Reading the algorithms

January 22, 2024 5:00 AM

Divination is a way of revealing otherwise unknowable and unobtainable information about important matters. But interestingly, diviners are not often considered to be the ones who possess this information. They are skilled technicians who can read what’s hidden elsewhere: in the cards, the tea leaves, the entrails—or the algorithms. [CW: entrails, woo]
posted by cupcakeninja (21 comments total)

in the cards, the tea leaves, the entrails—or the algorithms

...the skull bumps, the polygraph traces, the point and figure charts...
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 AM on January 22 [4 favorites]

if machine learning is being considered divination, we desperately need to teach people how machine learning works.
posted by iamck at 6:12 AM on January 22 [17 favorites]

a fun read, thanks cupcakeninja! had me look up the new-to-me term augury, the wikipedia entry for which is excellent:

Augury was a Greco-Roman religion practice of observing the behavior of birds, to receive omens. When the individual, known as the 'Augur ', read these signs, it was referred to as "taking the auspices". "Auspices" (Latin auspicium) means "looking at birds". Auspex, another word for "augur", can be translated to "one who looks at birds".

posted by tamarack at 6:15 AM on January 22 [12 favorites]

At the risk of a derail, I find Ancient and Medieval thought about divination incredibly interesting. Building on Greek and Roman works, later philosophers were kind of stuck in rationalizing their ideas about the universe (and especially God) with the Ancient's reverence for divination, especially astrology.

Well, sort of reverence. Astrology went in and out of fashion, sometimes being at least quasi-illegal (you did not want to be caught with anything that might forecast the Emperor's death, for example), and there were some very systematic and logical examinations of the theory and practice, with Vettius Valens being the one that we have the most information on -- not only have several manuscripts survived, but they show that he tracked the lives of people he cast horoscopes for and revised his system to try to account for deviation from his predictions.

Anyway, the problem with Divination for almost all the philosophers are many -- does divination show the future? cause the future? And, if the later, how do we account for free will, which seems to be a thing? Epicurean physics ran into this by working its way into a completely deterministic universe which, on one hand, fit their theories, but, on the other, didn't match their experience. Once Monotheism gets going, there is the problem that, since God is omniscient, messages can be written in the stars or all sorts of things, assuming God has an interest in telling us what is going to happen. But... if that's the case, then... what is the point? If everything is known, it's also predetermined, and that's a depressing state of affairs. Many solutions were proposed, often ingenious ones.

Anyway, divination is pretty fascinating stuff, even if you don't believe it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:55 AM on January 22 [12 favorites]

I see your auguries and raise you "haruspicies" which rely on the skillful contemplation of the entrails (especially the liver) of sacrificed sheep.

I spent the 00s in a lab adjacent to the idea of Pharmacogenetics, which is the use of genetic screening to predict metabolic responses to different drugs or therapies. PG is a sort of holy grail in the field: drugs specific to individuals will a) spare patients side-effects and adverse reactions; b) save money by not wasting expensive therapeutics of folks who won't respond (or will be harmed!). But we're not there yet or even close. The idea only works by treating (trial) patients as (anonymous, double-blind, age-matched, randomly assigned) ciphers. Diviners (and homeopaths) at least sit down with those in pain, confusion or trouble and listen to them, and pay attention to the things that are not being said. And if a nice pot of tea is shared, everyone relaxes and the tea-leaves can serve as a vehicle for discovering a version of the truth.
posted by BobTheScientist at 9:33 AM on January 22 [8 favorites]

if machine learning is being considered divination, we desperately need to teach people how machine learning works.

That would prevent 99% of the "AI" posts made to MeFi and other places from ever happening, so I am 100% in favor of this.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:45 AM on January 22 [8 favorites]

The article lists a bunch of reasons/purposes for divination drawn from the research paper, but FWIW an overlooked one that I've run across more and more is just, like, playing around and having fun. I mentioned a bunch of examples in the Tarot thread, which caused me to look around further. Since then, I've run across Le Pantheon et temple des oracles (1630; described here in English); Ludus fortunae, ad recreandam societatem (1633); Le Palais des jeux, de l'amour, et de la fortune (1663; and bundled with some parlor games at the end); and Les Oracles divertissans (1677).

I'd vaguely known of Lorenzo "Spirito" Gualtieri's Libro delle sorti (ca. 1482; Youtube flip-through) previously, but skimming all these others, my thought has been, yeah, wow these are parlor games: you get together with a group probably indoors, run through a simple set of rules together making up your own questions as you go, and probably just laugh and have fun. It can be difficult to see this kind of social activity as a game, since it has only the minimal choice of a question to ask and no winner, but as a shortcut I've explained elsewhere, it helps to know that the history of parlor games in Europe and the US is tied pretty extensively to the history of "Truth or Dare" variants, i.e. something widely understood as a game today that is also substantially a procedure-driven social interaction that involves asking questions.

Anyway, if you've played around with Ouija boards or a Magic 8 Ball as a kid, that kind of non-serious divination has a pretty long history to it.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:52 AM on January 22 [5 favorites]

Divination. See the future? No.
See possibilities you hadn't thought of? Yes.
The reader has to know enough about the subject to fit the symbols to the situation.
posted by Goofyy at 10:49 AM on January 22 [3 favorites]

So, Ouija boards... divination, or spiritualism? And what is the difference?

In my mind, Ouija boards are part and parcel with trying to communicate with the dead or spirits, which is different from divination which is predicting the future by reading signs.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong. And I don't really believe in either. But they just seem different to me.
posted by hippybear at 11:46 AM on January 22

So, Ouija boards... divination, or spiritualism? And what is the difference?

Fair question--probably depends who you ask, but it can be both: "The Ouija board ... is a form of divination (seeking information from supernatural sources)" via Ouija > Religious responses on Wikipedia.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:55 AM on January 22 [1 favorite]

So, Ouija boards... divination, or spiritualism? And what is the difference?

Divination is a set of practices. Spiritualism is a worldview. Ouija (and other talking board shenanigans) are divinatory, because they seek information through extranormal means. They do so from a spiritualist perspective, that is one in which disincarnate spirits, particularly those of dead humans, exist concurrently with us and can influence ourselves and the world.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 12:00 PM on January 22 [4 favorites]

“In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.”

― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

posted by Phssthpok at 12:05 PM on January 22 [7 favorites]

The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better.
In my experience, the more you understand about the underlying internal logic of astrology and why the rules are what they are, the less arbitrary they are. What seems "arbitrary" to an outsider is just ignorance.
posted by flamk at 12:32 PM on January 22 [4 favorites]

If something is grown in a certain place and harvested at a certain time, it takes on the character of that place and time. Astrology claims to be no more than this.
posted by DJZouke at 12:58 PM on January 22

Well, no, at least not for the Classical Age. The planets were seen as Stellar Powers who had clear influences on you. There are a lot of variations on the idea, since it developed over 1200 years or so. Some philosophers supported the idea, some challenged it. The idea of Fate was pervasive, but not always popular. It seems likely that some of the Mystery Cults were explicitly about freeing the initiate from the power of the stars….

Perhaps we need an initiation to free us from Big Data.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:06 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

auspiciously, this augurs well.
posted by clavdivs at 2:04 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]

I do have to say, any time augury is mentioned, I think of Aughra from Labyrinth, who had a giant machine in her lair that showed the movements of planets and who knew about the great conjunction coming that would reunite the Skesis and the urRu...

A physical representation of divination and augury in a fantasy setting.

She holds one eye in her fingers and one eye in her head.

I mean, there is so much symbolism going on in this one tiny bit of this one movie, all having to do with this one topic.
posted by hippybear at 2:18 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]

Hippybear, yes! Was just running my D&D group through a similar encounter with a seer last week and based my description of her orrery on those scenes from The Dark Crystal. Was shattered to learn only half my group has ever seen the movie!
posted by meinvt at 3:04 PM on January 22

if machine learning is being considered divination, we desperately need to teach people how machine learning works.

I'd settle for teaching people to be skeptical of algorithms and how to property interrogate them. There's a lot of machine learning that essentially presents itself as either a completely opaque box or one that's difficult to peer into. Knowing how it "works" doesn't necessarily give you insight into what it's doing for a given input. I can know how a distributed neural network works when it comes to detecting people in images and at the same time not know that a particular model was consciously or unconsciously trained with very racist data.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:35 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Because I’ve had prescient dreams and witnessed others, including a really jaw-dropping example from my mother when I was 15 (which you can find in my comments if you’re interested), I’m a little more sanguine than the rest of you about the possibility of divination.

So I was very excited a few years back to read about the computational advantage conferred by messages which travel backward in time but cannot be read:

It turns out that an unopened message can be exceedingly useful. This is true if the experimenter entangles the message with some other system in the laboratory before sending it. Entanglement, a strange effect only possible in the realm of quantum physics, creates correlations between the time-travelling message and the laboratory system. These correlations can fuel a quantum computation.

Around ten years ago researcher Dave Bacon, now at Google, showed that a time-travelling quantum computer could quickly solve a group of problems, known as NP-complete, which mathematicians have lumped together as being hard.

The problem was, Bacon's quantum computer was travelling around 'closed timelike curves'. These are paths through the fabric of spacetime that loop back on themselves. General relativity allows such paths to exist through contortions in spacetime known as wormholes.

Physicists argue something must stop such opportunities arising because it would threaten 'causality' -- in the classic example, someone could travel back in time and kill their grandfather, negating their own existence.

And it's not only family ties that are threatened. Breaking the causal flow of time has consequences for quantum physics too. Over the past two decades, researchers have shown that foundational principles of quantum physics break in the presence of closed timelike curves: you can beat the uncertainty principle, an inherent fuzziness of quantum properties, and the no-cloning theorem, which says quantum states can't be copied.

However, the new work shows that a quantum computer can solve insoluble problems even if it is travelling along "open timelike curves," which don't create causality problems. That's because they don't allow direct interaction with anything in the object's own past: the time travelling particles (or data they contain) never interact with themselves. Nevertheless, the strange quantum properties that permit "impossible" computations are left intact. "We avoid 'classical' paradoxes, like the grandfathers paradox, but you still get all these weird results," says Mile Gu, who led the work.

Gu is at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University in Beijing. His eight other coauthors come from these institutions, the University of Oxford, UK, Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia, and QKD Corp in Toronto, Canada.

"Whenever we present the idea, people say no way can this have an effect" says Jayne Thompson, a co-author at CQT. But it does: quantum particles sent on a timeloop could gain super computational power, even though the particles never interact with anything in the past. "The reason there is an effect is because some information is stored in the entangling correlations: this is what we're harnessing," Thompson says.

There is a caveat -- not all physicists think that these open timeline curves are any more likely to be realisable in the physical universe than the closed ones. One argument against closed timelike curves is that no-one from the future has ever visited us. That argument, at least, doesn't apply to the open kind, because any messages from the future would be locked.

There is a huge tradition of prophecy and prophetic dreams among human beings, and given these results, it would be possible to argue that those forms of prophecy are (at least) a side effect of the superior entangling timelike loop QC functionality of the human brain.

To me, the vatic obscurity of Tarot and other forms of divination look a bit like a necessary attempt to get something out of a message from the future without actually 'unlocking' it.
posted by jamjam at 11:30 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

given these results, it would be possible to argue that those forms of prophecy are (at least) a side effect of the superior entangling timelike loop QC functionality of the human brain

It would also be possible to argue that the entire point and purpose of the brain is the ongoing construction of an accurate world model to allow the animal whose brain it is to make accurate predictions for the purpose of self-preservation.

The notable feature of the human brain is the extent to which it supports our species's One Weird Trick of language, a trick that works so spectacularly well as to allow us to get away with relying almost exclusively on narrative as our favoured tool for constructing both models and predictions.

We rely on narrative so heavily that many of us spend a lifetime failing to make any distinction between our actual lives and our internal narrative accounts of them. If we can't fit a thing into some kind of story, we tend to pay it no attention and this applies equally to outside influences on us and to the internal world modelling and prediction processes going on inside. We habitually fail to recognize our own brain's predictions as such and/or take them seriously unless and until we've shaped them into some kind of narrative first.

Accurate prediction is inherently difficult because no internal world model ever possibly could model the actual world in anything even close to full detail, and many details turn out to have what appear to be unreasonably disproportionate consequences. It follows that predictions that prove to be accurate in a wealth of detail will be rare, and therefore notable, and therefore noted.

And when one of those rare, notable, memorable predictions first draws our attention in non-narrative form, such as the simulated direct experience of a dream or the sudden shattering revelation of an epiphany, the natural tendency is to treat the prediction itself, rather than the huge and slowly accumulated collection of world-modelling information it was built from, as requiring its own story of a thing that came from elsewhere.

All of us are prophets, in our own ways, but for most of us most of the time it never really goes beyond the ordinary, day-to-day understandings: that a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and no-one shall know where lieth those things with a sort of raffia-work base that has an attachment.

Notable prophecy requires that the prophet involved has both the charisma and the narrative skills to spin a rare (perhaps even so rare as to be one-off) accurate prediction as something huge, mysterious, preferably at least a little scary and inaccessible to ordinary people. That's showbiz, folks. Props optional.
posted by flabdablet at 10:56 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]