https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

We kinda-sorta already know this is true. The lottery-ticket hypothesis [0] says that every large network contains a randomly initialized small network that performs as well as the overall network, and over the past eight years or so researchers have indeed managed to find small networks inside large networks of many different architectures that demonstrate this phenomenon.

Nobody talks much about the lottery-ticket hypothesis these days because it isn’t practically useful at the moment. (With the pruning algorithms and hardware we have, pruning is more costly than just training a big network.) But the basic idea does suggest that there may be hope for interpretability, at least in the odd application here or there.

That is, the (strong) lottery-ticket hypothesis suggests that the training process is a search through a large parameter space for a small network that already (by random initialization) exhibit the overall desired network behavior; updating parameters during the training process is mostly about turning off the irrelevant parts of the network.

For some applications, one would think that the small sub-network hiding in there somewhere might be small enough to be interpretable. I won’t be surprised if some day not too far into the future scientists investigating neural networks start to identify good interpretable models of phenomena of intermediate complexity (those phenomena that are too complex to be amenable to classic scientific techniques, but simple enough that neural networks trained to exhibit the phenomena yield unusually small active sub-networks).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lottery_ticket_hypothesis

Basically, give an agent its own unprivileged user account (interacting with it via sudo, SSH, and shared directories), then add sandbox-exe on top for finer-grained control of access to system resources.

0. https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault

What I’ve seen suggests the most common answers are (a) “containers” and (b) “YOLO!” (maybe adding, “Please play nice, agent.”).

One approach that I’m about to try is Sandvault [0] (macOS only), which uses the good old Unix user system together with some added precautions. Basically, give an agent its own unprivileged user account and interact with it via sudo, SSH, and shared directories.

0. https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault

But Friedman would have supported a broad basic-income scheme. We know this because he did support one. It was his proposal in 1962 of a “negative income tax” [0] (in Capitalism and Freedom) that gave rise to the movement to replace traditional social welfare programs with simple schemes that just give money to poor people. (This movement led to the Earned Income Tax Credit [1] in the United States.)

Friedman’s negative income tax is equivalent to the contemporary notion of a guaranteed basic income (but not to a universal basic income, as only people earning below some threshold would receive it). Like most economists, Friedman believed that people (even poor people) can typically make their own economic choices better than a government program can make those choices for them. (He was likewise not opposed to redistributive policies per se.) That was the root of his advocacy for market-based mechanisms of organizing the economy.

0. The idea dates to at least the 1940’s, but Friedman’s book is typically credited with popularizing it. See, e.g, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

But transmission of prions by ingestion is thought to be quite rare, as that mechanism suggests. Transmission by any means seems to be quite rare, even heritable transmission (e.g., vCJD). So that’s why it seems unlikely that whatever is happening in New Brunswick is CVD.

But if it’s not some minor mass hysteria, then maybe prions.

Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope.

Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a similar mis-folded shape when they come into contact with them. The mis-folded shape of the prion itself is what causes the mis-folding in adjacent proteins. It’s a chemical-bonding thing at the molecular level. It’s the shape of the prion that causes other proteins to take on a similar shape and become prions, etc.

Some prion diseases occur spontaneously (when a protein takes on a mis-folded configuration due to mis-transcription or random energetic impulses) and some are transmitted, typically by eating some part of an animal that contains prions, which then end up in your own body, inducing proteins in your body to take on prion configurations.

Prion diseases are the only known transmissible diseases that do not involve the replication of a pathogen’s genetic material in a host cell. The only known prion diseases affect nervous tissues, and in humans the only known prion diseases affect brain tissues.

I’m not an expert on prion diseases, but I’ve had a bit of a fascination with them since having to report on a bunch of USDA surveillance lectures on mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) and to summarize a bunch of symposia on prion diseases in a previous life. The symptoms reported in the article sound very much like a prion disease, and the tests for CJD indicate that the doctors in the region suspect as much.

But we simply don’t have good tests for prion diseases in vivo. And prion diseases are not well understood in general, so it wouldn’t be surprising that a new one would present as something of a mystery.

It is also the case that I know very little about New Brunswick, but I will mention that prion diseases in humans are thought to be far more commonly acquired than spontaneous. The most common cause of acquisition is eating animals with endemic prion diseases; this is most often nervous tissue of venison, but rarely nervous tissue of cattle infected with BSE, which is present in Canada more than anywhere else (by a small margin).

It is also possible (but not likely) that a prion disease can arise de novo.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion_disease

0. https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~hoganr/Soc%20312/The%20nature%20... [PDF]

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640392

Points: 1

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Oh, look, somebody just re-discovered static typing.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45048350

Points: 4

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Note that this generalization of the classical CLT relaxes the requirement of finite mean and variance but still requires that the summed random variables are iid. There are further generalizations to sums of dependent random variables. John D. Cook has a good blog post that gives a quick overview of these generalizations [1].

0. https://edspace.american.edu/jpnolan/wp-content/uploads/site... [PDF]

1. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/central_limit_theorems/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44298163

Points: 3

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An economics paper in the same spirit (though of course economics addresses more practical problems than mathematics, in this case whether one should leave the toilet seat up or down) shows quite well how to present and develop an economic model [0].

0. https://jaypilchoi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Economic-I... [PDF]

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43785841

Points: 15

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Sampling from a standard uniform distribution and then using the inverse transform is the commonest way of generating random numbers from an arbitrary distribution.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_transform_sampling

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_integral_transfo...

2. Not every cdf is one-to-one, however, so you may need a generalized inverse.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43284108

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945147

Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756802

Points: 24

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0. Readably summarized at https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/net-wealth-is-over-135-... .