[FRIAM] Datasets as Experience

[Steve Smith]

>
> I've been in long-standing confusion about the meaning of "ethics". 
> And almost without fail, if/when I say that to a group of people, 
> particularly men, everyone jumps in and explains to me what they think 
> it means. 

<let me try a little of my own mansplaining> As for "mansplaining", I 
find that there is a different mode (I find it different/complementary 
to proper mansplaining) which is to report the mental scattering that a 
particular word/phrase/concept generates in the receiver.  A collective 
free-associative exploration (worst case is random tangenting?  
word-salad from a salad shooter instead of a nicely laid out salad bar 
or well constructed Cobb?).

Maybe it is all on the same spectrum.  When tightly focused and 
(intended to be) coherent, it *becomes* mansplaining I think?   I am 
pretty sure that the concept (if not precisely the term) was first 
popularized in Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain things to me 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Explain_Things_to_Me>.

She described being introduced to a man at a party who had just read 
her  book (River of Shadows 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_of_Shadows>) on Muybridge's early 
stop-action photo work and motion studies.   The hostess was apparently 
fairly clear to the man that he was being introduced to the *author* of 
the book he was so taken with, but instead of hearing that I saw Solnit 
as his next victim to tell *all about* the subject of the book that he 
just read that she *wrote*.   As she tells it, the conversation ended 
without him ever twigging to the fact that when she tried to interrupt 
him, it was to tell him that *she* was the author (and would be happy to 
talk with him about the subject but probably didn't need a lecture on 
the content of her own book).   I don't know if her failing to clue him 
in was her own passive aggressive trick or if she really couldn't get a 
word in edgewise.  I've seen both things happen...   but her essay on 
this really moved me. Her work/voice in general has been a great thing 
to/for me... FWIW.

> Of course, each of their explanations is different and often pairwise 
> incommensurate. So, if they're sedate, by the end of the conversation, 
> I can convince most people *they* don't know what "ethics" means, 
> either. Add to that the implicit question of whether non-humans have 
> ethics and the file metaphor (from paper to bits on disk to 
> orchestrated bits on multiple disks to in-context learning modified 
> bits on multiple disks), then that sentence is all over the map of 
> possible meanings. That was supposed to be the point of my remark ... 
> in the context of DaveW's question about the semantics of LLM workflows.

I don't know if I'm coming around to what it is you mean when you talk 
about communication being an illusion, but it is a much more comfortable 
concept now than it was the first time I heard you say it.   Maybe you 
are getting through to me?  Is that communication?

I'd ask what *co*-munnication and *commune*-ication might mean if not 
this highly-technical   transfer of 
mental-emotional-states-between-entities-via-serialization-and-tokenization 
?   I tend to think of "communication" more as the process of 
seeking/building resonance in many modes across many entities... though 
this is probably not a definition most here want to use...

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