the patient, an assembly line worker named Henry Molaison, was forever altered. He could no longer form new memories.

. . .

In a landmark 1957 paper Dr. Milner wrote with Mr. Molaison’s surgeon, she concluded that the medial temporal areas — including, importantly, an organ called the hippocampus — must be critical to memory formation. That finding, though slow to sink in, would upend the accepted teaching at the time, which held that no single area was critical to supporting memory.

Dr. Milner continued to work with Mr. Molaison and later showed that his motor memory was intact: He remembered how to perform certain physical drawing tests, even if he had no memory of learning them.

The finding, reported in 1962, demonstrated that there are at least two systems in the brain for processing memory: one that is explicit and handles names, faces and experiences; and another that is implicit and incorporates skills, like riding a bike or playing a guitar.

“I clearly remember to this day my excitement, sitting there with H. M. and watching this beautiful learning curve develop right there in front of me,” Dr. Milner said. “I knew very well I was witnessing something important.”

. . .

For Dr. Milner, after a lifetime exploring the brain, the motive for the work is personal as well as professional. “I live very close; it’s a 10-minute walk up the hill,” she said. “So it gives me a good reason to come in regularly.”

For the full story see:

Benedict Carey. “At 98, ‘Still Nosy’ About the Brain.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 16, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “Brenda Milner, Eminent Brain Scientist, Is ‘Still Nosy’ at 98.”)

The “landmark 1957 paper” mentioned above is:

Scoville, William Beecher, and Brenda Milner. “Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 20, no. 1 (Feb. 1957): 11-21.

$700 Million Deployed for Harris by an “Elusive” Expert on Randomized Clinical-Trials

“The biggest super PAC in American politics” (p. 1) is spending $700 million on ads to elect Harris, more than the combined expenditures of both the official campaign of Harris and the official campaign of Trump (p. 1). “Leading the group” (p. 19) is an “elusive” PhD named Chauncy McLean, who has “ascended in the party by displaying encyclopedic knowledge of randomized controlled-trials” (p. 19). If Harris wins will that be more due to her overwhelming advantage in funding or more due to the methods used to spend the funds? (Or will the results depend more on how much Americans remember the record of Trump compared to how much they remember the record of Biden-Harris?)

For the full story see:

Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher. “Super PAC Places $700 Million Bet On Harris’s Bid.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, October 20, 2024): 1 & 19.

“Mass Deportation” Is Not in Trump’s Heart, but Is a Warning to Future Illegal Aliens

I am stressed by the image of the “mass deportation” of those who entered the U.S. illegally, but otherwise have been decent hard-working people. My plausible hope is that deep in his heart, Trump does not really mean it or plan it. Why “plausible”? Read the passage quoted below describing Trump’s visit with The Wall Street Journal editorial board.

At this year’s Republican National Convention, Mr. Trump vowed to undertake “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Editorial board member Kyle Peterson asks how large—does Mr. Trump intend to deport aliens who are law-abiding except for their illegal presence in the country, even if they have American spouses and children? Maybe not, Mr. Trump says: “We have a lot of good people in this country, and we have to do something about it, and I’d like to see if we can do it.”

Pressed for specifics, he demurs: “Well, I don’t want to go too much into clarification, because the nicer I become, the more people that come over illegally.” When he was president, “I said, ‘We’re going to separate your family.’ . . . It doesn’t sound nice, but when a family hears they’re going to be separated, you know what they do? They stay where they are, because we couldn’t handle it. . . . But the interest from the heart, yeah, something’s going to be done. . . . I mean, there’s some human questions that get in the way of being perfect, and we have to have the heart, too. OK?”

The implication is that the optimal immigration policy is a happy medium between restriction and openness. That’s certainly true and perhaps a truism. Mr. Trump suggests that he, the bully with a heart of gold, is just the man to strike the balance.

For the full commentary/interview see:

James Taranto. “The Weekend Interview; Trump Tangles With the Journal’s Editors.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 18, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses in original.)

AI Algorithms Lack Intelligence Since They Are “Just Predicting the Next Word in a Text”

(p. B5) Yann LeCun helped give birth to today’s artificial-intelligence boom. But he thinks many experts are exaggerating its power and peril, and he wants people to know it.

. . .

On social media, in speeches and at debates, the college professor and Meta Platforms AI guru has sparred with the boosters and Cassandras who talk up generative AI’s superhuman potential, from Elon Musk to two of LeCun’s fellow pioneers, who share with him the unofficial title of “godfather” of the field. They include Geoffrey Hinton, a friend of nearly 40 years who on Tuesday was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, and who has warned repeatedly about AI’s existential threats.

. . .

LeCun thinks AI is a powerful tool.

. . .

At the same time, he is convinced that today’s AIs aren’t, in any meaningful sense, intelligent—and that many others in the field, especially at AI startups, are ready to extrapolate its recent development in ways that he finds ridiculous.

If LeCun’s views are right, it spells trouble for some of today’s hottest startups, not to mention the tech giants pouring tens of billions of dollars into AI. Many of them are banking on the idea that today’s large language model-based AIs, like those from OpenAI, are on the near-term path to creating so-called “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, that broadly exceeds human-level intelligence.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman last month said we could have AGI within “a few thousand days.” Elon Musk has said it could happen by 2026.

LeCun says such talk is likely premature. When a departing OpenAI researcher in May talked up the need to learn how to control ultra-intelligent AI, LeCun pounced. “It seems to me that before ‘urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us’ we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,” he replied on X.

He likes the cat metaphor. Felines, after all, have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning ability and a capacity for planning, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “frontier” AIs, including those made by Meta itself.

Léon Bottou, who has known LeCun since 1986, says LeCun is “stubborn in a good way”—that is, willing to listen to others’ views, but single-minded in his pursuit of what he believes is the right approach to building artificial intelligence.

Alexander Rives, a former Ph.D. student of LeCun’s who has since founded an AI startup, says his provocations are well thought out. “He has a history of really being able to see gaps in how the field is thinking about a problem, and pointing that out,” Rives says.

. . .

The large language models, or LLMs, used for ChatGPT and other bots might someday have only a small role in systems with common sense and humanlike abilities, built using an array of other techniques and algorithms.

Today’s models are really just predicting the next word in a text, he says. But they’re so good at this that they fool us. And because of their enormous memory capacity, they can seem to be reasoning, when in fact they’re merely regurgitating information they’ve already been trained on.

“We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves, or manipulate language, are smart—but that’s not true,” says LeCun. “You can manipulate language and not be smart, and that’s basically what LLMs are demonstrating.”

For the full commentary see:

Christopher Mims. “Keywords: This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Pet Cat.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 12, 2024): B5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated Oct. 11, 2024, and has the title “Keywords: This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat.” The sentence starting with “Léon Bottou” appears in the online, but not the print, version. Where there are small differences between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

People Thinking about the Rules They Have to Obey, Are Not Thinking about the Problems They Have to Solve

(p. A18) . . . I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

. . .

In every organization I’ve interacted with, the administrators genuinely want to serve the mission of the organization, but the nature of their jobs is to enforce compliance with this or that rule.

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up. I don’t know about you, but my health insurer sometimes denies my family coverage for things that seem like obvious necessities, but I let it go unless it’s a major expense. I calculate that my time is more valuable.

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion. These are two different mentalities. As Howard writes, “Studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems.”

. . .

. . ., Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.

In a recent essay in Liberties Journal, he illustrates how administrators control campus life . . .

. . .

Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.