My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.
More from pete wolfendale
So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.
I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.
Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.
I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.
We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.
Which human societies, past or present, come closest to your ideal of how we should live together?
— Keith Frankish (@keithfrankish) January 15, 2021
I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.
Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.
I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.
We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.
This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).
This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.
And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.
We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.
This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
This is what happens when you let philosophers try to write about real life. This ridiculous, game-playing, feigned innocence. Journals have been full of this for years, this elaborate performance of *doing philosophy* and saying nothing. I cannot adequately express my contempt pic.twitter.com/ciDeWuEkET
— Jack (@jackeselbst) January 14, 2021
This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.
And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.
We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.
This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
More from For later read
Nice to discover Judea Pearl ask a fundamental question. What's an 'inductive bias'?
I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.
explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?
An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.
The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
Help! What precisely is "inductive bias"? Some ML researchers are in the opinion that the machine learning category of \u2018inductive biases\u2019 can allow us to build a causal understanding of the world. My Ladder of Causation says: "This is mathematically impossible". Who is right? 1/
— Judea Pearl (@yudapearl) February 14, 2021
I crucial step on the road towards AGI is a richer vocabulary for reasoning about inductive biases.
explores the apparent impedance mismatch between inductive biases and causal reasoning. But isn't the logical thinking required for good causal reasoning also not an inductive bias?
An inductive bias is what C.S. Peirce would call a habit. It is a habit of reasoning. Logical thinking is like a Platonic solid of the many kinds of heuristics that are discovered.
The kind of black and white logic that is found in digital computers is critical to the emergence of today's information economy. This of course is not the same logic that drives the general intelligence that lives in the same economy.
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).
Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!
Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr
#Pluralistic
1/
On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."
https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg
2/
Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!
https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2
3/
Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.
https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN
4/
#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV
#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r
5/
Inside: Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs; Strength in numbers; and more!
Archived at: https://t.co/esjoT3u5Gr
#Pluralistic
1/
On Feb 22, I'm delivering a keynote address for the NISO Plus conference, "The day of the comet: what trustbusting means for digital manipulation."
https://t.co/Z84xicXhGg
2/
Planet Money on HP's myriad ripoffs: Ink-stained wretches of the world, unite!
https://t.co/k5ASdVUrC2
3/
Back in November, I published an article for @EFF about @HP's latest printer-ink ripoff: after offering its customers a free-ink-for-life plan, it unilaterally switched them all to a $1/month-for-life plan.https://t.co/bsc73xPSuo
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 18, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/tagduPupA5
Strength in numbers: The crisis in accounting.
https://t.co/DjfAfHWpNN
4/
Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
— Cory Doctorow #BLM (@doctorow) February 18, 2021
1/ pic.twitter.com/FaNQc66gQN
#15yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://t.co/Rn9E5R1gtV
#10yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for https://t.co/Jz28qHVhrV? https://t.co/dN1e4MxU4r
5/
