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Karthik Srinivasan · @skarthik

137 followers · 70 posts · Server neuromatch.social

Indeed! It is a profound analogy.

I would like to add a couple of points that I believe are related to Ted Chiang's on knowledge generation, compression, complexity, and communication vis-à-vis LLMs (especially given the role these large and powerful corporations play in our day-to-day lives, and look increasingly indistinguishable from the role of states).

Both are from James C Scott, the great anthropologist who brilliantly captures these ideas in his work "Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed"

1) The first of them is what he calls "legibility", and thus a simplification. Simplification (a form of compression) that turned out to be disastrous because of what he calls, "authoritarian high modernism".
This is how he explains legibility:

"The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The pre-modern state was, in many crucial respects, particularly blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people."

2) The second idea is towards the end of the book, a type of knowledge he calls "metis" to contrast it to the knowledge a lot of us at the core of society generate and engage in, "techne".

Techne consists of our legible plans, rules, social codes, principles etc etc., including science and policy.

Metis on the other hand, is the thinking and knowledge process
that has to deal with the messy unpredictable complexity of both the human and natural world in the here and now. Thus practical skills and common sense improvisations to deal with such situations, which by their very nature are know-hows locally rooted, hardly transmittable, or legible, and thus harder or impossible to be either compressed or simplified.

I believe both "legibility" and "metis" along with lossy compression are equally applicable to LLMs.

Loosely speaking LLMs are like the "five year central plans" for organizing knowledge that Scott critiques in his book.

After all, Google does say their aim is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".

#legibility #metis #JamesCScott #chatgpt #LLMs #complexity #critique #mapterritoryrelation #AI #SeeingLikeAState