{"id":1069,"date":"2017-06-29T09:26:06","date_gmt":"2017-06-29T13:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/?p=1069"},"modified":"2017-06-29T09:26:06","modified_gmt":"2017-06-29T13:26:06","slug":"friston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/friston\/","title":{"rendered":"Friston"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two of my favorite blogs \u2014 Slate Star Codex<\/a> (topics: psychiatry, social commentary) and Marginal Revolution<\/a> (topics: economics, everything else) \u2014 have both linked to Karl Friston papers in the last 24 hours. Since one of my bosses is a Friston enthusiast, and he's the only Friston devotee I've ever met, and<\/em> neither of these blogs has anything to do with what I work on, this gave me a Worlds-Are-Colliding feeling.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A George divided against itself can not stand.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I haven't read either paper yet (\"An aberrant precision account of autism<\/a>\" and \"Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing<\/a>\") but I do want to respond to SSC's commentary. Here's what he had to say:<\/p>\n

A while ago I quoted a paper by Lawson, Rees & Friston about predictive-processing-based hypotheses of autism. They said:<\/p>\n

This provides a simple explanation for the pronounced social-communication difficulties in autism; given that other agents are arguably the most difficult things to predict. In the complex world of social interactions, the many-to-one mappings between causes and sensory input are dramatically increased and difficult to learn; especially if one cannot contextualize the prediction errors that drive that learning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I was really struck by the phrase \u201carguably the most difficult thing to predict\u201d. Really?<\/em> People are harder to predict than, I don\u2019t know, the weather? Weird little flying bugs? Political trends? M. Night Shyamalan movies? And of all the things about people that should be hard to predict, ordinary conversations?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I totally endorse the rest of his post, but here I need to disagree. Other people being the hardest thing to predict seems perfectly reasonable to me. The weather isn't that hard to predict decently well: just guess that the weather tomorrow will be like it is today and you'll be pretty damn accurate. Add in some basic seasonal trends \u2014 it's early summer, so tomorrow will be like today but a little warmer \u2014 and you'll get closer yet. This is obviously not perfect, but it's also not that much worse than what you can do with sophisticated meteorological modeling. Importantly, the space between the naive approach and the sophisticated approach doesn't leave a lot of room to evolve or learn better predictive ability.<\/p>\n

Weird flying bugs aren't that hard to predict either; even dumb frogs manage to catch them enough to stay alive. I'm not trying to be mean to amphibians here, but on any scale of inter-species intelligence they're pretty stupid. The space between how well a frog can predict the flight of a mosquito and how well some advanced avionics system could do so is potentially large, but there's very little to be gained by closing that predictive gap.<\/p>\n

Political trends are hard to predict, but only because you're predicting other human agents aggregated on a much larger scale<\/em>. A scale that was completely unnecessary for us to predict, I might add, until the evolutionary eye-blink of ten thousand years or so ago.<\/p>\n

Predicting movies is easier than predicting other human agents, because dramatic entertainments \u2014 produced by humans, depicting humans \u2014 are just a subset of interacting with other human agents. If you have a good model of how other people will behave, then you also have a good model of how other people will behave when they are acting as story tellers, or when they are characters. (If characters don't conform to the audience's model of human agents at least roughly, they aren't good characters.)<\/p>\n

Maybe a better restatement of Friston et al. would be \"people are are arguably the most difficult things to predict from the domain of things we have needed to predict precisely and have any hope of predicting precisely<\/em>.\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two of my favorite blogs \u2014 Slate Star Codex (topics: psychiatry, social commentary) and Marginal Revolution (topics: economics, everything else) \u2014 have both linked to Karl Friston papers in the last 24 hours. Since one of my bosses is a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cogsci","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3sddF-friston","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":71,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/roman-mars\/","url_meta":{"origin":1069,"position":0},"title":"Roman Mars","author":"jsylvest","date":"3 March 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The latest episode of Bullseye includes a great interview with radio producer and podcaster Roman Mars. Mars is the man behind the wonderful podcast 99% Invisible. (No relation to OWS.) 99% Invisible is about the design and architecture of both the extremely weird (Kowloon Walled City, Razzle Camoflage) to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/tag\/academia\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"99percent-invisible-logo","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/99percent-invisible-logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":351,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/reading-list-for-2-may-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":1069,"position":1},"title":"Reading List for 2 May 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"2 May 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Marginal Revolution :: Tyler Cowen :: Is there a shortage of STEM workers in the United States? Simplified analogy: I'm not bidding up the price of quadcopters. That doesn't mean that if we had more of them I wouldn't find cool stuff to do with them. (For other takes on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reading Lists"","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Taschen information graphics book","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/rendgen-information-graphics-201x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":129,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/reading-list-for-2-apr-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":1069,"position":2},"title":"Reading List for 2 Apr 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"4 April 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Alan Winfield's Web Log ::\u00a0Extreme debugging \u2014 a tale of microcode and an oven \"Components on the CPU circuit board were melting, but still it didn't crash. So that's how I debugged code with an oven.\" If that's not a closing line that gets you to click through, I don't\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reading Lists"","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":542,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/reading-list-for-16-july-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":1069,"position":3},"title":"Reading List for 16 July 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"16 July 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Evan Miller :: Winkel Tripel Warping Trouble or \"How I Found a Bug in the Journal of Surveying Engineering\" All programming blogs need at least one post unofficially titled \u201cIndisputable Proof That I Am Awesome.\u201d These are usually my favorite kind of read, as the protagonist starts out with a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reading Lists"","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Irene Global Tweets WInkel Tripel","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Irene-Global-Tweets-WInkel-Tripel-1024x604.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Irene-Global-Tweets-WInkel-Tripel-1024x604.png?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Irene-Global-Tweets-WInkel-Tripel-1024x604.png?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Irene-Global-Tweets-WInkel-Tripel-1024x604.png?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":599,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/some-recent-brief-book-reviews\/","url_meta":{"origin":1069,"position":4},"title":"Some recent, brief book reviews","author":"jsylvest","date":"20 June 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Philip Pullman I knew these were darker than Disney (and everyone else in the 20th C.) would have children believe, but wow. I think there was a stretch of seven stories in a row in which at least one person was casually executed. Cinderella's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"brothers_grimm_pullman_cover","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/brothers_grimm_pullman_cover-198x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1188,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/aies-2018\/","url_meta":{"origin":1069,"position":5},"title":"AIES 2018","author":"jsylvest","date":"9 February 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Last week I attended the first annual conference on AI, Ethics & Society where I presented some work on a Decision Tree\/Random Forest algorithm that makes decisions that are less biased or discriminatory. ((In the colloquial rather than technical sense)) You can read all the juicy details in our paper.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding"","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1075,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions\/1075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}