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#epistemology

4 posts3 participants0 posts today
Continued thread

Out of curiosity, I went to see when in fact "heed" dropped off in usage, and as I suspected, it was during The Enlightenment, just before the Revolutionary War. It tried to pull up again in the mid-19th century, then the 20th century put the nail in it. Again, probably because of its connections to the concept of obedience. To understand someone meant you would obey them, and after awhile that didn't seem so fun. (I just picture some angry old father screaming at his children to heed him or else.) Our society is FAR less authoritarian than it once was.

(I saw a YouTube video on outsider artist Henry Darger last night, and jesus we have it good. I'd like to keep it that way and make things even better.)

wolframalpha.com/input?i=heed

#epistemology
#psychology
#etymology
#English
#AbuseCulture

www.wolframalpha.comheed - Wolfram|AlphaWolfram|Alpha brings expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels.

English conflates the concepts of "hear" and "understand." Many conflicts get nowhere because we use the common phrasing, "You're not listening to me!" or "You didn't hear me!" when what we really mean is, "You didn't get me, I want you to make sense of what I'm saying."

The process of comprehending what someone has said is different than hearing their words. How many times have you said, "You're not listening!" and they were in fact "listening" but not getting it? How many times have you said, "No I HEARD you?" when you did not, in fact, understand?

English used to have a snappy word for this: heed. To heed was to both hear AND to understand. And it also meant "obey" which might be why it fell out of favor (which itself reflects an interesting point of cultural values shift). We DO in fact conflate "listen" to obedience, sometimes, especially towards children. But not as much as once was.

The fact that all words mean multiple things, and that English has some issues with which things are conflated, can really influence how we think and interact. It's worth trying to unpack that. Then I start thinking towards how we can change English to be better.

If you understand Virtue Epistomology (VE), you cannot accept any LLM output as "information".

VE is an attempt to correct the various omniscience-problems inherent in classical epistemologies, which all to some extent require a person to know what the Truth is in order to evaluate if some statement is true.

VE prescribes that we should look to how the information was obtained, particularly in two ways:
1) Was the information obtained using a well-understood method that is known to produce good results?
2) Does the method appear to have been applied correctly in this particular case?

LLM output always fails on pt1. An LLM will not look for the truth. It will just look for what is a probable combination of words. This means that an LLM is just as likely to combine a number of true statements in a way that is probable but false, as it is to combine them in a way that is probable and true.

LLMs only sample the probability of word combinations. It doesn't understand the input, and it doesn't understand its own output.

Only a damned fool would use it for anything, ever.

#epistemology #LLM #generativeAI #ArtificialIntelligence #ArtificialStupidity @philosophy

In other words, Generative AI and LLMs lack a sound epistemology and that's very problematic...:

"Bullshit and generative AI are not the same. They are similar, however, in the sense that both mix true, false, and ambiguous statements in ways that make it difficult or impossible to distinguish which is which. ChatGPT has been designed to sound convincing, whether right or wrong. As such, current AI is more about rhetoric and persuasiveness than about truth. Current AI is therefore closer to bullshit than it is to truth. This is a problem because it means that AI will produce faulty and ignorant results, even if unintentionally.
(...)
Judging by the available evidence, current AI – which is generative AI based on large language models – entails artificial ignorance more than artificial intelligence. That needs to change for AI to become a trusted and effective tool in science, technology, policy, and management. AI needs criteria for what truth is and what gets to count as truth. It is not enough to sound right, like current AI does. You need to be right. And to be right, you need to know the truth about things, like AI does not. This is a core problem with today's AI: it is surprisingly bad at distinguishing between truth and untruth – exactly like bullshit – producing artificial ignorance as much as artificial intelligence with little ability to discriminate between the two.
(...)
Nevertheless, the perhaps most fundamental question we can ask of AI is that if it succeeds in getting better than humans, as already happens in some areas, like playing AlphaZero, would that represent the advancement of knowledge, even when humans do not understand how the AI works, which is typical? Or would it represent knowledge receding from humans? If the latter, is that desirable and can we afford it?"

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf

papers.ssrn.comAI as Artificial IgnoranceAI and bullshit (in the strong philosophical sense of Harry Frankfurt) are similar in the sense that both prioritize rhetoric over truth. They mix true, false,

My favourite online comparative theologian at ESOTERICA Dr. Justin Sledge has put out part four of his Demiurge series, would recommend if you're interested in how humans came up with all the crazy things we believe these days. Turns out wE lIvE iN a SimUlAtIoN is antique and creaky as well. youtube.com/watch?v=kq-CoIFf8l0 #Epistemology #Philosophy #ComparativeTheology #Occult #Religion

Pari tuoretta OA-artikkelia sosiaalisen epistemologian journaalissa.

Pedro Schmechtig pohtii episteemistä paternalismia ja suojelevaa auktoriteettia, tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10, eli millä ehdoin voisi olla oikein auttaa, jopa ohjata jotakuta "tietämään paremmin".

Mark Coeckelbergh puolestaan tarkastelee tekoälyn vaikutusta episteemiseen agenssiin eli tiedonmuodostuksemme itsenäisyyteen ja kriittisyyteen, tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10

Neu im Science Works Podcast: Holger Straßheim (Uni Bielefeld) skizziert Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen verschiedenen Zugängen zur politischen Epistemologie und denkt über Konfliktdynamiken im Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Politik unter den Bedingungen der Weltgesellschaft nach.
blogs.hu-berlin.de/sciencework #science #sciencestudies #podcast #epistemology

blogs.hu-berlin.de#12 SCIENCE WORKS / Jour fixe: Politische Epistemologie | Science Works
Replied in thread

@tg9541 @bookstodon @philosophy

yes, agree in a way. but do not see a win in playing off those two against each other, as later (after their common work PM) their work developed rather independently in more or less complementary areas, sometimes overlapping in #PhilSci topics.

E.g., if one focusses in #philosophy first of all on questions of #ontology (of science), ANW's process ontology will be much more impressive than say the duplicating entities of logical constructs in 'logical atomism' (which imop is a late and needless sin of BR).

If, on the other hand, the main focus is #logic and logic related
#epistemology and/or #PhilMath, there is roughly anything deeper and more worth considering than the theory of incomplete symbols; and perhaps no more careful and penetrating study than the ramified theory of types as developed from the circulus vitiosus argument, even when this theory was abandoned in the sequel for independent reasons.

Patient-Centered Measurement: Ethics, Epistemology, and Dialogue in Contemporary Medicine
Leah M. McClimans (2024)

"patient-centered measures present a puzzle. And this puzzle has its source in the Janus-faced nature of medicine. How can measurement, which relies on standardization, represent patient perspectives, which, if not idiosyncratic are at least various and changeable?"

academic.oup.com/book/56467