{"id":433,"date":"2021-01-02T06:22:30","date_gmt":"2021-01-02T13:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janemfraser.com\/?p=433"},"modified":"2021-01-03T13:06:27","modified_gmt":"2021-01-03T20:06:27","slug":"rosebud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/janemfraser.com\/?p=433","title":{"rendered":"Rosebud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Source: https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Rosebud.jpg<\/a>. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons<\/a> Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported<\/a> license.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s new<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three articles came together for me this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. New Scientist<\/a> magazine reported<\/a> on an ambitious project to use artificial intelligence (AI) to speak with animals.<\/li>
  2. New Scientist also reported<\/a> on the astounding amount of code in old programming languages still present in financial processing software.<\/li>
  3. A friend who writes and teaches about Celtic paganism and horse goddesses posted a link to a 2017 article<\/a> arguing that Joseph Campbell got a lot wrong in his work on mythology.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    What does it mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The first article states \u201cAI is good at language,\u201d and describes a current project to decode the sounds made by sperm whales using AI to look for categories in massive databases. The technique \u201cis great at detecting patterns and can neatly sort whale calls, say, into piles based on their acoustic properties, but often can\u2019t tell you what those piles relate to.\u201d The researchers realize they need to correlate the whale\u2019s clicking vocalizations, called codas, with whale behavior and conclude \u201cThis is still a long way from deciphering meaning.\u201d The article falls, I fear, into a long, long pattern of hype about AI, with the headline \u201cDr Dolittle machines: How AI is helping us talk to the animals\u201d belied by the actual content of the article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Among the many social problems made even more visible by the corona virus pandemic, attempts to provide financial aid to people found that some computer systems were overwhelmed \u201cwith the flood of people applying for welfare benefits \u2013 and hardly anyone around knew how to fix things,\u201d as stated in the second article. These welfare processing systems, it turns out, still have massive amounts of code written in COBOL and other old programming languages. Ageing programmers, like the COBOL Cowboys<\/a>, were called into service to try to fix the situation. But it often turns out that you don\u2019t just need an<\/em> experienced COBOL programmer, you need the<\/em> COBOL programmer who wrote the original code. \u201cOpaque turns of phrase, plus coding conventions that can vary significantly between domains or even organisations, make deciphering a specific bit of software difficult for an outsider.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    While Campbell\u2019s views shifted across his many works<\/a>, he is best known for arguing for the similarity of myths across many cultures. His thesis is summarized in the title of one his books, The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em>, in which, according to the Joseph Campbell Foundation<\/a>, \u201cCampbell formulated the dual schemas of the Hero\u2019s Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through all of humanity\u2019s mythic traditions, and of the Cosmogonic Cycle, the stories of world-creation and -dissolution that have marked cultures around the world and across the centuries.\u201d To the contrary, the 2017 article by Jeana Jorgensen quotes Sara Cleto as writing: \u201cBy saying `all these stories are the same,\u2019 we lose what stories mean in different contexts and, especially, what they can mean to people that come from cultures that are not our own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    What does it mean for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Humans look for and see patterns, perhaps due to evolution, since pattern recognition can help us survive<\/a>. The theme I see in these three articles is that problems can arise through overuse of categories or patterns. It is more than just the difference between lumpers and splitters<\/a> in taxonomy, it is more than whether patterns or categories help or hinder our thinking, the issue is our overuse of the general at the expense of the particular and our failure to respect the meaning an individual puts on an experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    I can give more examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n