[FRIAM] Working for the Military Institute of Technology Causes Cognitive Dissonance

[Marcus Daniels]

While I think LLMs will be hard to use for analysis tasks, there is something satisfying to see certain people squirm as LLMs, as Altman says, “Blow right through the Turing test.”

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Roger Frye
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2023 6:47 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Working for the Military Institute of Technology Causes Cognitive Dissonance

Eric,

I agree with your critique, especially about Dresser's two-facedness. What struck me most was how Chomsky’s cognitive dissonance about military application could drive him to abstraction and unworkable theory.

Chomsky has been one of my heroes. I have marched with him, but never agreed with his linguistics. But then never fully agreed with any linguist.

I worked with people back in the 60s at Bolt Beranek and Newman and with professors at MIT who believed they could communicate with computers in English but was unaware of the military intention. I created English style GUIs and wrote COBOL compilers, but none very successful. Who knew that AI chat would be so successful this year.

-Roger


On Dec 13, 2023, at 3:34 AM, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu<mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:

Wanted to say thank you for this.

I don’t know that I find Dresser’s psychologizing of Chomsky persuasive at all.  But it’s nice that what leaks through the general history is Chomsky’s commitment as an operator.

I liked that they had the little video clip in there.  What comes through (to me, so bright that it quenches out everything else) is the one constant of Chomsky, across his history and in all the modes of his activity: the superciliousness, and the attitude of Olympian contempt he puts on, at all times, standing in judgment of everyone and everything.

The way Dresser doesn’t roll over to Chomsky’s assertion of absolute domination, in the main text, was kind of a relief, though his blithe dismissal of Chomsky’s having had any substantive reason for being an influencer looked like trouble.  The comments — surprisingly content-rich — unpack that trouble, but even there the exchange is interesting.  The defenders say Dresser misses the point of the syntactic work and mis-represents by taking things out of context (I think probably true), and then Dresser answers by providing explicit statements that are hard to understand as being any less ridiculous than he claims, since they are asserted with characteristic Chomskian authoritarianism.  What I take this for is evidence of what I see as the major pattern: Chomsky’s writing is as close to Newspeak as we probably have in something that is glossed by some as a science (and that, in a good world, could be, and is trying to become, more of a science).  His writing, over the decades and lots of books (here referring to the linguistics) has essentially no stable constructive assertions, yet at every point the delivery is “This is what I say and this is what I have always said.”

(Not that Dresser comes out of this looking like any much-better character.  Claiming he isn’t out to write a hit-piece on Chomsky’s intellectual contributions, while transparently wanting mainly to do that, and then at the end saying how grateful he is for Chomsky’s activism, rings pretty disingenuous.  I am also struck because to me the style of The Man is recognizably the same in both.  But enough on Dresser.  He will be forgotten by tomorrow, so one can just comment on the content of the writing.)

I don’t know where Chomsky ranks in the guruness indices.  But he is a case study in the patterns of meme-authoritarianism.  A vast discourse of negative statements, which (seen in many people I have to deal with) seem to have only the goal of denying something specific somebody else is trying to say or to do, accompanied by shifting, or shifty, assertive-sounding statements, but ones that turn out to be slippery enough that you are never permitted to attach a meaning to them and decide for yourself whether they are valid or not.  Any judgment you pass against the constructive-sounding statements can always be parried by an accusation that you are too low a life-form to have understood the wisdom they encode.  Johnny Yune did this nicely in the ancient camp-movie They Call me Bruce (maybe the sequel), in the line “You are not ready for the tech-a-niques of the master.)

Not sure why I feel compelled to compose typologies of the styles of shiftiness in the world.  The impulse to see some fingerprints that occur repeatedly seems to scratch some itch.

Eric




On Dec 8, 2023, at 7:54 AM, Roger Frye <frye.roger at gmail.com<mailto:frye.roger at gmail.com>> wrote:

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