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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:ab3482a6-c68c-330a-c836-3b05f2b5c58b@gmail.com">
<br>
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. </blockquote>
<p><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?).<br>
</p>
<p>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 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Explain_Things_to_Me">Men
Explain things to me</a>. <br>
</p>
<p>She described being introduced to a man at a party who had just
read her book (<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_of_Shadows">River of
Shadows</a>) 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.</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:ab3482a6-c68c-330a-c836-3b05f2b5c58b@gmail.com">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.
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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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