Mortal Computers

> Hinton believes that Donald Trump's posts aren't really about facts or their authenticity but are about distilling his beliefs by having his followers learn a probability distribution that carries a rich signal.

That's the stuff! Love the information theory approach. Where it gets hairy is if most of the 'rich signal' is social - "We like this guy!" / "We hate this nasty woman!" It's compelling information, but based in tribal politics and quickly untethers from ground truth facts.

The 'teacher / student' model vs backprop has the potential to shine a light on human relationships. It's computationally expensive to learn from scratch. Being taught means placing the teacher where the world would go, imbibing a compressed (and emotionally heightened) distillation, along with biases.