In a polarized society, most people believe that those on the opposite side are there because they are ignorant. How sure are of the truth of what we know
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Turkey's presidential election second round is this Sunday. It is never easy to win against authoritarian populist governments. Why? How can one explain the unwavering support of Erdogan's followers in Turkey despite all the problems in the country, just like it was like for Peron in Argentina and Marcos in the Philippines?
Some opposition elites prefer to attribute the failure of the opposition to the ignorance of the electorate. Then I wonder: How do you know what people know or don't know? Are you sure of the veracity of what you know? How can you be certain?
While searching for answers to these questions, this article came to my mind.
Epistemology, the science of 'knowledge about knowledge,' divides the sources of knowledge into four categories: (a) intuition and everyday experience; (b) empirical; (c) logic; and (d) authority.
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Intuition or individual perceptions
If I see four apples on a tree, I don't need other evidence for their existence. Unfortunately, I cannot have firsthand perception about everything happening in the world. Watching something on TV is or reading about it in a book is not the same. Therefore, all I can say is, 'I heard it from someone,' 'I read it somewhere,' but I cannot claim to be a true witness. This means most of my knowledge is transmitted knowledge. Based on transmitted knowledge, no one should accuse anyone else of ignorance.
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Empirical Knowledge
Experimental methods are crucial for expanding our collective knowledge as humanity, but their personal utility is limited. The knowledge I can obtain purely through empirical means is unfortunately very little. I cannot access the data, perform experiments in a laboratory, or have supercomputers to carry out complex calculations. For example, I cannot empirically estimate the comparative effects of the COVID vaccine's protection and side effects because I don't have the data. I cannot calculate how CO2 emissions into the atmosphere will affect global climate because I don't have the computational capacity to generate numerical predictions, nor do I have a meteorological database to compare those predictions. Experimental research is significant as a collective effort of humanity, but we don't have the means to conduct every experiment ourselves. We trust in the authority of others who have conducted proper experiments.
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Logic
Logic requires certain presuppositions to reason. Gödel's incompleteness theorem stipulates this requirement. Even without reading Gödel's work, I am sure we agree that we cannot discover truth by mere thinking with no prior assumptions.
For instance, we cannot determine by pure logic whether the 2020 American elections were stolen from Trump. We cannot determine by pure logic how much of the allegations in the December 17-25 Corruption and Bribery Operation in Turkey is true or fabricated. We need either empirical knowledge (seeing the stolen votes or money with our own eyes) or a presupposition (believing the claimants to be telling the truth, for instance).
Saying that we cannot acquire new knowledge through pure logic without presuppositions does not mean that logic is unnecessary. Logic is the most effective tool we possess as individuals to evaluate the consistency of acquired knowledge.
However, logic is not an attribute exclusive to educated individuals. Aristotle, who formulated the first logical rules, did not invent them out of thin air; he abstracted them from the explanations and thought chains put forth by the people around him. In other words, knowing Boolean algebra is not a prerequisite for reasoning. Logic is a part of the daily lives of educated and uneducated individuals alike. Therefore, I have never regarded those who think differently from me as lacking in logic. I have assumed that they think differently due to their presuppositions, personal perceptions, or experiences, which I am not aware of.
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Authority
I have learned most of what I know from others. Either directly, from the words of my elders or teachers, or indirectly, from books and similar sources written and recorded by others. It can be said that I learned through 'persuasion'; that is, I accepted the words of someone who knows, someone authoritative, and was convinced by their authority. I believe this is true for almost everyone.
When expressed this way, I am sure no one will object to the fact that the overwhelming majority of our knowledge is acquired from others, that is, transmitted knowledge. Nevertheless, we are not hesitant to claim that those who do not share our beliefs are ignorant simply because they were not 'persuaded' by the same 'authority.'
There are two important questions regarding this:
In today's world, where almost anyone can speak and broadcast their words to the entire world using technology, which authority should we believe in?
Does being skeptical, approaching the statements of all authorities with doubt, hinder us from having definitive opinions?
These are important questions. I will address them another day.
ICYMI
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Peter Attia, Video - US healthcare system is broken, 24 May.
Peter Attia is a physician I follow on-loine on different platforms. I will write about him specifically in the future. His son got sick while he was in San Diego last week. He thought it was probably dehydration, but they went to the hospital anyway. The hospital did a couple of tests; decided that it indeed was dehydration; gave fluids to the kid; and presented Peter Attia with a $5950 bill. He paid, of course.
He was surprised that his health insurance gave him $4500 for these two and a half tests and one serum without objection. Despite this “generosity”, two thousand dollars still came out of his pocket. He sees this episode as evidence how the US health system is broke. The US per capita health is the highest in the world buyt the country is well that while it is the world's first in health expenditures per capita, it is an indicator of how the US health system, which is behind all other developed countries in health outcomes, has gone bankrupt.
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Matthew Lynley, Blog - Supervised, 24 Mayıs.
Nvidia became an AI hardware pioneer overnight because its Graphical Processing Units (GPU) proved to be the essential hardware to run the new Large Language Models on. However, as more compact LLMs are becoming available, the Nvidia GPUs may no longer be unavoidable and Apple seems to be placing itself to adapt its M1 Macs to LLM-development engines for iPhones. (HG: For this, we first need to be able to download PyTorch as a whole to the Mac iOS system. Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment. Therefore, it is not possible for me to run any of the current LLMs locally on my Mac.)
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Paper - Tree of Thoughts for LLM Problem Solving
Yao, S., Yu, D., Zhao, J., Shafran, I., Griffiths, T.L., Cao, Y., & Narasimhan, K. (2023). Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models. Click for Code repo.
This is a paper with an impressive list of authors (at least an impressive list of organisations with which the authors are affiliated). That is probably why it attracted some attention in the AI discussion space. However, it looked like an almost trivial innovation to me. It says that we can try and start our LLMs with a list of most plausible prompts ("thoughts") and decide at the end which gave the best result. There is more in the article but it does not introduce a solution to the inability of the LLMs to produce categorical answers in areas where only such answers are acceptable.
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Diary
Although the title is Halim's Diary, this page has somehow become a serious blog. I never wanted to be a serious blogger. So I will try to factory reset. Every post will have a Diary section from now on.
Wednesday, May 24
This morning I went to the city by bus to buy tea. I like Lapsang Souchong. No one else seems to like it. I have a separate teapot for it so that its aroma does not mix with normal tea. Evidence of its lack of popularity is that it is not available everywhere. Taylan and Yi found a shop in the city for me last year. I've been buying it from that shop ever since.
Smoke was rising on the eastern horizon as I walked towards the bus stop.
Later, I looked it up. There was a bush fire around Capalaba. A consequence of the sunny and dry days of the last week or so.
I returned by train.
The train station is a little farther from home than the bus stop, but I see this as an opportunity to walk. I saw this poster while walking. It's as if Dan Murphy has brought out a wine brand to commemorate Cem Karaca.
I crossed the street to Sunnybank Plaza using the pedestrian bridge.
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I bought a box of Polaramine from the pharmacy. I am allergic to dry air and pollen combination. Polaramine helps. There was a long queue at the cash register.
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No more distractions till home. Beatiful winter weather (sunny and dry - perfect bush fire weather).
When home, I first checked on the birds. They seem to be enjoying the fine weather too.
After saying hello to the birds, I opened the tea pack I bought to refill my tea jar in the pantry: