[FRIAM] Language Model Understanding

Sun Oct 8 20:25:23 EDT 2023

    Hope: "/doing the right thing, no matter how you think it will turn
    out/"


On 10/8/23 2:21 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> I would center nihilism not on devaluation but on deconstruction. If 
> value is about a set of lived experiences, is it a detached reflection 
> on something special that was discovered, or more because of 
> membership in that ecology – because of an investment?
> Deep membership makes it harder to talk objectively about discoveries 
> and to move on to making other discoveries. Generally attaching to one 
> value system means not attaching to another value system.   For 
> example, adopting the value of tolerance logically is at odds with 
> policing intolerance, e.g., one Jewish neighbor remarked this morning 
> he drove past a home with a Hamas flag on it and was scared. (Reducing 
> that fear by removing the flag would be reducing tolerance.)
>
> It seems to me that ideas that work have power and things that don’t 
> work don’t have power.   It is reasonable to be skeptical about 
> investment in ideas that may require years or decades of investment 
> and not result in a return. Unpacking an idea to a Silicon Valley 
> venture capitalist as to why there could be a return is deconstruction 
> not devaluation.
>
> I see these folks on MSNBC talking about the nihilism of DJT or Bannon 
> and I don’t really get it.   Democracy isn’t a value system; it is a 
> way to avoid (violent) conflict in a pluralistic society.   There’s a 
> case to be made for the merits of such societies, and a case to be 
> made for limiting violence.  They should make those cases, not just 
> throw out a placeholder word like nihilism to judge the people who 
> don’t value those types of societies.   (Apparently many people in 
> North America.)
>
> Marcus
>
> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of David Eric 
> Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
> *Date: *Sunday, October 8, 2023 at 10:40 AM
> *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject: *Re: [FRIAM] Language Model Understanding
>
> Zang!  I had not made that connection.
>
> Hmmh.  What do I think?  I seem to have viewed uninterpreted models 
> much as I view a hammer or a shovel; as a tool in the world for doing 
> a certain job (in this case, a job of perceiving the world in valid 
> ways), neither here nor there w.r.t. questions of nihilism.
>
> Where then would I try to center nihilism?  (It’s being a topic I 
> haven’t spent a lot of time on historically).  Maybe if I had to 
> choose one phrase, it would be “the devaluation of values”.   Brown 
> uses it in her book, but I think it is old and standardized.  Don’t 
> know if it came from Nietzsche or Weber, or is much older than either 
> of them.
>
> How would I orient to try to address such questions, that I do not 
> want to go into support of bombs?  I think my current cast of mind is 
> that there is a large class of “discovered thing”, meaning that they 
> are not willed into existence, but are brought into existence (if 
> there is even any bringing) through lived experience, and “noticed” 
> after the fact.  Or maybe given in the ineffable from the start, and 
> noticed along the way (all of Descartes’s cogito, the rest of “the 
> self”, and much else).  It seems to me that there is room for 
> aesthetics to be given much more and better attention than perhaps it 
> has had in philosophy (or whoever is in charge of this question). 
>  Aesthetics certainly not being the only domain from which discovered 
> things can originate, but useful in that we can recognize it as a 
> source, but not have the impulse to conflate it with dogma, as many 
> other notions of “belief” tend to drift into.
>
> Hmm.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>     On Oct 8, 2023, at 12:30 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
>     wrote:
>
>     Eric writes:
>
>     “Bears on how many things make up the machinery of nihilism,
>     extending well beyond relations I recognized as part of an
>     integration, though mentioning many things I rail against in daily
>     life.”
>
>
>     The willingness of physicists to use uninterpreted models, e.g.,
>     quantum mechanics, seems like nihilism to me.  I don’t mean that
>     in a judgmental way, nor do I mean it in an admiring way.  On the
>     other hand, there are many people, I reckon most people, that
>     provide their beliefs as both explanations and justifications.  
>     Bombs follow soon after.
>
>
>     Marcus
>
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