Two of my favorite blogs — Slate Star Codex (topics: psychiatry, social commentary) and Marginal Revolution (topics: economics, everything else) — have both linked to Karl Friston papers in the last 24 hours. Since one of my bosses is a Friston enthusiast, and he's the only Friston devotee I've ever met, and neither of these blogs has anything to do with what I work on, this gave me a Worlds-Are-Colliding feeling.

I haven't read either paper yet ("An aberrant precision account of autism" and "Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing") but I do want to respond to SSC's commentary. Here's what he had to say:

A while ago I quoted a paper by Lawson, Rees & Friston about predictive-processing-based hypotheses of autism. They said:

This provides a simple explanation for the pronounced social-communication difficulties in autism; given that other agents are arguably the most difficult things to predict. In the complex world of social interactions, the many-to-one mappings between causes and sensory input are dramatically increased and difficult to learn; especially if one cannot contextualize the prediction errors that drive that learning.

And I was really struck by the phrase “arguably the most difficult thing to predict”. Really? People are harder to predict than, I don’t know, the weather? Weird little flying bugs? Political trends? M. Night Shyamalan movies? And of all the things about people that should be hard to predict, ordinary conversations?

I totally endorse the rest of his post, but here I need to disagree. Other people being the hardest thing to predict seems perfectly reasonable to me. The weather isn't that hard to predict decently well: just guess that the weather tomorrow will be like it is today and you'll be pretty damn accurate. Add in some basic seasonal trends — it's early summer, so tomorrow will be like today but a little warmer — and you'll get closer yet. This is obviously not perfect, but it's also not that much worse than what you can do with sophisticated meteorological modeling. Importantly, the space between the naive approach and the sophisticated approach doesn't leave a lot of room to evolve or learn better predictive ability.

Weird flying bugs aren't that hard to predict either; even dumb frogs manage to catch them enough to stay alive. I'm not trying to be mean to amphibians here, but on any scale of inter-species intelligence they're pretty stupid. The space between how well a frog can predict the flight of a mosquito and how well some advanced avionics system could do so is potentially large, but there's very little to be gained by closing that predictive gap.

Political trends are hard to predict, but only because you're predicting other human agents aggregated on a much larger scale. A scale that was completely unnecessary for us to predict, I might add, until the evolutionary eye-blink of ten thousand years or so ago.

Predicting movies is easier than predicting other human agents, because dramatic entertainments — produced by humans, depicting humans — are just a subset of interacting with other human agents. If you have a good model of how other people will behave, then you also have a good model of how other people will behave when they are acting as story tellers, or when they are characters. (If characters don't conform to the audience's model of human agents at least roughly, they aren't good characters.)

Maybe a better restatement of Friston et al. would be "people are are arguably the most difficult things to predict from the domain of things we have needed to predict precisely and have any hope of predicting precisely."