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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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Symbol Disease

20 Sep 2025 - 20 Sep 2025
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    • Or formalism disease. This is the bug of assuming that your symbolic representation somehow are an unproblematic image of some outer reality.
    • First pointed out to me by Agre and Chapman. Articulated most clearly in that McDermott paper, Artificial intelligence meets natural stupidity | ACM SIGART Bulletin
      • As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery. Many critics have urged that we are over the border.
      • Unfortunately, the necessity for speculation has combined with the culture of the hacker in computer science to cripple our self-discipline. In a young field, self-discipline is not necessarily a virtue, but we are not getting any younger.
      • Wishful Mnemonics A major source of simple-mindedness in AI programs is the use of mnemonics like "UNDERSTAND" or "GOAL" to refer to programs and data structures. This practice has been inherited from more traditional programming applications, in which it is liberating and enlightening to be able to refer to program structures by their purposes.
      • Alright I'm in danger of quoting the whole paper so will stop. Very Relevant to My Interests, and interesting to think about in the context of LLMs and vibecoding. It sounds positively quaint to think you can or should think of your program in mechanistic rather than intentional terms.
      • OK one more
      • Charniak <1972> pointed out some approaches to understanding stories, and now the OWL interpreter includes a "story-understanding module". (And, God help us, a toplevel "ego loop". <Sunguroff, 1975>)