Exactitude in Science – Borges (1946) [pdf]

https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf

by jxmorris12 • 6 months ago

91 29 6 months ago

I can't get enough of Borges.

His way with words and way to highlight to absurdity of situations is first class.

My favorite is the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. It's a critique of the classification used by the Institute of Bibliography which he considered nonsensical. He claims to have found the list in an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia:

- those belonging to the Emperor

- embalmed ones

- trained ones

- suckling pigs

- mermaids

- fabled ones

- stray dogs

- those included in this classification

- those that tremble as if they were mad

- innumerable ones

- those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

- et cetera

- those that have just broken the vase

- those that from afar look like flies

bobson3814• 6 months ago

It's such a wonderful thing to be reminded of how silly it is to take language seriously. IMO it's prickles and goo[1] all the way down - and the prickles help us share meaning and exchange information, but there is no project of exactitude to be completed.

The hubris it takes to maintain the view that we can just keep figuring things out if we are rational enough is also sometimes overwhelming to me. It's not that we can't understand things better through analysis, just that it sometimes seems foolish to me to try to get all of it through system-2 type behavior. We will always miss something crucial[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU

[2] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

mkoubaa2• 6 months ago

An algorithm written in a well specified language with precise semantics might have bugs. A "logical" argument made with natural language is orders of magnitude less precise

colechristensen• 6 months ago

If you haven't run across it yet you would enjoy Borges and Me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_and_Me:_An_Encounter

divbzero• 6 months ago

The most avid members of the Cartographers Guilds had even proposed a Map of the Empire several times larger than the Empire itself to depict microscopic details that would otherwise be invisible. Such proposals were considered the peak of academic excess after the Study of Cartography fell out of favor.

bobson3814• 6 months ago

I do sometimes wonder if we will get "detailed enough" vector embeddings in LLMs to bring the grain of resolution down below human perception - like having enough bits to fully capture what's on tape in audio world. Maybe this is never possible, and (I hope) some details are unresolvable, but it will be interesting to see.

pixl97• 6 months ago

LLMs are already used in signal processing so the idea is explored.

Simply put anything that can be encoded is a language, so you just need sensors to capture and classify the incoming data and build that into a model. The real question is post training the model to behave correctly as these places are far less explored than things at the human scale. RLHF may be a poor choice because the models may see actual behaviors that humans don't and humans will discount it as being incorrect.

storystarling• 6 months ago

I suspect the curse of dimensionality makes this an optimization dead end. You hit prohibitive latency limits on retrieval long before the resolution approaches human perception. Even with current dimensions, the trade-off between index size and query speed is already the main constraint for production systems.

anthk• 6 months ago

That wil be doable some time with computers :)

johngossman• 6 months ago

"I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6."

Steven Wright

Though it's not as funny without his delivery

zubiaur2• 6 months ago

Ficciones is full of mockings of intellectualism. I Particularly like the critique on the critical philosophical work of Menard's Quixote. Where Menard, the subject of the story, carefully writes parts of a novel that is word-for-word a copy of Cervante's Quixote, but shaped by Menard's intellectual efforts, one is to draw the opposite appreciations than from the one written by Cervantes.

His stories are such a strange read. The plot, the characters, the mentions, all feel almost secondary to the feeling they evoke.

lkm02• 6 months ago

Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve. Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.

zubiaur2• 6 months ago

Fascinating. Borges is not shy in mentioning his admirations, and what he was exposed to. I like that he leaves breadcrumbs, or whole loaves, pointing to what he likes. It's an interesting way to thread into literature.

I envy a bit those , who, like you, had such exposures. It's such a fascinating world, which I used to scoff at when I was younger. But it's a healthy envy. I feel happy for those who choose to developed such capacities, and it inspires me to try to develop them for myself.

I think I've still got the time.

Thanks for your reply.

PaulRobinson• 6 months ago

I remember a PostSecret from many years ago that was a picture of the title plate of Ficciones, and the "secret" was somebody saying they wished that they could have just one night in front of a fire with a bottle of malt whiskey and the person who introduced them to that work. I had never read Borges before, but I liked that sort of a feeling a book could create, so I trudged to the bookshop and found a copy, and then settled into a corner of a cosy pub (I live in England), not far from a fire and a golden retriever, with a pint of ale and settled in.

Changed my life, when it comes to literature.

The feelings you get from that work are hard to describe, but unique and engaging and marvellous. But when you step back and look at it from a critical reading, it's all a bit odd and silly and mocking.

There is no writer I want in my pocket more than Borges though, particularly when it's dark and cold outside and the fire is burning, and a friend who also appreciates him is nearby to discuss.

fbn79• 6 months ago

"The House of Asterion" is the most beautifully written thing I have ever read. https://klasrum.weebly.com/uploads/9/0/9/1/9091667/the_house...

sylos• 6 months ago

Holy cow, that was amazing.

Eliand• 6 months ago

The last words almost make me cry everytime I read them. It's such a beautiful tale.

internet_points• 6 months ago

I read that after seeing it was a forgotten inspiration for Piranesi: https://www.betterreading.com.au/news/author-related/susanna...

(And probably House of Leaves)

RationPhantoms• 6 months ago

It was lost on me at first because I had none of the background, it's now beautiful in hindsight with the context.

profsummergig• 6 months ago

I think it's a message about how science is really about effective sampling.

moss_dog2• 6 months ago

While we're Borges-posting, I recommend "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...

kej2• 6 months ago

This seems like a good place to ask: I have a memory of a longer story along very similar lines. Maps are made that are increasingly larger, but in the version I'm remembering the maps are in a room of a palace or something?

Does this ring a bell to anyone?

moss_dog2• 6 months ago

Maybe Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1"?

kej2• 6 months ago

That definitely sounds like part of what I remember. Possibly I read several similar stories around the same time and merged them in my head. Thanks!

andychiare• 6 months ago

I love Borges and his lucid hallucinations. As this story highlights, when a representation of reality (the map) ends up mapping reality one by one, the representation becomes useless. I see this as a warning for the progress of AI. When AI maps human intelligence one by one, it will be useless (or perhaps we will be the ones who will be useless).

Exactitude in Science – Borges (1946) [pdf]

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