Readers may recall him from the four levels of multiverse he advocated in Scientific American in 2003. But forget that. He now thinks there is too much bias in American media and he is working on an AI program to combat it:
Recently, he was interviewed at New Scientist about his thoughts about AI and the current focus of his work, which is using machine learning “for good” to identify news bias, which he feels that humans flub…
From a news writer’s perspective, it’s hard to see what use his program would be. The advent of concepts like fake but accurate, “truthiness,” and “post-truth” in this decade signals intractable differences of opinion about what truth even is. An algorithm is not going to solve that.
Analysis sites like Snopes tend to get captured by one side in political controversies; indeed, last year, Snopes declared a ridiculous war on the Christian satire site, The Babylon Bee, apparently taking the satirical sketches for news items. Similarly, the process of assigning “Pinocchios” when questioning statements by public figures is easily corrupted. Political statements are full of ambiguities and nuances. Only those on the other side of an issue typically perceive a statement to be a “lie.”
The risk with well-intentioned ideas such as Tegmark’s is that power brokers may push to treat an AI-based fact/bias checker as infallible when it simply reflects the shared philosophical biases of its programmers.
Denyse O’Leary, “Multiverse physicist Max Tegmark seeks AI that checks news bias” at Mind Matters News
See also:
Consciousness is two hard problems, not one. Psychology prof Gregg Henriques argues, consciousness “plays by a different set of rules than the language game of science”
China: Sophisticated surveillance decides who gets sent to Uuyghur camps. The leak of documents from police in Karakax County in Xinjiang reveal the details of everyday life that can send a Uyghur to the camps.
and
Is Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon right re the multiverse? Robert J. Marks comments: Sheldon Cooper insists that in no universe would he dance with Penny.“Some claim, there is an infinite number of universes in the multiverse. That is ludicrous because there are no infinities in the physical world. Even if there were, Cantor’s theory of the infinite shows that, if there were an infinite number of contingencies, not all contingency combinations could be accounted for by an infinite number of universes.”
The fundamental and fatal flaw in Tegmark’s belief that AI can, supposedly, operate in a non-biased fashion, i.e. can spot news bias, is that the bias of the programmers themselves is literally built into the computer algorithms. As Greg Coppola, (a former software engineer for Google who was fired for blowing the whistle on bias in Google’s programming), put the situation in 2019,
This leads to an even more fundamental and fatal flaw in Tegmark’s thinking. Tegmark is an atheist who does not believe in free will. Yet free will is necessary in order to create new axioms in mathematics (and computer algorithms).
In fact, not only does Tegmark not believe in the free will that is necessary to create new axioms in mathematics (and algorithms), Tegmark, in his 2015 book, ‘Our Mathematical Universe’, believes whatever is mathematically possible is real as a universe or is real in some universe.
Moreover, on top of all that, (as if that was not bad enough), besides an infinity of other universes being based on whatever is mathematically possible, Tegmark also holds that he himself to be nothing more than a ‘consistent mathematical structure’.
In the following article, George Ellis remarks that “Tegmark has argued that every consistent mathematical structure exists in some disconnected universe. Tegmark also believes that nothing else exists beyond the consistent mathematical structures. Tegmark is himself nothing more than a consistent mathematical structure. This is a view that assigns to mathematical structures a degree of agency that they are not otherwise thought to possess.”
Also in critique to Max Tegmark’s 2015 book, Our Mathematical Universe:,, Sheldon Glashow, professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University, quips that “I may be a blockhead but I am certainly not a mathematical structure akin to a triangle.”
Thus, in his denial of his own free will, and in his assigning “to mathematical structures a degree of agency that they are not otherwise thought to possess”, Tegmark is forced into the insane position of claiming that he himself is nothing but a ‘consistent mathematical structure’, i.e. a deterministic meat robot doing the bidding of whatever his particular ‘consistent mathematical structure’ may demand that he do.
Such an insane belief that Tegmark is forced to hold, (forced to hold because of his denial of his own free will), would not even make a good science fiction novel, much less does his belief make any sense in the real world. As George Ellis noted in Einstein’s denial of his free will, ” if Einstein did not have free will in some meaningful sense, then he could not have been responsible for the theory of relativity – it would have been a product of lower level processes but not of an intelligent mind choosing between possible options. I find it very hard to believe this to be the case – indeed it does not seem to make any sense.”
To refute Tegmark’s belief that every consistent mathematical structure exists in some disconnected universe, and that he himself is ultimately nothing but a ‘consistent mathematical structure’, I would like to introduce Tegmark to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in mathematics. i.e. ““Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove”.”
In short, contrary to what Tegmark believes, Godel’s incompleteness theorems prove that ‘we cannot construct an ontology that makes God dispensable.’
In other words, contrary to what Tegmark believes, it is not mathematics from which we must derive our ultimate ontology of being, but God himself from which we must derive our ultimate ontology of being. As Paul preached to the Greeks in Athens
Rather than looking for ways to monitor and decide whether something posted on the Internet is “biased”, we should go back to teaching basic logic, typical fallacies, and how to read critically so that readers can judge for themselves how true something is, and which biases are on display.
Alternatively, every article should come with a disclaimer stating, “there are other perspectives on this subject”, and the author should be required to post a link to one or more of those other perspectives.
Another possibility: put a delay of say, three to five minutes on posts? When an author presses “submit”, or “post”, a warning should come up asking whether the writer has considered other perspectives on the subject, and is willing to stand by what he/she has written. How open to contrary viewpoints and evidence is the author?
Of course, that would not work either, but hey, we need some way to tone down the polarized polemics and diatribes that seem to be getting worse (i.e. more biased) every year.