Daily Archives: February 1, 2022

The explanatory power of human language has been essential to the evolution of human beings, as it enables us to accurately predict a multitude of phenomena without going through a multitude of potentially painful discovery processes. Is it possible to endow machines with similar abilities?

In the new paper Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks, a research team from Sapienza University of Rome and OpenAI introduces an explanatory learning procedure that enables machines to understand existing explanations from symbolic sequences and create new explanations for unexplained phenomena. The researchers further propose Critical Rationalist Network (CRN) deep learning models, which employ a rationalism-based approach for discovering such explanations in novel phenomena.

The researchers summarize their main contributions as:

The proposed Explanatory Learning (EL) framework is treated as a new class of machine learning problems. The team restructures the general problem of making new predictions for a given phenomenon as a binary classification task, i.e., predicting whether a sample from all possible observations belongs to the phenomenon or not.

The team introduces Odeen, a puzzle game environment and benchmark for experimenting with the EL paradigm. Each Odeen game can be regarded as a different phenomenon in a universe where each element is a sequence of geometric figures. Players attempt to make correct predictions for a given new phenomenon from few observations in conjunction with explanations and observations of other phenomena.

The researchers then propose Critical Rationalist Networks (CRN) deep learning models, which are implemented using two neural networks and take a rationalist view on the acquisition of knowledge to tackle the EL problem. The team notes that CRN predictions are directly caused by human-understandable explanations available in the output, making them explainable by construction. CRNs can also adjust their processing at test-time for harder inferences, and are able to offer strong confidence guarantees on their predictions.

Correct explanation rate of CRN and other empiricist models

In their evaluations, the team compared CRNs to radical (EMP-R) and conscious (EMP-C) empiricist models on their Odeen challenge. The results show that CRNs consistently outperform the other models, discovering the correct explanation for 880 out of 1132 new phenomena for a nearest rule score (NRS) of 77.7 percent compared to the empiricist models best of 22.5 percent.

Associated code and the Odeen dataset are available on the projects GitHub. The paper Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks is on arXiv.

Author: Hecate He |Editor: Michael Sarazen

We know you dont want to miss any news or research breakthroughs.Subscribe to our popular newsletterSynced Global AI Weeklyto get weekly AI updates.

Like Loading...

Follow this link:

Sapienza U & OpenAI Propose Explanatory Learning to Enable Machines to Understand and Create Explanations - Synced

I rarely read memoirs. I find personal excavation unsettling, a little too raw in its most original form but too packaged when well-edited. But Rachel Krantzs book ensnared me. Alive and pulsing with insight and self-reflexivity, Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy creates an intricate portrait of a vibrant woman lost and found. I chased my roommates in and out of rooms reading out applicable dog eared portions. I saw myself, my queer friends and my straight friends in the novel. A word that comes to mind is parity, despite the distance of race, family and job experience.

Rachel Krantz is a journalist and co-founder of Bustle, who practices non-monogamy an agreed upon, consensual relationship where individuals in a relationship can seek other partners. In her memoir, Krantz seeks to understand her place in both an abusive relationship and in white supremacist power structures.

In a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily, Krantz echoed the novels introduction. Writing the book was an exercise in being the most vulnerable persons in the room and an attempt to understand how (getting lost in her relationship) happened and kind of retrace (her) steps.

Open encompasses five years of Krantzs adult life, following her introduction to Adam, a charismatic man, and through him, non-monogamous relationships. The narrative traces the development of their relationship and his extensive gaslighting. The book is structured chronologically to treat Krantz as the investigative subject in an asymmetrical relationship, providing frequent footnotes that break the fourth wall. Primary sources like typed journal entries and recording transcripts are included as tools to help readers investigate alongside Krantz as her exciting romance devolves.

Rather than be a passive subject, Krantz falls back into her usual position as an intrepid interviewer. She is too vivacious a narrator, too quick and clever a writer to let her life be the novels only subject. While readers are busy putting together the warning signs of abuse, Krantz flashes her own insecurities about her queerness and positionality in the peripheral. Its a brilliantly employed and aggressively engrossing tactic. By the midpoint of the book, the readers find themselves at a mental table opposite of Krantz, questioning the binaries they subscribe to and what liberation looks like for them.

The novel frames ideas and anecdotes through critical feminist frameworks, making reading a treasure hunt for theory and its application in the real world. Krantz is a product of elite institutions (though she does not name or reference her alma mater, NYU, in the novel) and as good practice, frequently signposts her positions and privilege. To her humility and credit, despite being an award-winning journalist, her memoir barely references her professional success. But perhaps because of Krantzs past in journalism, scenes featuring Krantzs queer friends and cosmopolitan lifestyle feel like more than incidental visits; through Krantz and her connections, the reader receives an insight into inclusive queer spaces, guided by a wonderfully expansive accepting network. In sum, the vignettes transform the novel into a conversation that branches out and touches on a great many things other than just non-normative sex and relationships.

While reading, more about Krantz herself emerges, keeping her equally as compelling as the broader narrative. The realizations mimic the constant self-reflective and self-reflexive thinking Krantz anxiously cycles through as she struggles with questions of hierarchy, whiteness and womanhood. In a novel supposedly all about her non-monogamous lifestyle and experience being gaslit by a long-term romantic partner, she seamlessly interjects theses about biphobia and power structures before hitting readers with her own lucid considerations of queer imposter syndrome and what it means to be liberated in the 21st century.

Krantz comments that there is an under representation and dismissal of (bisexuality) with gatekeeping within the queer community. If youre a woman who, like me, has always had these feelings, but youve only dated men seriously, it can have this effect where its like no one believes you, and so, then you start to not believe yourself.

In her novel, Krantz constantly references new literature and reevaluates how an individual can live in an overdetermined, oppressive world without upholding the patriarchy and other oppressive systems.

And this is not an accident. Rather, its through these power structures and critical theories that Krantz processes life. During our conversation, Krantz articulates how learning about anti-racism and power structures influenced how she processed her relationship with Adam.

Learning throughout the last few years a lot more about how to be anti-racist and also just the kind of traits of white supremacy culture, Krantz said, provided a lens (through which) to view my relationship with Adam.

She also noted paternalism, rationalism, either/or binary thinking, the idea that progress is bigger or more, worship of the written word, and a disavowal of the emotional all fall under the cultural umbrella of white supremacy. Though patriarchy does not only exist in white supremacy culture, it is a trait of white supremacy.

Reading Krantz felt like getting coffee with the right side of my brain, if it were smarter and more well-read. Rather than salacious, this memoir about sex, queerness and non-monogamy felt comfortable and inclusive. Krantz successfully made a space for me and my life and others between her vivid narration and asterisked advice and notations.

Daily Arts Writer Elizabeth Yoon can be reached atelizyoon@umich.edu.

Link:

A Conversation with Rachel Krantz, author of 'Open' - The Michigan Daily

Books are always arriving at the wrong time in Olga Tokarczuks The Books Of Jacob. The 18th-century Eastern Europe and Mediterranean through which this novel charts its course is a thoroughly multilingual environment. Its not uncommon for characters to juggle Polish, German, Yiddish, Turkish, and Ruthenian within a single conversation. Accordingly, writing moves at a much slower pace, and printing is often a matter of great personal cost. Official edicts take years before theyre translated into popular language, and heretical books are subject to censure and often burned. The Books Of Jacob also details prescient volumes that arrive too soon, and for that amount to prophecy. Its appropriate then, that it should take a monumental amount of time, and deft translation work from Jennifer Croft, for this 965-page novel, which first appeared in the authors native Poland in 2014, to make its way into English.

It comes with the recommendation of the Nobel Committee for Literaturewhich, in another example of bibliographic mistiming, retroactively awarded Tokarczuk the 2018 prize a year late, due to resignations at the Swedish Academy amid a #MeToo scandal. In the Anglosphere, little of Tokarczuks work had been made widely available at that time, and most reporting on the prize was devoted instead to 2019 laureate Peter Handkes controversial support for Slobodan Miloevi. The Books Of Jacob appearing now feels like a long-promised setting to rights, an occasion for English readers to experience a genuine global artistic event: the publication of a genre-broadening contribution to the historical novel.

For her subject matter Tokarczuk takes on the real-world figure of Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who, beginning in the 1750s, claimed to be a messiah before leading his followers down a path of mysticism, apostasy, and often-dangerous adventure. Believed to be a reincarnation of the previous messianic claimant, Sabbatai Tzvi, Jacob Frank preaches a doctrine of liberation from the Talmud, Mosaic Law, and nearly every other cornerstone of conventional Jewish faith. In extraordinary times, according to Franks teaching, it falls to the messiah to transgress the old law and so herald the new. Scandalously, the Frankists convert to Christianity and face excommunication from the Jewish community. Only shortly thereafter, theyre accused of Christian heresy, and Frank is put in front of a tribunal. Religious disputation and changing political winds then find these true believers alternately embraced, embattled, imprisoned, or on the road within the roughly 40-year span of The Books Of Jacobs principal action.

The magic of the novel is that an encyclopedically researched account of a fringe schismatic denomination from nearly three centuries ago should feel so wildly contemporary. At times, the long and abstract asides on Kabbalism can seem remote from modern readers concerns. But when the true believers establish their communitarian peasants republic on the site of a town abandoned by its previous inhabitants after a bout of plague, something of our own times apocalypse is brought into relief. The Books Of Jacob is studded with similarly affecting moments, in which both the proximity and the distance of the past are thrillingly, simultaneously affirmed.

In a certain sense, Tokarczuk is concerned with letting you see the sweat on her product. The book concludes with a note on sources, and every period detail reads as faultlessly placed. The Books Of Jacob projects verisimilitude. Simultaneously, fictional composites exist alongside the historical personalities. Novelistic convention is subtle here, but ever-present. Frequently present, too, are reproduced paintings, lithographs, maps, and long blocks of direct quotation. Archival documents and pure invention share page space in a way that invites commentary and endless interpretation, putting into formal play the very questions of allegorical and mystical meaning that feature as the novels content.

Reality becomes increasingly difficult to parse from fabrication, and the power of narrative, its clear, lies in the resonances and connections that artifice can reveal between known facts. As one late passage has it, Over time, moments occur that are very similar to one another. The threads of time have their knots and tangles, and every so often there is a symmetry, every once in a while something repeats, as if refrains and motifs were controlling them, a troubling thing to notice.

Within the Enlightenment period that Tokarczuk presents, much progress was made in the study of optics. Jacob Franks preaching is depicted alongside Benjamin Franklins invention of the bifocal, the publication of Newtons physical observations of light, and the popularization in Europe of the camera obscuraa technological precursor of the photograph. The suggestiveness of this choice in images for The Books Of Jacob is rich, as light and its manipulation come increasingly to be explained in the terms of the incipient Scientific Revolution. One story that the book has to tell is then of the undecidable encounter between eons-old faith and a growing rationalism.

At the same time, its a virtue of mysticism to be contradictory and puzzling, and in Jacob Frank, Tokarczuk has a hugely confounding figure. Most of the novel observes him in a broad third-person. Occasionally, there are diaristic asides from Franks disciple and biographer, Nahman of Busk. Perhaps the most interesting and reaching of the perspectives on offer here is that of Yente, Jacob Franks comatose grandmother: Hovering somewhere between life and death after a debacle involving an amulet, she dispassionately observes the entirety of the plot as a disembodied spirit. She synthesizes the diversity of otherwise random events, cutting out of them an intelligible figure. In this way she most resembles the author, as The Books Of Jacobs art is restoring and activating that recognizably human movement thats always present beneath the inert, static material of facts.

The Books Of Jacobs choices can sometimes be daunting. The books scale; its hugely populous cast of named characters; its reverse-ordered page numbers, done in honor of Hebrew convention; and the intense pitch of human suffering so often achievedit all makes for less than hospitable reading. In many ways, its the contents of the past itself thats the source of this difficultyobdurate as it is, and liable to unpredictable change. If theres one thing that Joseph Frank, the messiah, is concerned with imparting, its the provisionality of all earthly things. In her clear-sighted rendering of enormous historical momentum, pitilessly displaying the dissolution of both national borders and whole systems of belief, Olga Tokarczuk achieves much the same objective.

Author photo: Lukasz Giza

Drew Dickerson lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Read more from the original source:

In The Books Of Jacob, a Nobel laureate tells the epic story of a self-proclaimed messiah - The A.V. Club

One day in the early-1980s,when I was in my late-teens,Ibought a couple of books and brought themtoNYU Medical Center. Iwas a frequent visitor tothe hospital, given family health conditions and thatmyuncle,BobSilber,headed the hematology division.The books wereThe Creation, by P.W. Atkins, andModern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, by Paul Johnson.These reflected diverse interests Id developed; as ascience enthusiastabsorbed with questions aboutphysics and free will; andas alibertarian conservativefor whomgrowingdisaffectionwith the rightlay far in the future.

Both books shaped my views of science-related matters. And so did the environment where I began readingthem, a major hospital with research and teaching arms.

The Creationoffered a worldview of extreme rationalism and militant reductionism, as the dust jacket put it. Atkins, an Oxfordphysical chemist,sketchedout a universe with no role for a creator;whereinnatural processes arise from a purposeless collapse into chaos,andcomplex phenomena concealan underlying simplicity.Atkins held thatperfect freedom generates its own constraints, such thatevenspace, time and physical law are products of chance.He noted a debate that would intensify in later years,onclaims thatphysical constants show evidence of fine-tuningfor compatibility with life,buthedismissedthat idea as an illusion.

Atkins sawtheuniversehe describedas compatible with free will. The singular property of the brain is that its response to circumstance is to a degree under its own control, he wrote,though he added that this capacity was ultimately just purposeless dispersal of energy.The Creationwas a fascinating read, with an appealing formatwherethe main narrativewason right-hand pages while left-hand pageshadmore-technical comments.The book bolstered myskepticismtoward claims that scientists had uncovered, or were trying toevade,evidence of the divine; such claimslater became a staple of conservative magazines.

Modern Timeshad a different sensibility. Johnson, a conservative journalist and historian, sawmuch calamityinthe 20thcentury as having arisen from displacement of traditional religion by secular or atheistic ideologies. The book took a tack ofseparatingsciencefromsuch ideologies.It opened with the idea that the modern world began in 1919 when Einsteins theory of relativity was confirmed by solar-eclipse observations. Johnson proceeded to lament that this physics theory helped spur cultural trendsthat underminedtraditional morals and standards. He wrote:Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably,relativity became confused with relativism.

Johnson wrote with verve, putting forward a sweeping historical tableau resonant with Thatcherite and Reaganite conservatism. I was generally receptive to his interpretations, though in retrospectI findthe books tendentiousnessoverwrought, as with Johnsonscontention that Warren Harding was an exceptionally shrewd president,orthatWatergatewitch-hunterstoppled Nixon in what might be described as a mediaputsch.Modern Timess sympathetic treatment of the Franco regime in Spainisan ominous portentin light of right-wing affinities for authoritariangovernments in the 2020s.

Johnsonevinceda disdain for the social sciences as left-wing endeavors to remake society. Economics, sociology, psychology and other inexact sciencesscarcely sciences at all in the light of modern experiencehad constructed the juggernaut of social engineering, which had crushed beneath it so much wealth and so many lives, he wrote. He expressedapprovalthat such disciplines had faced growing disesteem in the 1970s but regretted ithad taken so long.

The effects of the social science fallacy will therefore still be felt until the turn of the century,Johnsonwrote. But its influence will steadily diminish and never again, perhaps, will humanity put so much trust in this modernmetaphysic. This argument influenced menegatively, I now believe, as itfostered a contemptuous dismissal of subjects about which I knew little.(I did, nonetheless, choose economics as one of my majors at NYUa year or so later, seeing it as partly exempt from the negative tendencies that Johnson had described.)

Johnson closedModern Timeswith an encomium to sociobiology, a school of thought led by biologist E.O. Wilson that emphasized genetic factors in understanding human behavior. According to Johnson, sociobiology was an exact science that was opposed by the radical social scientists, especially the Marxists because it suggestedthat their work and beliefs were no more than a metaphysics, a form of superstition. The books final paragraphwondered whether the whole process of seeking social and economic equality might run counter to a beneficial biological process under way in every second of creation, as humans evolve.

I thought back to thatpassagerecently amidallegationsafter Wilsons deaththathe hadracist ideas,a contretemps Ive previouslynoted. Wilson expresslydisavowedany such connection, writing that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social[behavior].Still,Wilsons work could be interpreted in bizarre ways, as with Johnsons suggestionto avoidsocialreforms so as to keep out of the way ofbiological improvementsover vast periods of time.Nearly two decades after readingModern Times, IreviewedWilsons bookConsilience, which sought to link various disciplines into a comprehensiveworldview, with sociobiologyas an important connector.Id maintained skepticismthatthis gene-centeredapproachwas an exact science.

Spending time with Uncle Bob at NYU Medical Center gave me a view of science and its messy realities I couldnt get from books. One day, he asked a young woman who worked in one of the labs to show me around. At one point, she unlocked a door so I could see where the monkeys are kept. Inthat room, the lab animals were in cages on shelves, andtheyreacted with rage at seeing us. At another point, we passed containers of blood, which had a strong smell.

Bob told me stories about scientists he knew. One of them had become well-known as an AIDS researcher andoncetold Bob hewas headingto another scientists lab as there was something theotherwanted him to see. Later, there was a dispute between the two scientists as to whod seen something first, and the well-known guys claim of credit wasfalse. Another anecdote was about a scientist whod bullied another,even overturning the guys desk and scattering his papers. When I asked what motivated this, my uncle described the bully as a psychopath.

There were more inspiring colleagues, such asLinda Laubenstein, famed for her work with AIDS patients.She used a wheelchair because of childhood polio and was called a bitch on wheels for her assertiveness with other doctors. I met her at a hospital party, and she was very nice.

Uncle Bob published over 100 science papers, withafocus on developing treatments for leukemia and other diseases. He was also a popular professor at the medical school. Treating patients was his overriding passion, though.He and they often formed close connections.

One day, I walked into the hospital, and to my surprise heard my name over the paging system. Calling the specified extension, I reached Bob, who told me that a terminally-ill woman he was treating enjoyed milkshakes of a particular type; he recited a list of ingredients, and asked me to get such a shake made. I went to a deli andinstructed a dubious counterman about the elaborate concoction, then brought ittothe womans hospital room, fulfilling her dying wish.

Kenneth Silber is author ofIn DeWitts Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canaland is on Twitter:@kennethsilber

View post:

Encountering Science in the 1980s - Splice Today

Macbeth, a new film adaptation of the tragedy of William Shakespeare after those of Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, is the first film made by Joel Coen alone, without the collaboration of his brother Ethan. It is therefore the feature film that marks the unprecedented separation between one of the most decisive, brilliant and influential couples of contemporary American cinema: the definitive split has not yet been formalized, but Ethan has in the meantime decided to devote himself to something else and an indirect confirmation has also come from their composer and collaborator habitual, Carter Burwell.

The transposition, produced by the fertile production house A24, standard-bearer for the new territories of genre cinema, and with protagonists Denzel Washington And Frances McDormand in the role of Lord and Lady Macbeth, he re-reads the raw and bloody soul of the work of Bard, not a little freezing instincts and impulses and letting the sound of the cynical and anti-humanist detachment typical of the works of the Coens (a strong stretch of discontinuity, undoubtedly, compared to the previous versions for the cinema of Macbeth).

The expressive hold is very remarkable and dazzling, with the complicity of black and white bruise photographed by the always excellent Bruno Delbonnel in 4: 3 format, while glacial elegance, although constantly on the edge of the patinated, fortunately never disperses the black heart, archetypal and universal, of the events of a man convinced by a trio of witches to be next king of Scotland, flanked and overwhelmed by a ambitious and furious wife.

The terrible and tyrannical spiral of violence thus translates into one dissertation on purely visual power, with a punctually unhealthy pallor, pushed towards abstraction by a geometric and spectral rationalism of forms. At the base of the operation there is after all an idea of macabre and sardonic thriller, in full Coen style, with a provocative and destabilizing approach to the psychoanalytic impulses of the classic text.

In fact, the protagonists face their own personal challenge for absolute power as they watch their mutual hopes inexorably unravel under the weight of a collapsing world and emotional landscape. The result is human portraits torn and deep contrasts, which are not only applied in the aesthetic packaging, indebted to so much German expressionist cinema and the Danish master Carl Theodore Dreyer, but also in the reflection on the case and fate of individuals crushed by a blind and unfathomable fate, ready to blow the bank of any reasoning.

All themes very dear, in the past, to Coenian poetics, with respect to which Macbeth is, in filigree, a sort of cold return to origins, of an ideal prodrome, of a literary rib noble in which all the characters are aware of their own physical and inner deterioration, as well as bearers of an exhaustion that passes from introspection as much as from framing.

Photo: A24, IAC Films

REPRODUCTION RESERVED

Read this article:

the review of Joel Coens film with Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand - D1SoftballNews.com