Eventually I Ran Out of Money

Eventually I ran out of money

Or, to be quite honest, I ran out of credit.

Or, to be clear, I ran out of money to make minimum payments, and without credit, I wouldn’t be able to acquire food.

And that’s the end of the mathing time.

But why was that relevant?

It’s not really, but I like the story, and I like to tell it.

It was my intent to get into machine learning, because I had learned about it on my journey. To be quite honest, though, I found statistics quite underwhelming, and disappointing.

Granted, my knowledge was relatively basic, but I was disillusioned with the concept of truth as it applied to statistics. I was disappointed to understand that bias is unavoidable. No matter what.

That “unbiased” is a laymen’s term to make people feel better about themselves, and that the way people make decisions is pretty arbitrary.

Even in science. It’s still just guessing based on what we think is “reasonable”, and we hope that if there are enough people using the same process, that we’ll come to an idea that’s true enough. Truthy.

But even that’s a hope.

We really don’t know anything. Nor can we ever be sure beyond an acceptable threshold.

And you can see why my 2 years of focusing on math and math alone began to change my views on spirituality. But we’re not going down that road today. That’s a long road we don’t have time for.

But it does highlight how limited statistics are. How there’s only so far you can go when you try to represent a continuous world with a discrete representation.

Because that’s all we can do - use discrete representations. We are continuous machines living in a continuous world, limited by our discrete understanding.

And that’s all we will ever be.

I think that’s all our creations will ever be, too. Discrete can represent, but it can never be continuous.

Which is why applied statistics, er, I mean, “AI”, if you want to call it that, will never be intelligent.

Artificial Intelligence is not intelligent.

There is more to say on that. Including ways I might be wrong, because even as I write this, I thought of a way it might be possible…