This was stuck in my mailtool, waiting for me to complete a closing
sentence and hit send...
On 1/22/24 12:46 PM, glen wrote:
Words matter: how ecologists discuss managed and non-managed bees and
birds
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-022-04620-2
Words do matter, acutely in the circumstance that modern humanity
(hominids since spoken/written language?) live (almost entirely) in a
co-created intersubjective (religious, political, economic) reality.
re: "loaded language"... This is what I'm finding fascinating about the
LLMs I've engaged (mostly GPT3/4 and Bard), is how *well* they seem to
infer the context of any discussion I'm trying to have with them. They
can *patently* get it overtly wrong, especially (I infer) if there are
some rule-based guardrails built into the system I'm interacting with.
In human discourse, this is what the *worst* of PC (usually on the left)
and "dog whistles" and other "coded language" on the right generates.
I'm continuing this thread because I really want to classify types of
ad hominem. The most obvious bifurcation is human vs. source ... so
against the human versus against the source. E.g. I've been using
https://ground.news. And this morning, they had some 100% right (as in
political right, not correct) article where all the sources were Mixed
or Low Factuality. I found myself trusting the Mixed Factuality Fox
News more than any of the others. So ... familiarity? I guess?
I've also been using groundnews.com and finding it mildly interesting
but in the spirit of GI:GO it feels as if the "meta-signal" they
provide, while useful, is somewhat limited by the quality of the
journalism they are working with. I suspect that oldSkool Journos (e.g.
Tom Johnson here) are extremely frustrated with the *average* quality of
the work put out there as well as the curatorial/editorial
distortions/biases that are generally available. I'd be interested in
others' experience with the various news-bias detectors/raters/recommenders.
Re loaded language and the birds and the bees: I don't think it's
possible to remove the loading from loaded language. The best you can
do is be aggressively transparent about your loading. And that's what
triggers my "ad hominem". It's a reaction to closed or obfuscated
loading. E.g. when some older white dude at the pub insists on using
politically incorrect language that makes the kids cringe, you have to
do a little analysis and modeling of the speaker. Are they doing it
'cause they're just too stupid? 'Cause it stirs up the kids? 'Cause it
makes them feel "free"? Etc. It's less *against* the person and more
of an attempt to infer their loading.
My experience with being in some sense the "old white dude" (pick your
period, pick your ephithet, it is probably more to the point: "presumed
to have some specific bit of power over the other who is confronting or
commentarying on me") is that I had to shift from 'trying to be liked"
to "trying to be understood" to "trying to understand myself as embedded
in a larger system" to "trying to understand myself, full-stop". The
escalation from liked to understood to self-understanding doesn't likely
help anyone else appreciate (or tolerate) me, but it seems to be a step
above self-gratifying rationalization?
On 1/8/24 11:06, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
I am particularly grateful for the ad hominem stuff.
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