Episode 8.80: Computer complexity and human simplification. Why the latter works, but only just.

Sometimes computer models get too big for our meagre resources, too big for any resources, so we need a way to make things simpler. They are in that respect very much like relationship between human intelligence and existence in the world. This week I discovered quantisation as a result of an error that I need to understand. Quantisation involves simplifying things in ways that go on working and so it’s a great metaphor for what human understanding does in the context of the world. It’s also very large extent what our chatbot friends do in order to make themselves and their models work.