(1) You speak as if by “we” (or “society”), grandparent was exclusively referring to men. We (non-men, for example women) are a part of society, and some of us can be quite awful to each other; this, I expect, is common sense.
The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today).
So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men.
(2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists).
If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.)
And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly.
I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere.
(3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.
No, it would mean not attributing innate value to maleness or femaleness, so to speak,, but to the relevant metrics.
One can still compute a mean afterward and potentially find that it differs, but that is no judgment of inherent value / not a causative factor for the value judgment being made.
And even then, there might sometimes be benefit to treating people more equally than they are on some metrics. Maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing resiliency, after all.
Given that there is clearly a difference in relative value produced across a non-trivial number of (often incomparable!) contexts, men and women cannot be equal, and the fiction that they are would not survive an afternoon spent watching the Olympics, or a brief visit to a maternity ward.
In my opinion, the only thing we should do with that information is accept that (1) men and women are different, (2) disparity of outcome may be the result of those differences, as opposed to systemic bias, and (3) insisting on equality of outcome will, invariably, produce grossly inequitable results in some contexts.
Absolutely agreeing that true “intelligence” would come from such a synthesis - it also loosely matches what we know from cognitive psychology. We won’t go anywhere without rigorously addressing knowledge representation and reasoning - unlike humans, language is the only faculty ChatGPT possesses (and the power of language has been oversold for a while).
The cynic in me would rather have the backlash (and a rude awakening for the industry), than the looming hyper-normalization of convincing-sounding bullshit/plagiarism/etc (and new, more convoluted forms of “saying the magic words to make the algorithm behave”) in the near future.
(Relatedly: Say what you will about the rationalist community, they appear to have really thought about a lot of this.)
I tried to get it to write _1984_ erotic fanfiction, which it did - but everything it spewed out was a cliche. I imagine it had read all of FFN and AO3.
> gathering information
It will probably be like the Google infoboxes and “People Also Search” entries we’ve had for a while, only more superficially coherent.
It seems like the “fake it until you make it” craze has fully taken over the AI/ML scene.
it produced cliche because of the cliche quality of the prompt. You can’t expect it to be original when you’ve asked it for a tiresome combination of genre and a canonical work.
If the outputs are boring it ain’t chatgpt at fault…
I don’t know the technical details of chatgpt but other language models have a sort of randomness tuning that makes them produce more unlikely stuff. Chatgpt appears to be deliberately tuned to produce very likely, very cliche, very rote output. Great for bloggers or people who want text summaries or boring professional content, not great for creativity. It’s not a ‘fault’ of chatgpt per se but it a consequence of chatgpt’s intentions, not the user’s.
Isn‘t it kind of ironic that we complain about ChatGPT not being „creative“ enough on a thread complaining it fakes academic papers? How can the same bot be limited to only produce „facts“ and at the same time would be useful to generate great „fiction“?
But I completely agree with you: it’s often spitting out boring stuff. And yes, it makes almost everything up based on language statistics and similarities.
Perhaps, we are just in a hype cycle? There are lots of specialty tools and bots available based on GPT-3 customized for different tasks. Complaining that ChatGPT or Bing+ aren’t equally suited for every task gets tiresome. Especially if more than 2/3 of the examples simply follow the pattern „junk in - junk out“.
It would seem that, when you try too hard at being creative, chatgpt usually just loses it completely - in my experience, it often starts falling back on even worse cliches, or it stops making sense altogether. (Or it might just time out.)
Actually, ‘cliche’ is an extremely good evaluation:
It is assessing the quality of the output as if a human had made it. Most of human writing is cliche. Expecting it to produce good output is, as you say, a matter of prompt engineering.
As a (former) student of psychology, I personally subscribe to the view that both platonism and constructivism are true (edit: in that they both accurately depict different-but-interrelated aspects of mathematics).
It’s a false dilemma much like “is light a wave or a particle” or “free will or determinism”. (Yup, I am that “you can have it all” pollyanna type of person.)
I don't think it's a false dilemma, because the essence of mathematical platonism isn't really that forms exist, but that these forms are how the universe really works.
They're not an approximation, a metaphor, or a point of view. They're the real deal - the base mechanisms. And they can be discovered through the scientific process, with its combination of physical and speculative analysis.
Clearly this is nonsense. Math isn't truly self-consistent, physical research is limited to a range of lab-friendly experiments garnished with some astrophysical guesswork, and all of it gets filtered through consciousness, which we have no clue about.
What we have is a "looking for the key under the light" situation where can only explore the things we can see. We don't know what's in the dark, and it's actually very likely that our consciousness is extremely limited and unable to perceive essential detail.
But because (tautologically) we can't see it we just assume it's not there, and our tiny and contingent view is gloriously universal.
I find the cat metaphor very revealing. Cats share a space with us but they literally do not see the same objects we do. They perceive weight, texture, and dimensions, they're far more sensitive to smell, and they have some innate models for dynamics and mechanics.
But they have no concept of the meaning of a book, a laptop, a wifi card, a Netflix subscription, or a mathematical description of General Relativity. Unless we breed them specially for intelligence for a good few tens of millennia they never will, because cat consciousness is too small to contain those concepts.
It's ridiculously, almost comically naive to believe - purely on faith - that human consciousness isn't severely limited in some analogous ways.
We're quite good at the human equivalent of hunting for food - which includes manipulating physical materials and crude energy sources, with some meta-awareness of abstraction.
What are the odds that's all there is to understand about the universe?
> I don't think it's a false dilemma, because the essence of mathematical platonism isn't really that forms exist, but that these forms are how the universe really works.
Consider Euclidean geometry, which is fine, mathematically, but, it turns out, not how the universe works. If mathematical platonists were concerned about whether mathematics' forms are how the universe really works, surely they would insist on the verification of their axioms before proceeding? And then, would mathematical platonism not be just the uncontroversial parts of the physical sciences?
The author reprises the platonism / formalism issue in this article's final section, beginning with the paragraph "But there is still more to be said. Perhaps, after all some of those Big Picture questions do remain lurking in the mathematical background." He refers to Platonists as realists, but, I think, in the sense that the forms are real regardless of whether they are how the universe really works.
I would consider the reverse (that mathematics is constructed) as just as nonsensical. One could argue that if mathematics were constructed, we are essentially taking on faith that mathematical properties in the physical universe just so happen (by coincidence) to correlate with the mathematical principles we have invented. But this seems backwards. The Pythagorean theorem makes more sense as something we have discovered, or the inner corners of a triangle add up to 180 degrees (half a circle); alien civilizations likely have arrived at the same conclusion. The simple answer is that math is simply a feature of the universe.
Even if mathematics isn’t truly self-consistent (it is not), that does not commit one to formalism or constructivism. The belief that abstract entities, if they are real, must be self-consistent, requires us to believe that self-consistency is a precondition for the realism of abstract entities to begin with. But there is no obvious reason to believe this.
As for the limits of our human consciousness: arguably there is a “floor” where we can have strong beliefs in the hypotheses we form about the universe (including those of mathematics). In fact, the essence of Platonism (and where it derives it’s name) is the very view that abstraction is realer than concrete or empirical particulars because it is more unchanging and absolute. It seems inconceivable to find a single world where 2+2 != 4, but we can conceive of worlds where say, Biden is not currently president, or where gravity had a different strength. In other words, the laws of logic (and perhaps many parts of mathematics) seem very fixed, but our other laws less so. Plato thought this told us something about the ultimate hierarchy of metaphysics; modern mathematical platonists like Godel think that we have a mathematical intuition that allows us to perceive mathematical objects; mathematicists like Max Tegmark thought that nothing other than mathematical objects exist at all.
It is this intuition towards the abstract as real, realer, or realist that motivates platonism. To committed platonists, the burden of proof is actually on the non-believers, partly as a preservation of logic and mathematics. If we dismiss that (a common logic), we might be incapable of having a real discussion in the first place. Whether or not that intuition is enough, or free of problems (it is not) is very debatable. However, platonism is not trivially or obviously false.
> If mathematics were constructed, we are essentially taking on faith that mathematical properties in the physical universe just so happen (by coincidence) to correlate with the mathematical principles we have invented.
Err, no.
The mathematics we as human have constructed is a superset of the physical universe - the mathematical world embraces much more than the mere confines of the physical world we can kick and observe across.
Indeed we have constructed various mathematic worlds that are at odds with each other - some my have application in this physical universe which then precludes others from also corresponding to the same.
So to be a Pollyanna is to have a certain (overly?) (irrationally?) optimistic towards ones situation in life and perhaps even the nature of human suffering in general. To be contrasted with the Buddhist thought which asserts that basically life is suffering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
===
Anyway, back to your belief that (mathematical) Platonism and (mathematical Constructivism can be reconciled.
So a hard-core mathematical Platonist believes – if I am not mischaracterising their position – that things like numbers are actually existing entities that we discover and that even if we humans had never existed that numbers would have or that if we humans cease existing that numbers will continue to exist. So mathematical progress is a progress of discovery, not creation. A hardcore mathematical Constructivist believes that if it were not for us numbers would not exist, the very idea of number would be unthinkable, we think numbers into being. A radical Constructivist (like me) does not believe in actually existing infinities or infinitesimals and so does not believe in actually existing unbounded real numbers like irrationals and transcendentals except in a symbolic or algorithmic sense.
Can these two positions be reconciled? Can we optimistically reconcile them. I think not. But I do think that the slighter weaker proposition that certain formal entities like numbers are necessary, I'm going to say, "truths" in that the nature of the universe necessitates certain types of mathematical entities such that once there are a sufficient class of thinking things to think them they'll pop into being, so to speak.
I am open to correction on any point. I know that my personal position is more-or-less anathema to most mathematicians I've had the pleasure of sharing these ideas with (as in I've gotten into heated drunken debates/arguments about this stuff).
Wow, I guess my mental model (so to speak) is even more “radical” than yours. I don’t think mathematics is really part of the (empirical) universe, but that they are their own kind of abstract entity. They may happen to correspond to certain patterns in how things exist and interact in the “real world”, or to sentient beings’ reasoning and modeling faculties, but they are not tied to the real world either way.
For comparison: To me, for a number to exist in a “symbolic or algorithm sense” is to for it to exist, period - but in the sense of “creating”/“discovering” a new number system to contain them. The set of rational numbers isn’t really “special” to me. (Non-negative natural numbers are “special” for their association with cardinality, but I will refrain from going down that rabbit hole this time.) (I assume you meant “unbounded” in terms of expansion into elementary algebra; do correct me if I misunderstood you.)
(i.e. Existence=NaN because it’s a loaded word, Abstractness=Yes, Independence=I have some but limited sympathy for the neo-Fregean view on this, “creating” and “discovering” are the same thing to me)
(Which would make me a platonist to some people, an intuitionist to others, I guess)
2+2=4 is (roughly) the same kind of truth as “two groups each consisting of two elves have a total of four elves”, or “if you travel a distance of 2cm twice, you’ve traveled by 4cm”, except it isn’t tied to the real or fictional existence of centimeters or elves.
And loosely the same kind of truth as “imagine a world where elves live in Lorien… in this world, elves live in Lorien.”)
And on the second point, by assuming 0/0=1, either you have left the realm of natural numbers (or real numbers), or you have to break the distributive law of addition, or all the symbols mean completely different things. Otherwise, you are essentially declaring both 1!=2 and 1=2, which is not math.
That's a tautology, you can similarly say "imagine a world where mathematics isn't tied to the real or fictional existence, in this world mathematics isn't tied to the real or fictional existence".
>And on the second point, by assuming 0/0=1, either you have left the realm of natural numbers (or real numbers), or you have to break the distributive law of addition, or all the symbols mean completely different things.
I didn't do such things.
> Otherwise, you are essentially declaring both 1!=2 and 1=2, which is not math.
It's derived from initial assumptions, which is how all math works.
1. I would object to the “similarly”, because they are not similar types of statements. And yes, the tautology aspect is the whole point of the axiomatic method (which has limitations that cannot be directly blamed on that premise).
2. You didn’t do the first two. But the symbols now mean different things than their conventional interpretations in number theory.
3.
> It's derived from initial assumptions, which is how all math works
It’s exactly how _logic_ works, and is how all math works, but that would only qualify it as (il)logic, and not inherently math. Necessary but not sufficient condition.
> or all the symbols mean completely different things
It's actually not entirely unproductive to consider this line of thought, whereby in this formulation equality actually means something like "arrivable via some number of zero divisions". I'm sure you could find all sorts of curiosities with this mathematical "toy".
Yup. You run into that all the time in abstract algebra. Although people usually don’t like to touch the equality sign; the usual practice (based on my limited exposure) is to invent equivalent operator notations.
Exactly - it’s still there (and still has its own semantics), but it’s also inert.
And, to address your point directly, of course mathematics detached from context can be used in practice. One can certainly create-slash-discover an abstract algebra, derives theorems about it detached from outside context, and then later on discover a context in which the abstract structure is applicable, and apply the pre-derived theorems.
I actually agree with you - “the symbols mean something different now” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. But I was trying to point out (what I saw as) a big ambiguity in parent’s comment.
This is a very shortsighted, historically-ignorant take that singles out M2F trans folks disingenuously - there have been plenty of calls from all over society, from cis women to trans women to trans men to gay folks to straight folks to any and all racial groups.
No, let’s just ignore all the times this has happened in history and all the times other groups had raised similar points (their possible merits aside), pretend this is a new problem, and blame MTF folks for it.
Then maybe I missed the point of the comparison. Why would we care if speech is considered abusive of not?
From the perspective of the article, hurtful speech (abuse), is and always will be subject to the interpretation of the listener. As such it will always change with time and context.
Anything can be interpreted as abusive speech at any time. It is not a consensus definition.
The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today).
So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men.
(2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists).
If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.)
And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly.
I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere.
(3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.