The C-of-C-C Quote-Of-The-Day

“—there is more truth in the particulars—“

David Weinberger:

“Machine learning works by not having any generalization. We don’t give it any generalizations…

We know there’s a correlation between smoking and heart disease. If you’re trying to build an AI model for predicting heart attacks, we don’t tell it that. We don’t give it anything general.

We just give it lots and lots and lots of particular data. Freed from the need to start with or to end up with generalizations, AI is able to put together something like a picture, unintelligible to us, but something like a picture of the world that retains what’s particular and individual about all of the examples it’s drawing from. That’s why it’s able to do a better job.

Because almost done, it turns out there is more truth in the particulars than we thought back when we thought, oh, nope, just look at what they have in common with other things, put it under a general law and we get a lot of knowledge out of it. We can, but we’re getting much, much more now by attending to the particulars, letting them speak, not taking away everything that makes them unique and makes them into particulars.”—