The Lies of Psychology, The Ignorance of Science, and the Illusion of AI

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

One of the many reasons I love the dynamics of my work and the environments I do them in is the intensity of those fields and those within them tend to force me to think and “feel” from a variety of views. Depending on my audience for the day, I could be viewed as “Cathartic”, as I enjoy sharing very raw emotions in an attempt to align with others in a very emotional world. To me, this is Math. Depending on those who I have been close to I could be looked at as “Sociopathic” because emotion doesn’t often trigger my response. But in business, I can often be referred to as “Psychotic” by many who have recently fallen under the recent discoveries of society that the best “business minds” are the same kind of crazy as Ted Bundy.

To me, I am simply me, and labels can be more awkward than helpful with circumstantial minds like mine out there today. And there are many out there, you might not notice them or know how to communicate with them, yet. However, to those that know me, really know me, I am simply a person who spends more time watching and understanding things to solve problems, than adhering to consumption out of pressure or emotional needs. It can be looked at as any of the following, subject to your Culture, Field, Role, Relationship, Upbringing, Objectives, or Philosophy, pick your poison.

• Cold
• Mysterious
• Cruel
• Leader
• Naraccistic
• Evangelist
• Brilliant
• Ignorant
• Bipolar
• Anxious
• Depressed
• ADHD

But Perspective and its close friend, Context, are the nature of this “Story”. Perspective is a reality, contextually, because math cares very little for what you think and your place in the physics of the world. Or Universe for that matter. Though, ignorance is certainly bliss, knowing that word could be a bit harsh given societal context. We can also call this “Bias”. Or, emotion.

The Lies of Psychology

Philosophy was the mother of the fields of Psychology. It was the minds of our most profound thinkers in a world that was too far divided and too driven by pain and victory of emotion to “study” or challenge the views of fanatic belief. Though years later many of those minds who felt the Math of the world and articulated it in words that resonated the generations would spawn a field that would attempt to understand what they felt. This is the basis of the Scientific method, they formed a hypothesis in a very human, emotional, bias way and we found ways to measure it. Psychology was our first Scientific attempt to understand minds. And do to the nature of Psychological fields, it has ignored foundational Sciences as it evolved. This was unavoidable.

We rapidly developed more tools, methods, practices, and connected minds and ideas globally. Communication and Technology enable us to do more as we introduced Math into the survey and process. Intuitively knowing math was the answer “statistically”. And the “irony” more or less begins there. Academia goes from a local debate for publication to a global debate fueled by decades of perspective and competition under the guise of collaborative enterprise. In fairness, the desire to grow knowledge was genuine, but the methods in which to fund, or be recognized for work was subject to the inception of academia. Business and Status.

As every field discovers new truth, new fields emerge and split. What is both beautiful and heartbreaking is so many of those fields break off to converge again around a single principle. Math. Though, those who are driven by Mathematical foundations tend to find one another in practice far sooner. There is actually a mathematical formula for this derived from a field that is often overlooked. And overlooked for seemingly obvious reasons when you can effectively measure the ignorance of people. But Psychology spawned Cognition for Science and Math along with Sociology for Science and Emotion.

The Ignorance of Science

This is a Scientifically inevitable truth. And one we are warned about entering academia in practice, but inevitably forget with the worlds we are set in. You HAVE to follow the curriculum, be aware of feelings of others, work in groups who can empower or halt your growth, be subject to a very human instructor facing their own matrix of conflict. You are in fields of measurable Sciences and forgetting topics of quantified emotion with measurable systemic effects. Want to argue that point? It doesn’t go well. I modeled this argument before. Calculus is handy.

Thank you, Sir Isaac Newton, who I was also told never formally published work to alter the perspective of Math to formalize Calculus, but along the minds of others who had more or less influence in various circumstantial global climates of society. But one may never know, the internet is a biased place.

Many young minds are very social today in and out of Academia, however, recognition for work and collaboration is also subject to the culture of your environment. Some institutions encourage collaboration across the different global institution and you can publish works this way. Others won't have it based on who is funding labs, research, or sometimes administration. Its nothing you can be upset about as an audience, we all play a part in it in our own way. However you’re entitled to your sentiment, it has a systemic impact on more than you know, and if this is an interesting topic to you, you should be exposed to graph theory. It's less a theory now, but follow the white rabbit you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

During my own “stint” in Academia, I was exposed to several other institutions that were mathematically defining what a Dream is. Another was finding ways of correlating patterns felt and heard in the womb to determine problem-solving as a child. And some areas of Physics at the time which were running a simulation to things that felt familiar. Sadly the bias of my own institution would stop work from happening to converge the two without “Martyrdom” being a warned sentiment. The problem is… that is relative to someone who circumstantially is driven by their own core “motivations”, mine was Brains and Math. Not surprisingly, many people were upset. A few found it amusing. Those few defined my “Career”.

The Illusion of AI

I was fortunate enough to leave academia right around the time our institution was getting lots of attention for “Computational Intelligence”, a field that grew and died quickly as the nature of the work was to challenge “Psychology” and converge Mathematical perspective of brains as machines. Psychology sold incredibly well in publication, fields of work, funding, and was just scientific and theoretical enough to sell T-shirts and help marriages. Today, those groups in business are called “User Research”. Though this field for us spawned HCI, which was lovely as Microsoft basically went and consumed everyone in the field. I seemed to have missed that wagon. Perhaps for the best.

The implication of AI is also too philosophical, but the comedy of this environment is that the Mathematicians are now becoming Psychologists. This was inevitable, but I am human and subject to society's views as well. I think it’s a bit comical. What is comical is that several decades ago we already identified how to measure intelligence, even could articulate what emotion was. Sadly at the time you just could not sell that research to a family funding bias perspective of findings to sell a sensational topic in the news like “Researchers at MIT have just found that your child could be a genius if they play Minecraft, stay tuned after these messages”. Depending on who was running that lab it could have been spun with numbers beat into the child being a serial killer too.

It's that basis, of intelligence that coined a phrase at the time “The ignorance of Intelligence and Bliss of Bias”, in that the pursuit of measuring it will challenge needed “Ego”, “Bias”, etc and would take a significant amount of societal pains to understand or deploy. Given how companies talk about AI, how groups fund AI, how media communicates AI, and how we still view younger generations, AI is not what you think. Factually, scientifically, mathematically AI likely won’t be what you think for some time. We will get close, but not yet. Or at least not in the way you think.

The Psychology of Science, and Science of Artificial Intelligence

Everything is run by people. We are all consumers. Every one of us. The difference is only in the context of currency. Some sell Products, others sell Dreams, some sell Vision, and some can wrap all that up into pressuring you into a timeshare with a free cruise. Not ironically you can hear philosophical statements and analogies made that are taken as a novel at the moment and we carry on with our lives, and I can say something now like “There are truths that live within lies”, or “Those that live within lines will never see in between them”, and you’ll inevitably feel some kind of way in the correct context, this is the impact of words and emotion. Words trick people. Factually, there is a measurable science to this as well and even being aware of it can make you “feel” something. Well, most of you.

Specifically to the topic of AI, there is also a logical and mathematical correlation to who is doing “AI” as we understand. Who actually believes and has convinced others they are and will fall short. And those who are doing nothing close to AI but will inevitably fall to AI as it evolves in the market today. None of these topics are fun. It's even less fun when you're the person who has to be the one to validate those things. But to be very clear, all of these things are needed to drive AI forward for a variety of reasons.

There is a little secret to AI that many in Computer Science, Neuroscience, Physics, AI, Data Science, and any neighboring practices. We are all Math, and all things have elasticity. It was once articulated as The Third Law of Motion. And with all things unavoidable, bias will inevitably stop the problem from being solved. Just yet.

Intelligence

For those of you that look at minds that are Autistic, Bipolar, Depressed, Happy Sad, Sick, Powerful, Crazy, Brilliant, or any other word which has changed in definition in accordance to Society or Science, those topics are “relative”, but they all have a “story” of interactions from a “butterfly effect” of things in and around their lives. How you feel about them is almost unavoidable and your capacity to do or say anything about them is also subjective.

But of all things know this, sometimes the math of your intuition is more powerful than the sentiment of those that will sell things to you. After all, your brain is just Math, you simply didn’t get exposed to the vocabulary of Arithmetic out of circumstance early enough to articulate it this way. Do not let anyone tell you what Intelligence means when they don’t know how to measure it themselves.

Behind all of our bias, what separates us from anything else is circumstantially our capacity to solve problems and see patterns, while expressing complex patterns ourselves.

You don’t need a Ph.D. to solve problems or understand the universe. In many cases it’s those without one who does. And we are waiting for you to move us forward.