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Jessica Flack Profile picture
@C4COMPUTATION
Jun 16, 2023 • 11 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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Much love, Cormac.

Looking south from Muley Point at your stomping grounds, where "all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships." Image
Blood Meridian, 25th Anniversary Edition, page 259. Image
Map in Blood Meridian, 25th Anniversary Edition. Image
"Then about the meridian of the day we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. "

One of Blood Meridian's origin stories. 25th Anniversary Edition, page 131. Image
"Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there a system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go."

The kid dreams of emergence + decomposability. p. 322.

Cormac + @sfiscience's Murray Gell-Mann became friends in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
On my drive I listened to Blood Meridian for the 1st time. I heard in the narration (very good, by Richard Poe) strong echoes of Melville. When I read myself, I feel the antecedents but the voice is clearly Cormac's. Cormac's everyday speech is very apparent in this passage. Image
In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy echoing darkly in Judge Holden Borges' Book-Man. p. 297.

"Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth." Image
"They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wild-flowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
I once suggested at a dinner that Blood Meridian + Tropic of Cancer were siblings, w ToC presaging BM in its 2nd to final paragraph. Cormac laughed + said "I don't know about that, honey, but it is one of the greatest paragraphs in literature" and recited it word for word. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Image
Cormac was aesthetically precise in everything he did. He loved fashion + for years we exchanged marked up copies of WWD. Descriptions of haberdashery abound in his books. Below, from Blood Meridian, p. 175.

The shoes he found at an antique store in Arizona. And, one of my… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… ImageImage
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More from @C4COMPUTATION

Jessica Flack Profile picture
Sep 6, 2024
Those of you who are not going to prison for hurting people in a more significant sense than through the oppression surveillance creates, are getting house arrest with ankle bracelet monitors so that you might finally feel viscerally the consequences of your civil liberty violating policies.

I know at least a subset of you and even if you believe yourself to be 'part of the team' a condition of my collaboration with others is that you also are held to account. You did not have my permission to surveil.Image
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Reining in massive exploitation, corruption + civil liberties violations should not take a backseat to "optics". Nor should science innovation or other advances that can contribute to human + whole earth flourishing.
It would be disconcerting if a 3T U.S. corporation that specializes in surveillance was using its election 'influence' to delay the release of AI *and* other science advances that can aid in flourishing, all in the service of gaining its own lock-in edge on these billion dollar tech innovations.

This wouldn't be surprising, however, given the purported role of some of its leaders over the last several years in poaching the work behind these advances using SS tactics like trying (unsuccessfully) to "induce depression" in at least one of the scientists responsible for the work, not to mention either directly or indirectly exploiting vulnerable human populations to test under the radar some of the 'therapeutic advances' that these new AI models helped discover.

It would be grotesquely disconcerting if another reason for the delays and attempts to undermine was that a second group of powerful individuals who are *supposed* to be helping with the corruption investigation (which involves multiple individuals, startups, finance, and venture capital firms) in fact used their 'help' to disguise their own surveillance + poaching, and are now also subverting release of these science advances to maintain their duel edge.
Read 19 tweets
Jessica Flack Profile picture
Dec 12, 2023
No, I won’t protect or delete my tweets to hide your history of corruption.

You have to live with the your SS behavior—Hacking + tracking, slander, financial shenanigans, gaslighting, attempted coercion + blackmail, using your authority to make fake medical diagnoses, sexual harassment, non-consensual image sharing, entrapment, intimidation, and intellectual theft to get that start-up a’going. And very crappy leadership.Image
For a sense of the institutional, societal + personal consequences of hacking + tracking, watch Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others.
For a good primer on the "con-man phenotype", watch Chameleon Street @criterionchannl. Cons can of course be any gender as can those who fall prey to them.

criterionchannel.com/chameleon-stre…
Read 17 tweets
Jessica Flack Profile picture
Nov 21, 2023
Two lovely 🌈 rainbow + one brown trout caught by my brother this past weekend.

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The waters chased him as he fled,
Poem 1749 By Emily Dickinson Image
Yes, I picked up on that two weeks ago. Was made clear.
Read 33 tweets
Jessica Flack Profile picture
Oct 19, 2023
ASSEMBLY, MICRO-MACRO MAPS + EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS @leecronin, @Sara_Imari + @sfiscience colleagues created a fire-storm w a paper @Nature last week that despite limitations makes good progress formalizing the role of compositionality in evolution. 1/n



In doing so they also provided a new complexity measure (note ‘complexity’ is used in multiple ways within the paper itself) that can serve as a signature of an adaptive process (useful for identifying life elsewhere) in so far as it quantifies how algorithmically unlikely (by chance) a given object is + hence how much work is required to produce it. This is nice because it lays more ground work for connecting construction / computation processes in biology to thermodynamics.

The paper has been described as controversial—a better description is "novel but not actually that controversial with a useful framework hidden in a bizarre package". Nearly every framing sentence (as well as many others) of this paper gave me anxiety, not just by virtue of being hard to parse but also because the sentences betray subtle confusions + intellectual inconsistencies—some of which perhaps belong to the authors but many others of which simply reflect the messy frontier. That said, this criticism doesn’t in any sense sink the paper because its true contributions do not depend particularly on its framing. In addition, in a kind of masochistic way I find the authors’ framing informative--its ‘wut’-ness brings to the fore conceptual issues at the intersection of biology and physics that badly need attention.

Below is at take on the paper’s findings + contributions, quotes from the paper for further thought, and flagged issues that need community attention. Before embarking, a final remark is that although this paper—even at this relatively early stage of the work—could be more elegantly and clearly written, I am glad it was published in Nature as these kinds of ideas are important + need more mainstream attention. In contrast to perhaps the conventional view that a journal like @Nature should be publishing the definitive work on some question, I think a better or additional use of such journals is to publish highly generative, thought-provoking or door opening papers, regardless of whether the results or frameworks are likely to stand the test of time.nature.com/articles/s4158…

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2/n SUMMARY: the paper (in a mixture of the authors’ language + mine) provides a formal approach for breaking down aggregates into elementary constituents (defined as requiring no assembly—which is a bit of a problem—see below), then recombining these elements in principled ways using assembly rules for when they can be joined to identify the shortest path—least number of algorithmic steps— required to reconstitute/compute the original macroscopic target. The authors call this minimal path the assembly index.

This process also yields the space of possible, counterfactual objects that could be realized from a given elementary set + rule space, but perhaps have not yet been discovered by evolution. The authors then drop the ‘all assembly rules are equally likely (technically drawn uniformly, I think) assumption’, which in implicitly introducing constraints, reduces the space of macroscopic objects that can in principle be computed/assembled, making the approach simultaneously more tractable and realistic.

Dropping this assumption allows introduction + comparison of objects generated by directed vs undirected processes + connects assembly index to selection strength in so far as a high assembly index is marked by high complexity (many steps) and low exploration (low variation due to strong selection acting against drift?). The quantity, ‘assembly’ is a function of the number of copies of an object and its assembly index (recall, that the assembly index is the minimal number of recursive steps necessary to build a macroscopic object, which the authors also call its size).

The authors argue that assembly captures the total amount of selection (or work?) required to produce an ensemble of observed objects and hence how likely an adaptive process is to be operating as well as quantifying its strength. An important note is that the initial rules (or those initially identified by the ‘breaking’ or decomposing process) and elements do not fully determine the space of possible objects—if mass action kinetics are allowed then (as I understand it from the paper) due to a natural symmetry breaking in the construction of contingent assembly paths, a network of growing branches can potentially emerge, changing through novel interactions the space of future objects.

It is here (I think) in the process that ‘biology’ could be said to emerge from physics to take on a life of its own, so to speak, not breaking the laws of physics but making a genuine causal contribution to them + marking an important transition in the universe’s dynamics, a la Wheeler (my take). Mentioned at the end of the paper are also some important points about the role that interacting timescales play in the discovery of complex objects. Also mentioned towards the end is the idea that an arrow of time arises through assembly, with a tick occurring each time an object is made. For more discussion related to the above summary, see also Carl Bergstrom’s excellent explainer thread about the paper on Bluesky.
3/n Specific sentences/paragraphs for further thought:

ON DEFINITION OF OBJECT (note—def seems novel but object here could be reinterpreted as a slow timescale macroscopic property with derivable synonymous with breakable): “The concept of an object in AT is simple and rigorously defined. An object is finite, is distinguishable, persists over time and is breakable such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. “
Read 9 tweets
Jessica Flack Profile picture
Sep 25, 2023
Best be stopping' the hacking + tracking. We're back on course for integrity. Don't undermine progress with an attempt at censorship or optics. Creativity + quality are allergic to both.

In dark mode now. I will reappear as necessary until this situation is stabilized.

Cheers SS.
Misrepresentation + grandiosity would send the wrong message + be disrespectful to the institute, its employees, scientists, + women. Except in the cases of the Hitlers and Stalins and their disciples, it’s of course fine to emphasize the genuinely good. In my experience, owning mistakes + working constructively to repair damage sets an invaluable positive example.
Please stay safe, @sfiscience. Take precautions. Even precautions that seem silly or over the top.
Read 31 tweets
Jessica Flack Profile picture
Mar 27, 2023
COMPLEXITY BEGETS COMPLEXITY: Improvements in measurement tech + exp design reveal complexity across scales, challenging the idea it increases in more than a Russian doll sense from cells to societies. Below—an old thread + new insect/bees results. 1/N

Cultural learning (diffusion of neutral behavioral variants) was thought limited to large brained animals. @alicedbridges @LChittka show @PLOSBiology bees socially learn to solve puzzle boxes+if exposed to mult equally good solutions nonetheless come as a group to prefer one. 2/N
The bees (Bombus terrestris) working in their puzzle box. @alicedbridges @LChittka et al use a multiple-demonstrator puzzle box open diffusion experimental set-up (Figure 4A above) to test whether one functionally neutral variant comes to dominate. 3/N

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ar…
Read 5 tweets

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