Goncharenko centre 2025-6-22: Travelling: The Carpathians, What I miss from NL, AI

Post event notes: See farther down on this page.

Translation: auto translation of this page into Ukrainian

1. Carpathians:

I went to Krivopillya to a place where someone I met in a friend's cafe, who stayed and maintained it while nothing else was going on. I thought it was about music events but it turned out to be more about meditation. For some reason I meet a lot of people who do such things, whereas I am not really interested in meditation, but also I have a strong criticism of groups that do meditation: All the groups that I know that are in some way organised to have a place for themselves, have had strong negative effects on many people. [ (see my criticism page, this one about an indoctrinated woman from Yalta: My site: Email 2014-3-22 from indoctrinated woman from Yalta (Crimea, Ukraine) where I give an overview of such groups as an introduction to the problem shown on that page, which is of indoctrination. ]

[ I talked with one woman a bit more than others, I mentioned that meditation isn't needed, you can do it anywhere, gardening, riding a bike, thinking about nothing, connecting with nature... She agreed. I mentioned a few other things that are important in life, such as that idealists cause problems, and she agreed with those too. I thought: "You don't need meditation, if you know all that"... But I suppose she was looking to be in a place with similar minded people. A very important point in life is stated by this saying: "Birds of a feather flock together" as I stated to one person at the end of the meeting. Perhaps also she felt when I stated the results of my analysis of these topics, that "yes that makes sense" but that is different from actually understanding by yourself, the same as when a teacher explains something vs. that you can explain it to someone else which is far more difficult, you need more background information for that.

About incompetence of psychologists, she suggested it could be because of studying psychology to understand yourself is more 'in vogue', or 'a fad' to use a few expressions. I said that this is not correct, the incompetence in psychology and in psychologists has been there forever (example: The explanation of psychological projection as you can find on wikipedia, is complete nonsense as I showed in a video with some examples. I analysed what causes this in detail, there are several factors but the essence is this: It is easy to analyse, from principles but also from experiences: People like Freud and Jung should have known! ]

2. What I miss from the Netherlands

Soft white buns (tasty with some cheese for example on it), dark brown buns with cheese, white bread of a type that I can't find in Kremenchuk (I found it in for example Novus supermarket in Kiev, a bread called Vulkan, and in a Varus supermarket which you can find more in the Zaporizhya area in a freshly baked bread), 'Chinese' food such as Bami, Ku lo yuk (or with chicken, Ky lo kai) with sweet and sour sauce with ginger. [ It is 'Chinese' in that the food is adjusted to the taste of the people of a country so the same food may not taste the same in another country... ]

Also various other things are hard to find or quite expensive: Stainless steel screws with torx head for example. Domovoy could supply them but at double the price of screws in the Netherlands. [ More examples: I can find Spax stainless steel screws (more expensive than other brands) in NL everywhere, in Ukraine I would need to order them via internet, and they are more expensive than in NL though not double the price. ]

Q: Have you thought about leaving Ukraine? If so why? What would you miss that you might not be able to find in another country? Certain foods, friends, other things?

3. Artificial intelligence:

The start of experiments was really in the 1950s with computer chess programs and in the 1960s with programs such as Eliza (1964 to 1967 at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum), in a LISP like language.

LISP stands for "List processing". It is an interpreted language and data can be evaluated, and thus 'executed', which means you can 'easily' write self-modifying programs with this. The brain is self-modifying, so this seems a good idea for artificial intelligence.

Another language used was Prolog: "Programming in logic". You define certain things and then the language can deduce from that various results, and you can ask it to show the trace of how it came to that result.

This is an important trait, as verifiability is important, it shows you how the system gets to a certain viewpoint or result. [ it can also be used to improve understanding, improve algorithms etc. see farther on. ]

I will tell a bit about standard computer algorithms and how verifying is important:

Computer games and actually a lot in life is about tree searching, checking all possible options, of actions are responses, but as it often becomes too much quite quickly to check everything, it is important to find cutoff methods to restrict the amount of searching.

Many years ago I made a computer program to calculate the outcome of all possible quarter turns with a Rubik's cube, and to store those that only affect the upper layer. How many turns would be needed? I.e. some outcomes will take a lot of quarter turns, how many? The program would need about 60 days calculation time, I estimated. So I split the time running on mine and a relative's computer. The program sent output to text files and it would be no problem if the computer was turned off at some point because I combined text output files and would restart the program from where it last wrote a combination that it found.

I combined all files, then upon examination I realised that the result was incorrect! I checked my cutoff tables that I created to speed up the calculation by cutting off sequences that would not get to a situation where only the upper layer was affected. Ah! I found an error...

I then made a computer program to verify all my cutoff tables. All the rest were fine. But I realised that I could create cutoff tables using my program to verify tables. I did that and it speeded up my program 30 times! So from then on using that (older, single core) computer, I would only need 2 days calculation time. [ I will get back to this further on, it is an example of improvement through self-correction/self-analysis, which works in computer programs but also with thinking and performance of people ]

Verifying correctness is important, if a system is a black box you just trust, nothing more, then you could get guided to wrong ideas/untruth...

Then around the mid 1980s connectionism started to gain traction in research, which really means neural networks. These are 'trained' with data to get a certain behaviour or outcome, and they are more like black boxes rather than a system that explains how and why you get to a certain result. Similarly, I don't know how my brain works, but I can explain reasoning, and use a reasoning style of thinking for things that require this, such as mathematics, or to explain things to people, etc. But he underlying way of thinking, of how the brain works, I don't know. This is fine as long as such a verifiable method is available... (so for example, not: "I don't like this proof", but "This proof is not good because xyz").

You can see the problem of when this is not available in various videos on youtube, such as Times Radio recently put out a video about how artificial intelligence lied to them... Louis Rossman made a video in which he described some issues such as specifying exactly what he wanted it to do to some texts, to change markup I think, and not change anything in the actual text. The AI, or rather AS (artificial stupidity) did change a lot of wording in the text and Rossman was annoyed at this. He had already thrown away the original texts... (I would never do that, I would always verify the results and then still keep the originals around as backups...). He also stated about wanting to hire someone, that only 1 person sent in a self written job application, the rest were AI written. [ I stated that this is problematic in that you don't see what a person can do, what he/she is like. You don't see the personality. Job application letters used to be judged by psychologists for some jobs in NL, especially government jobs. Perhaps this still happens, I heard it in any case from my dad. ]

Further, I saw a video on youtube of a teacher at a university who said that most students enter papers written by AI. He could see that from the type of writing. He failed such students...

Future of AI

I used to be interested but since a long time not any more. I don't find computers interesting except as a tool to help me, not a tool to replace me...

Q: What do you think about the possibility of a lot of jobs being replaced by AI?

Notes about the meeting

I mentioned a few topics, such as incompetence of psychologists after one person mentioned a friend who is a psychologist, used AI for herself. I asked, why can't she do it herself? Why as a psychologist would you need any help? And then I got to a point that I mentioned before in a talk, which is that psychologists are often people who need psychologists themselves. This is not a new phenomenon, for example I saw this mentioned in an episode of an old TV series that I watched on youtube, called "Hercule Poirot" after the books by Agatha Christie. The compatriot of Poirot, Captain Hastings, said about psychologists that they seem to be the ones who need psychological help themselves. This episode was from the late 1980s or early 1990s and I assume it is also in the books by Agatha Christie, from the 1930s-1940s. In any case, it is not something new...

I said: Psychologists or those studying psychology know the problem: They often tell me without asking why they themselves studied or still study psychology: To understand themselves. Others stated when I posed this problem that I noticed that psychologists are generally incompetent, that people go study psychology for several reasons, such as to understand themselves or they have issues in their personal life or someone in their family has issues.

I stated that: If a person doesn't understand himself/herself at 18 years old, that is not going to improve with 4 years of studying psychology! (in fact it can give an understanding of people and their actions, but only in a 'distant' way, theoretical rather than properly understood and felt as feelings. You can see the same thing with for example My site: Analysis of article about/with a psychopath called "Patric Gagne".

[ I connected a few things that may not seem related but which are in fact connected: Awareness, self reflection in business and verifying the output of computer programs: Verifying the output of a program is similar to inward looking of a person to see what he could improve, whether he made any mistakes etc. Not inward looking is what in particular anti-social people do. They also show incompetence, a company director running a company into the ground (i.e. an expression for making the business fail), while thinking he did a great job, is common for psychopaths. They do not see the world in the same way as other people, everything is outward: Every problem and failure is an outside influence that they could do nothing about, every success is caused by themselves. Autists are in many ways similar but have a different set of issues: They don't understand other people, whereas psychopaths don't care to understand other people. The difference is in that psychopaths can understand other people and thus reasoning but the further they go, and the more they get into a position of power, the less they need to do any introspection/self-correction (as they will need to do for example in school to learn things). This means their incompetence shows especially in certain positions where they do not need to consider other people as people from whom they need to get approval. ]

About expressions: I mentioned that after watching a documentary about 'beats/beatniks' (people beaten down by life/society, artists mostly), that I looked for some expressions that were from that group and found that I know most of the expressions from the 1960s and 1950s, they are simply used a lot in films, TV series, even computer games. [ Have a look here and see how many you know of these 1950s expressions you know:https://fiftiesweb.com/pop/1950s-slang/ ]

[ Something else: Schools are a place where psychopaths are forced to learn and look at what they need to improve: There are 2 reasons:
1. The teachers are considered authority figures, as they hold the key to grades, and to passing to the next year.
2. The whole system is competition, comparing to others. So this is forced, there is no option to state that "I did my best, but my efforts were thwarted by a bad economy", or something like that. They could still do that [ Example, stating: "my parents had no money, I had to work and had no time to study". ], but that would not result in passing grades... In 'the real world', you are allowed more freedom, including freedom to fail (using bankruptcy laws) which barely affect such people... ]