I mean something specific by "statistics": modelling frequency associations in static ensembles of data.
Having a body which changes over time that interacts with a world that changes over time makes animal learning not statistical (call it, say, experimental). That animals fall into skinner-box irrational behaviour can be modelled as a kind of statistical learning, but it actually isnt.
It's a failure of ecological salience mechanisms in regulating the "experimental learning" that animals engage in. Eg., with the cargo cults the reason they adopted that view was because their society had a "big man" value system based on material acquisition and western waring powers seemed Very Big and so were humiliating. In order to retain their status they adopted (apparently irrational) theories of how the world worked (gods, etc).
From the outside this process might seem statistical, but it's the opposite. Their value system made material wealth have a different causal salience which was useful in their original ecology (a small island with small resources), but it went haywire when faced with the whole world.
Eventually these mechanisms update with this new information, or the tribe dies off -- but what's going wrong here is that the very very non-statistical learning ends up describable that way.
This is indeed, why we should be very concerned about people skinner-boxing themsleves with LLMs
> Having a body which changes over time that interacts with a world that changes over time makes animal learning not statistical (call it, say, experimental). That animals fall into skinner-box irrational behaviour can be modelled as a kind of statistical learning, but it actually isnt.
RL is doing just this, simulating an environment. And we can have an agent "learn" in that environment.
I think tying learning to a body is too restrictive.
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You strongly rely on the assumption that "something else" generates the statistics we observe, but scientifically, there exists little evidence whether that "something else" exists (see eg the Bayesian brain).
You need some way of inducing distributions in reality, ie., making the ice cube.
If you're just subject to time-varying, random, stochastic, perceptual distributions you have no way of estimating the properties of the data generating process (reality).
You need to be the one in control of the distribution in order to study it: this is the lesson of the whole history of science as an experimental discipline.
> Having a body which changes over time that interacts with a world that changes over time makes animal learning not statistical (call it, say, experimental).
The "experiment" of life is what defines the statical values! Experimentation is just learning what the statistical output of something is.
If I hand you a few dice, you'd probably be able to guess the statistical probability of every number for given roll. Because you've learned that through years of observation building a mental model. If I hand you a weighted die, suddenly your mental model is gone, and you can re-learn experimentally by rolling it a bunch. How can you explain experimental learning except "statistically"?
> they adopted (apparently irrational) theories of how the world worked (gods, etc)
They can be wrong without being irrational. Building an airport doesn't make planes show up, but planes won't show up without an airport. If you're an island nation with little understanding of the global geopolitical environment of WWII, you'd have no idea why planes started showing up on your island, but they keep showing up, and only at an airport. It seems rational to assume they'd continue showing up to airports.
> that animals fall into skinner-box irrational behaviour can be modelled as a kind of statistical learning, but it actually isnt
What is it if not statistical?
Also skinner boxes are, in a way, perfectly rational. There's no way to understand the environment, and if pushing a button feeds you, then rationally you should push the button when hungry. Humans like to think we're smart because we've invented deductive reasoning, and we quote "correlation is not causation" that we're not just earning to predict the world around us from past experiences.
For dice the ensemble average is the time-average: if you roll the dice 1000 times the probability of getting a different result doesn't change.
For almost everything in the world, action on it, changes it. There are vanishingly few areas where this isn't the case (most physics, most chemistry, etc.).
Imagine trying to do statistics but every time you sampled from reality the distribution of your sample changes not due to randomness, but because reality has changed. Now, can you do statistics? No.
It makes all the difference in the world to have a body and hold the thing you're studying. Statistics is trying to guess the shape of the ice cube from the puddle; animal learning is making ice cubes.
Having a body which changes over time that interacts with a world that changes over time makes animal learning not statistical (call it, say, experimental). That animals fall into skinner-box irrational behaviour can be modelled as a kind of statistical learning, but it actually isnt.
It's a failure of ecological salience mechanisms in regulating the "experimental learning" that animals engage in. Eg., with the cargo cults the reason they adopted that view was because their society had a "big man" value system based on material acquisition and western waring powers seemed Very Big and so were humiliating. In order to retain their status they adopted (apparently irrational) theories of how the world worked (gods, etc).
From the outside this process might seem statistical, but it's the opposite. Their value system made material wealth have a different causal salience which was useful in their original ecology (a small island with small resources), but it went haywire when faced with the whole world.
Eventually these mechanisms update with this new information, or the tribe dies off -- but what's going wrong here is that the very very non-statistical learning ends up describable that way.
This is indeed, why we should be very concerned about people skinner-boxing themsleves with LLMs