Unmaking Sense

Episode 11.03: The maths of AI; overfitting and underfitting.

Teachers of all levels need to resolve a particular conundrum, which is how to prepare children well enough for whatever challenges they may face in the future including examinations, but not to make them think what they have been taught is everything that they could possibly need to know. And the other is not preparing them well enough for whatever challenges they may need to face The example, in the episode is of memorising the solutions to all the crossword puzzles that have ever been set without learning how to do crossword puzzles. That will not enable you to do the next crossword puzzle, which I presented with. The same is true of preparing for exams: there is merit in doing some past papers, so that you understand what is expected of you and the structure, but to do every past paper, as though that would somehow prepare you in the absence of a real understanding of what the contents of the paper was, is not going to help you Of course, the opposite is not to know enough to have insufficient skills and that is called underfitting, under-educating, under-learning, not having reached the required standard.

Episode 11.02: The Maths of AI; culture, context and language.

Neural nets as a central component in artificial intelligence, depend crucially upon such things as matrices, statistics and calculus. For matrices we should really read tensors, but that’s for a later episode. They also in training neural nets, require us to familiarise them with our culture, with its context, and with one or more of the languages in which we wish to interact with it.

Episode 11.01: What Comes Next: The Maths of AI 1: Completions.

Sequences, prompts, completions and inference.

Episode 11.00: Unmaking Sense of AI; Introduction.

Beginning a new series on AI.

Episode 10.44: Positive discrimination and redressing injustices and imbalances.

Positive discrimination from the perspective of Brobdingnagian little-endian women and bigendian men.

Episode 10.43: Can we be discriminatory without realising it and regardless of our intentions?

As responsible language-users we have to be mindful of the shifting sands of meaning and understanding upon which language depends and so how we are heard may very easily not match how we intend to speak. But the matter goes much deeper than that.

Episode 10.42: What duality entails and what it doesn’t.

This episode should probably have come before 10.41. It is about not conceiving of duality in terms of conventional opposites but in terms of full alternatives that include opposites. The significance of the distinction.

Episode 10.41: Duality in education: what it isn’t and what it is; changing our dual changes it all.

Why educational opposites are all on the same side of the duality, and what is on the other.

Episode 10.40: Our systems of thought tend to be circular, so how do we revise them or escape them?

We start to explore ways to escape self-reinforcing systems of thought that imprison us by confirming their own assumptions. How and why might we decide to try to break out of them?

Episode 10.39: Passion in science; the persistence of the visionary; waste-paper-basket theory.

We look at questions to do with the personal convictions and passions that drive scientific discovery, and in particular the visionaries who leads scientific progress. We contrast the ways of understanding the universe that are now standard for many physicists with the scepticism of such as Roger Penrose who think that things in physics are nowhere near as settled as some would have us believe. We reiterate the waste-paper-basket principle.