Bathrobe sent me this post at The Conversation by Morten H. Christiansen and Pablo Contreras Kallens; after talking about the Chomskyan insistence on a grammar template wired into our brains, they continue:
But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.
Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be.
GPT-3, arguably the most well-known of these models, is a gigantic deep-learning neural network with 175 billion parameters. It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence given what came before across hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books and Wikipedia. When it made a wrong prediction, its parameters were adjusted using an automatic learning algorithm.
Remarkably, GPT-3 can generate believable text reacting to prompts such as “A summary of the last ‘Fast and Furious’ movie is…” or “Write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson.” Moreover, GPT-3 can respond to SAT level analogies, reading comprehension questions and even solve simple arithmetic problems – all from learning how to predict the next word. […]
Research published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that these artificial deep-learning networks seem to use the same computational principles as the human brain. The research group, led by neuroscientist Uri Hasson, first compared how well GPT-2 – a “little brother” of GPT-3 – and humans could predict the next word in a story taken from the podcast “This American Life”: people and the AI predicted the exact same word nearly 50% of the time. […]
We are not suggesting that GPT-3 or GPT-2 learn language exactly like children do. Indeed, these AI models do not appear to comprehend much, if anything, of what they are saying, whereas understanding is fundamental to human language use. Still, what these models prove is that a learner – albeit a silicon one – can learn language well enough from mere exposure to produce perfectly good grammatical sentences and do so in a way that resembles human brain processing.
For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models prove otherwise. They demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned from linguistic experience alone. Likewise, we suggest that children do not need an innate grammar to learn language.
Bathrobe also sent a link to “a very dismissive thread on the article” at r/linguistics where redditors say things like “linguists are mostly die-hard Chomskyans. We beat that strawman into submission really hard.” Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they, deluded creatures that they are?
learning networks seem to use the same computational principles as the human brain
Really? They know what the computational principles used by the human brain are, now? Why was I not informed of this? Find me an underling to punish …
Yet again, I must cite the Hausa proverb: Kama da Wane ba Wane ba: “Like John Smith doesn’t mean that he is John Smith.”
This doesn’t actually seem to have any particular relevance to Chomsky’s errors: the system is hardly suffering from poverty of stimulus. Quite the opposite.
Once again: a bad argument for a true proposition (here, “Chomsky is fundamentally wrong”) is still a bad argument.
Moreover, GPT-3 can respond to SAT level analogies, reading comprehension questions and even solve simple arithmetic problems – all from learning how to predict the next word. […]
Can it pass an exam and study in a university?
Nowadays, probably yes … (I presume it could stump up the fees …)
Indeed, it could probably get papers published in Nature Neuroscience … seems to have the necessary skills …
Why, people back in the day thought that ELIZA was pretty much indistinguishable from a real shrink…
Christiansen and Kallens seem in fact to be unfamiliar with the actual state of play regarding Chomskyanism (and who shall blame them? Unless, of course, they choose to write articles on the topic …)
They refer to (presumably) the Principles and Parameters incarnation of the Great Truth, long since junked by the Great Man on the (not unreasonable, though characteristically unacknowledged) grounds that it Doesn’t Bloody Work, as if it was still current wisdom, and are evidently also unaware that the Poverty of the Stimulus thing has long since been – well – debunked, anyway. With no AI needed,
Quite interesting. If I’ve understood correctly, the next time someone exercises their “second amendment rights” and kills a bunch of schoolchildren, the local NRA-owned politician will be spared the need to intone thoughts and prayers. They can just feed the report of the massacre to the computer, and it will use its speech synthesizer to say thoughts and prayers in the voice of that very same selected official.
A camera renders anatomy more precisely than Leonardo or Degas. Is a camera an artist?
In fairness, passing the Turing Test is probably a bad career move for a politician. It doesn’t do to frighten the horses.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/p-bot
(Why not?)
It occurs to me that this experiment could in fact be interpreted as supporting what is actually the foundational Chomskyan error, viz that syntax can be satisfactorily analysed without invoking meaning.
This experiment, where meaning has been totally excluded (the machine being altogether incapable of attaching meaning to constructions), yet the generated verbiage is apparently grammatically acceptable, seems to be a sort of proof of concept.
In fact, it fails to prove the point because the technique is highly parasitic on the imitation of vast numbers of texts generated by agents who do associate meaning with form, and thereby smuggles an intermittent imitation of meaning into its output. Still, it gives a powerful illusion of proving the point.
As it happens, I was just reading a Construction Grammar account of English which points out that the Poverty Of the Stimulus argument, especially with some of the particular constructions favoured by Chomskyite pushers of the argument, actually assumes that syntax is a separate thing from meaning, thereby greatly increasing the supposed difficulty of the learner’s task.
Y: A camera renders anatomy more precisely than Leonardo or Degas. Is a camera an artist?
There was a debate, after the invention of photography, as to whether a photograph could be copyrighted. Is taking a photograph an act of creative invention, or just a mechanical process? Thanks to a campaign by professional photographers, it was eventually decided that a photograph can be copyrighted.
But not by the person who designed the camera, though.
The research group, led by neuroscientist Uri Hasson, first compared how well GPT-2 – a “little brother” of GPT-3 – and humans could predict the next word in a story taken from the podcast “This American Life”: people and the AI predicted the exact same word nearly 50% of the time.
This somehow reminds me of the Monty Python sketch proving that penguins are as intelligent as people, because the comprehension level of a group of penguins to a spoken passage in German was identical to that of a group of humans selected for an inability to speak German. (I think it was German.)
syntax can be satisfactorily analysed without invoking meaning.
This should at least be adequate for translating such hum-drum texts as bureaucratese. Which similarly rarely involves meaning.
(The Decher critique hints darkly there are limits, without giving examples. My experience is ‘supporters/researchers’ (Liberman for example) have so much lowered their expectations that “can write newspaper articles” means articles no editor would dare to charge money for.)
I totally agree with the criticisms voiced here.
I did find the reddit thread pretty ridiculous, though. As the second commenter said:
And the article they cite to summarize “Chomskyism” is twenty years old. In his more recent work on the minimalist program, Chomsky notes that “developments in linguistic theory over the past two decades have greatly clarified aspects of language’s origin. In particular, we now have good reasons to believe that a key component of human language—the basic engine that drives language syntax—is far simpler than most would have thought just a few decades ago.”
Good reasons to believe? Chomsky only justifies his latest theory by appealing to some concept of “computationally simple”. When hard-core Chomskyans write things like “far simpler than most would have thought just a few decades ago”, I’m tempted to ask “How many times did you perform Merge when you wrote that sentence?”
Pushback from non-Chomskyans is also satisfying. As cat-head said:
I think there is a double standard in how models are evaluated. Mathematically informal and computationally unimplementable models are considered ‘fine’ but computational models are not considered interesting unless they fully solve language. (My bolding)
maidhc: From the little I’ve read, it seems that undirected photography, e.g. by webcams or security cameras, is probably not copyrightable, by US law anyway.
Y: You may be right. Copyright requires a creative step. But it may be that, analogous to a work made for hire, the output of an undirected camera belongs to the owner of the camera.
It’s my understanding (based on something I heard on NPR) that currently the most common use of automatic text generation software is generating tedious and predictable newspaper stories such as accounts of high school sports events. These may get tidied up a bit by an editor later. I imagine copyright issues are covered in the software license.
I misremembered the Monty Python sketch. The English comprehension of the penguins was compared to humans who didn’t speak English. At least one of them was German.
At least one of them was German.
The humans or the penguins?
“This experiment, where meaning has been totally excluded (the machine being altogether incapable of attaching meaning to constructions), yet the generated verbiage is apparently grammatically acceptable, seems to be a sort of proof of concept.”
@DE, not totally. Where meanings comes from is a philosophical question, but context is at least a part of what creates meanings in our minds.
What makes them say language models don’t have grammars? They’re certainly built on an architecture that has language structure in mind, and many recent studies are finding evidence of implicit compositional syntax within their parameter layers. Inductive bias doesn’t have to come in the form of trees.
what creates meanings in our minds
The context doesn’t create meaning: we assign meaning to the patterns we see,
There isn’t any way, conceptually, of getting from pure syntax to semantics: from links between signs to links between the signs and what they signify. It’s like an inhabitant of Flatland trying to move in three dimensions.
The machine here is an inhabitant of Flatland.
@DE, I don’t know what ‘meaning” means. I think we see it as anchored outside of langauge (in our mental and external realities) and yet we learn it from the context too. When you leave only contexts for all texts, the situation becomes different. True. But can we say that semantics disappears, if contexts are still here?
And it is not just “from syntax”.
“we assign meaning” – do we already have meanings before assigning them?
I think we see it as anchored outside of language
Inevitably, surely? If no word has any real-world referent, how can language relate to anything at all, except itself? Indeed, in what sense is it even a “language”, as opposed to a (perhaps very elaborate) internal mind game of some sort?
The machine has no access to any context whatsoever outside of the texts themselves. It is logically impossible for it to be able to relate signified to signifier: it has no knowledge of anything signified. If its agorithms are sufficiently elaborate, it may be able to imitate the behaviour of agents which do relate signified to signifier: but imitation is all that it can ever achieve. Kama da Wane ba Wane ba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signified_and_signifier
My argument does not depend on any assumptions about whether a machine is actually or potentially capable of thought or consciousness or anything like that. It would apply just as much to a human being whose entire life experience consisted of reading texts (as a result of some ghastly dystopian experiment.) It seems to overlap a bit with Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, but I don’t actually find that very persuasive: I don’t think Searle has ever come up with a good answer to the idea that the Room as a whole system in fact does understand Chinese, even though its hapless operator does not. After all, my individual neurons are presumably not conscious …
(The Chomskyan view, of course, from the outset, was that actual human language really is the same kind of thing as an abstract mathematical structure, metaphorically called “language”, where the question of external reference does not arise and the only questions are how the elements of the “language” relate to one another; it is hardly surprising that this ludicrous idea has run into the sand, only that it’s taken so long.)
@DE, I need “consciousness” here, because the fact is I believe you have it, so I list it too.
I don’t know what it is, so maybe you can take some meanings from there:)
But I just said “mental reality” which must include many things.
Yes, the crude model is “some words/concepts are anchored in [the source of all meanings] and others are either explicitly defined (X is Y) or less explicitly learned from contexts. Or both anchored in [the source] and in the contexts where you observe them. And there is also grammar that helps us with definitions, we learn it in a similar manner”.
What I mean is that if you remove this external anchor, what you or your machine have is still far from “nothing”:/
She is in the situation of a sceintist who discovered a Klingon inscription.
How can I claim that it does not contain semantics? What does it contain then? Definititely not only grammar…
Also consider a blind person. We receive a lot of data in the form of visual input and we don’t know what of it matters and what of it does not. But enough to consider a blind person to understand that this data is not critical.
She still has many other things distinct from verbal communication. Movements and shapes, touches and smells.This is all right, but are those really building blocks that form the WHOLE of our experience, our thinking, our feelings and communication?
What I mean is that if you remove this external anchor, what you or your machine have is still far from “nothing”:/
She is in the situation of a sceintist who discovered a Klingon inscription.
I agree with your first statement: if you strip away the annoying hyperbole and the cod philosophising, what the researchers have achieved is actually quite interesting.
I disagree strongly with your second. Your scientist is not at all in the position of the machine. She has discovered the inscription herself in some particular real world context, or heard about it from those who did. She knows that it is an inscription, and what inscriptions are. She has recognised that it is in a language, and that it is not a language that she knows. Your scenario inevitably implies that the researcher brings a huge amount of real-world knowledge to the interpretation of the text before she even begins. She will, moreover, not conclude that she has actually succeeded in interpreting the inscription until she can relate its contents to her preceding knowledge of the external world. She would certainly not regard it as “success” just to be able to imitate its contents plausibly (even well enough to fool actual Klingons) regardless of any supposed meaning (though that might be a clever thing to be able to do.)
Also consider a blind person. We receive a lot of data in the form of visual input and we don’t know what of it matters and what of it does not. But enough to consider a blind person to understand that this data is not critical
Smell, touch etc are also meaningful concepts only insofar as they relate to an external world. (Otherwise, one is talking about hallucinations, and even the word “hallucination” implies the existence of sensations which are, in contrast, not mistaken.)
If anything, this is surely even more obvious than with words?
This reminds me a bit of Wittgenstein’s celebrated Private Language Argument …
Yes, this claim about Klingons was not really accurate. But I realised that I can’t accurately describe what’s wrong with it, and still illustrates the point about “far from ‘nothing'”, so I allowed myself this false comparison.
As for blind people, what I mean is that either our inborn mental reality plays a very large role, or verbal communication itself is very rich, or, if it is “anchored” in touches and shapes, then all our conversations are made of building blocks as simple as touches and shapes.
all our conversations are made of building blocks as simple as touches and shapes.
What’s simple about them?
@LH, what I meant is that is remarkable.
Visual input is so much data every second (and you don’t even know what of it your brain processes and what ignores), that even thinking “do I mostly learn from visual or verbal input?” is very difficult. This is why I thought about blind people (also the fact that blind people are not too different from other people and don’t behave like extraterrestrials means something – but it is not why I spoke about them).
I do not mean that tactile input is poor.
I think all the three options are true to some extent.
St Ludwig’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument
is basically an attempt to show that it is not actually logically possible that the basis of our thoughts is to be found in qualia like simple touches and shapes. (It’s an unfortunate and misleading name for the argument, really, but the argument itself seems entirely valid to me.)
The argument also undermines the idea that the connection of signifier and signified is straightforward and unproblematic. I was thinking that this is a potential weak spot in the (generally persuasive) Construction Grammar notion that form and meaning are associated from the get-go in “constructions” which go all the way down to morpheme level. “Meaning” (as drasvi rightly implies) is not a straightforward concept at all.
Be that as it may, that is one of the handicaps that our unfortunate machine is labouring under. It’s not capable of participating in any language game (In Witter’s sense.) And it’s not part of a language community.
As a result of the above discussion about the necessity of creative input in making photographs copyrightable, I had a look at famous examples of “animal-produced art” on Wikipedia. I knew there would be ample cases of artistic monkeys and elephants, but I also found an example of a rabbit who paints.
However, that’s not why I’m leaving this comment. I followed the Wikipedia link to the page for the “Domestic rabbit,” which begins:
My instinct was that the inclusion of “bun” in the list of synonyms was probably a sly reference to the use of that term in xkcd.
the Principles and Parameters incarnation of the Great Truth, long since junked by the Great Man on the (not unreasonable, though characteristically unacknowledged) grounds that it Doesn’t Bloody Work
Actually, uptake of the new Minimalism appears to be rather poor; Principles and Parameters still seems to be the standard for many, being the last incarnation of Chomskyan theory that has a body of concrete analyses that can actually be referred to. Minimalism is just a “program”.
Good grief, it was announced by the Fount of Wisdom Himself in 1993!
Get with the Program, people!
Publish those insights!
Thirty years is not too long for a revolution to gather pace. I’m only afraid Noam will be pushing up daisies by the time his program comes to fruition….
I would like to see automated text generation try its hand imitating this type of dreary polemic. It all looks the same anyhow.
It’s what Orwell calls “duckspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Interesting standing locution “communists and workers.” Presumably this is supposed to be construed like “lord and master” with “and” joining two words referring to the same entity, but the implicature for an English L1 speaker is that the communists and the workers are distinct groups. Heresy!
The title “Information Bulletin” reminds me of the old joke that there is no pravda in “Izvestiya”, and no izvestiya in “Pravda.”
Presumably this is supposed to be construed like “lord and master” with “and” joining two words referring to the same entity
Not at all. To be a communist, it is not enough simply to be a worker; you must be a “conscious” worker with enough партийность (to use the expressive Russian term) to deserve and be granted the infinitely desired Party card (the loss of which is so catastrophic in Simonov’s novel). And of course not only workers can be communists; you have forgotten the sacred union of workers and peasants, comrade! I am afraid some reeducation will be required…
Ah! You passed my little test, Hat! For a moment I thought I might trap you into expressing bourgeois revisionism …
David E.: The machine here is an inhabitant of Flatland
Which one?
The question here is: do Norwegians have the capacity to assign meaning to utterances?
(I leave, for the present, the question as to whether Norwegians are conscious.)
languagehat: …you have forgotten the sacred union of workers and peasants, comrade!
But that is just another kind of cant. Taken as an exclusive or, it literally implies that peasants don’t work! (For similar reasons, I don’t use the term “working class,” as it implies that the upper middle class doesn’t work.)
The question here is: do Norwegians have the capacity to assign meaning to utterances?
(I leave, for the present, the question as to whether Norwegians are conscious.)
Sometimes they are, sometimes not – like everybody. To sleep, perhaps to dream of assigning meaning !
Point …
David E.: The question here is: do Norwegians have the capacity to assign meaning to utterances?
Good question, but maybe we should narrow the scope. The toponym Flatland is mostly confined the region of Telemark, which was still a blank slate in the 16th century, so all meaning must have been assigned later.
Ah. So it would have been the Danes that assigned the meaning, then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway#Union_with_Denmark
Norwegian national romanticism, rather.
One wonders why. But i’ll leave that to the teleologists.
it literally implies that peasants don’t work!
Nor did they! In pre-industrial times, peasants would rise late, linger over an ample breakfast of bread and jam, wander out to say hello to the cows and sheep and goats, then return by early evening to indulge in bucolic festivities of singing and dancing, before heading off to the pub to get sloshed on beer or cider. Such was life in the pre-modern age.
Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output … is grammatically correct.
Proven: the AI is Republican! (It is mean, but I think sitll funny; be sure for your mental health to change some key words to make it a Democrat. Disregard if you are not a USian)
Insofar as the notion of “grammatical correctness” is at all objective, is it not (ipso facto) a Radical Socialist concept?
Real Republicans know that truth is entirely a matter of the Will to Believe.
No, I haven’t seen ‘conservative’ publications complaining about a bias in Google images.
P.S. “nonsensical, but grammatically correct” is indeed applicable to political discourse in general.
One wonders why. But i’ll leave that to the teleologists.
Are teleologists the people who study Telemark, or is Telemark the place where teleologists live?
P.S. “nonsensical, but grammatically correct” is indeed applicable to political discourse in general.
Chomsky himself, reportedly, is not too far from this; cf. the Chomskybot.
(I forgot: did he become a politician before or after he became a linguist?)
Telemark is skiing style that can still to an extent be praciced with NN bindings (but not with those stupid modern bindings…). But of course the is a specialised binding too.
All modern bindings are specialized, but some are more specialized than others. Modern cross-country bindings are mostly useless outside groomed tracks, but that’s OK, for so are modern cross-country skis. I have a pair of fjellski (back country skis) with wooden core and curved steel edges (51-60 mm wide), bindings like this (except the cable), and boots like this. The main use is for off-track cross-country skiing, but they work decently for Telemark as well, at least in natural snow outside of the prepared slopes. In slopes you’ll need better skills than mine. When I go cross-country skiing in well-groomed trails, the bindings and boots rub against the sides of the track, so I got myself a pair of trail skis with a modern binding as well.
Telemark style skiing is named for the pioneers of modern skiing from Telemark. Slalom (Norw. slalåm) is a compound of Telemark dialect words (maybe even coined by these pioneers). The last element is låm “track left by a pulled or gliding object”. The first element is said to be the adjective sla(d) meaning “weakly sloped, almost flat”; which bothers me, and I suspect it could instead be slag in the sense “fold; straight movement between sharp turns”, so “zigzag track”.
Teleology is the study of Telemark. The people living in Telemark are Telemarketers.
All modern bindings are specialized
For a moment I thought you were talking about generative grammar
All modern bindings are specialized
For a moment I thought you were talking about generative grammar
I made a WiPe-mediated attempt to discover what that’s all about. I found:
and
and
No thanks. Such use of notation to simulate clarity is just plain tacky.
I am reminded of RL Moore’s Axiom 1:
@Trond, yes. It seems there is a misconception that one of those bindings is “old” and the other is “modern”, but the “modern” ones (likely) increase your speed on a prepared trail and are less convenient when you need to make turns.
or maybe I just never tried “SNS pilot, SNS–BC, NNN–BC” with appropriate books from here.
P.S. booTs (usually I make this typo in books.. booBs. Sigh).
@Stu, I’m sure you could package all that in a single concept and be much briefer. Like the Axiom of Induction: “An inductive set exists.” Sure, but you have to set up all sorts of machinery to interpret it, and getting from there to “finite induction works” is not trivial either, but that’s what people want it to mean.
@Lars: the WiPe article from which I took those “definitions” gives no intuitive motivation. I’m fed up with notation-shuffling. I liked it many decades ago. I’m also put off by concept-shuffling in philosophy. Today I decided that “necessary” is yet another concept I don’t need.
Moore in his book gives no motivation for his Axiom 1. He was infamous for refusing to give explanations. You had to find your own.
I took a topology class with him because everyone said he wouldn’t let me in, so I lied about my age and was accepted.
@DE, are “sings” are so different from “signs, touches and shapes”?
We can, of course, decide that we consist of two subsistems, one processes “touches and shapes”, one processes “words” and meanings are arrows from words to senses. We can even declare that “touches and shapes” are what we actually think about, while “words” is just an arbitrary extra layer (and it is arbitrary in that words are different in different languages).
The problem is that whether you input wholly consists of texts or it also contains touches and shapes, both times it is “some data”….
So your idea is that the machine develops “meaning” by associating text items with other text items?
That would mean that there was still an unbridgeable gap between its universe of “meaning” and the actual non-textual world; but, more importantly, the point of the Blessed Ludwig’s Private Language Argument is that your scenario (that we ourselves assign meaning by, as it were, creating arrows from words to sense inputs) is logically impossible. (This is basically the “picture theory” expounded so beautifully in the Tractatus; Wittgenstein’s later work is basically all dedicated to showing that it doesn’t work.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_theory_of_language
Rather that I am not sure that lack of input other than verbal means that “meaning” is meaningless for our machine (if it is meaningful at all, it is difficult to discuss “meaning”).
That the system “AI and a text” is incomplete or that the missing component is touches and shapes and not something else.
Denying that “meaning” exists other than as interrelationships among verbal tokens seems akin to denying that consciousness exists — a pointless game for philosophers.
If I understand correctly, the situation currently is that AI can learn to produce a text about cats when prompted the word “cat”, and it has learnt to produce such texts in a way that fits with how people write about cats. But while it can write “The boy fed the cat this morning”, it has no concept of boys, or cats, or feeding, or mornings, it only knows that these words can be combined in a way that look like the texts it has learnt on.
But would you say that a system that could observe a boy feeding a cat in the morning and, based on that observation, would produce that sentence later in the day had a concept of meaning?
“Здравствуй, здравствуй, кот Василий,
Как идут у вас дела?”
Дети козлика спросили…
Зарыдала камбала.
И малюткам кот ответил,
Потрясая бородой:
“Отправляйтесь в школу, дети!
Окунь плачет под водой.”
[from Shefner’s Girl by the Cliff, depicting the in-story state-of-the-art situation of AI verse writing in the early 22nd century]
But would you say that a system that could observe a boy feeding a cat in the morning and, based on that observation, would produce that sentence later in the day had a concept of meaning?
I think the key question there is not the text production, but the “observe.”
If the machine could reliably identify
(a) that there was a young human male involved (not a young girl, not a chimpanzee, not a consultant ophthalmologist)
(b) that there was a cat involved (not a ferret, a genet or a foxcub)
(c) that the boy was actually causing the cat to eat (and that that is a thing cats do, at least with some things, though not others)
… “in the morning” is dead easy for our machine, of course …
and could consistently perform similar but different feats (say, identifying correctly that an old man was watering plants in the afternoon) so that this was not a matter of merely fitting whatever was happening into a limited set of preset tick-box categories of possible scenarios), then I’d say Yes (being, as I said above, unimpressed by Searle’s Chinese Box argument.)
Note that huge amounts of real-world background information would be necessary in advance for the machine to make these “observations” correctly.
(c) is the difficult one, I think (after all, even mobile phone apps are quite good at identifying things as being cats.) Along with the requirement for being able to perform other feats of a similar but different nature, which, to be honest, is a way of smuggling in a requirement that the system actually be intelligent, in the normal sense, as opposed to the watered-down pretend marketing-slogan sense used in modern “Artificial intelligence.”
During the Heroic Age of AI, before the current Age of Cheating with Statistics, quite lot of work went into working out how a machine might interpret situations by, for example, comparing them with various prescripted situations. It turned out to be horribly impractical for all but toy problems.
It’s analogous to the way that attempts to do machine translation by teaching machines about syntax have been comprehensively overtaken by brute-force statistical methods involving training on huge amounts of input, and to hell with getting machines to “interpret” anything. In practical terms, the results are much more impressive, but the philosophical questions about what is really going on have merely been solved by the time-honoured method of pretending that they don’t exist.
It’s conceivable, I suppose, that we ourselves parse sentences in the same way that these neural networks do, a claim artlessly implied by TFA’s “learning networks seem to use the same computational principles as the human brain.” I prefer to think that meaning enters into my own language-processing strategies, but I only say that because I am a philosophical zombie and I don’t want to feel left out. (Humans can be so cruel about us.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
@DE: Now we have a set of criteria. Only one remark on this:
that the boy was actually causing the cat to eat
I’d be wary of bringing causality into this; philosophers might accost you in a dark alley…
And for me, it would be sufficient to observe that the boy puts food where the cat is supposed to eat it, whether the cat accepts the offering or not; I would be confident in answering “yes” to the question “Did you feed the cat?” even in that case.
What I mean (if i, given my ontological status, can truly be said to mean something) is that the correct use of the word “feed” entails a particular interpretation of the situation. For example, if the boy dropped the food accidentally, and the cat leapt on it, did the boy feed the cat? If the boy dropped the food, and the cat happened to find it an hour later?
The details in this particular case are not vital: it’s easy to come up with other apparently unproblematic descriptions of what is in front of one’s very eyes which in point of fact entail whole layers of assumed classification of, and identification of, participants and causal relationships, to say nothing of the background knowledge needed to make the scene describable in precisely that way at all.
David Eddyshaw: It’s analogous to the way that attempts to do machine translation by teaching machines about syntax have been comprehensively overtaken by brute-force statistical methods involving training on huge amounts of input, and to hell with getting machines to “interpret” anything.
Similarly, the key conceptual development the made it possible for computers to beat the best humans at chess was giving up on trying to teach the computers how to play chess. People like Hans Berliner (who had been a world champion in correspondence chess) tried to teach computers to play the way they themselves played. The Deep Thought team at IBM instead hit upon the strategy of teaching the computer how to learn to play chess, then feeding it a huge number of grandmaster games to learn from.
I wonder if Google has an in-house Philosophy Team? (It should have a quick-response unit for dealing with ontological emergencies.)
I’d prefer a paramedical unit staffed by the Department of Clinical Ontology.
“Excuse me, ma’am, I’m an ontologist; what is the nature of your current problem with Being?”
“I think, Doctor, but I’m not.”
If an ontologist would speak, could we understand him?
“Doctor, I have no continuity of self.”
“The treatment will make you a selection of episodes with a loose thematic connection.”
“That isn’t really helpful, doctor.”
“There’s only so much antology can do.”
“I think, Doctor, but I’m not.”
A common problem over on one of my Discord servers, where the newly formed headmates frequently doubt whether they in fact exist.
(Continuity-of-self troubles are also fairly common. Comes with the DID.)
The title “Information Bulletin” reminds me of the old joke that there is no pravda in “Izvestiya”, and no izvestiya in “Pravda.”
This, and (later) the recent discussion in the phrasebook thread which also touched on the same words, reminded me of Tom Lehrer’s Lobachevsky, where a scene near the end goes “Pravda said [funny but irrelevant Russian phrase] – it stinks, but Izvestiya said [another funny but irrelevant Russian phrase] – it stinks”.
And I thought, rule-of-funny Russian phrases aside, it seems clear that Lehrer expected his presumably-American audience to recognize the names “Pravda” and “Izvestiya”.
But how? Where would Americans in the 1950s (or ’60s or ’70s for that matter) have heard the names of the Soviet newspapers? Presumably Soviet newspapers did not actually publish in the USA. Would there be sufficiently frequent reports of Soviet news attributed to those newspapers?
Or is it some kind of TV thing? Having not lived through the US side of the Cold War – or the Soviet side either, technically – I have no idea where it could ever come up, but presumably it somehow did or the reference would have fallen flat.
– “Правда” есть
– Нет.
– “Россия” есть?
– “Россию” продали.
– А что осталось?
– “Труд” за три копейки…
“Россия” – Советская Россия.
Would there be sufficiently frequent reports of Soviet news attributed to those newspapers?
I don’t know about the U.S., but in German news broadcasts and newspaper articles it was usual to quote Soviet sources for news from the USSR in the 70s. Frequently enough that even as a teenager I was familiar with names like Pravda and TASS.
I don’t know about the U.S., but in German news broadcasts and newspaper articles it was usual to quote Soviet sources for news from the USSR in the 70s. Frequently enough that even as a teenager I was familiar with names like Pravda and TASS.
Same in the US; I was familiar with all those names in the ’60s and maybe even in the ’50s (I say “maybe” because I was just a kid and didn’t pay as much attention to the news; I’m sure my parents knew them).
Same in the UK too.
And in Norway. I knew Pravda and TASS from a very early age. NPABAA and TACC even earlier.
Бравада “bravade” would make a good name for a newspaper…. Morning Bravade.
This has been niggling at me for a long time.
(David Eddyshaw on Chomskyan theory) Doesn’t Bloody Work
For me, this is grammatically substandard. In good English we need an adverbial form here, not an adjectival one. ‘Bloody’ is an adjective; ‘bloody-well’ is the adverbial form. The correct form is:
Doesn’t Bloody-well Work
I was quoting a member of the Royal Family!
None of your antipodean republicanism here!
May I speak in support of the August Personage but note that a participle, i.e., bleeding/fucking could be effectively substituted for “bloody”. The construction [NEG AUX VERB] [EXPL ADJ] [INFINITIVE] has an emotionally intensified force which would not be the case if [EXPL ADJ] were to replaced with an adverb like really/unfortunately/actually or a salutation (after the infinitive) like old girl/man/chap/boy.
Antipodean republican, huh?
Well how do you explain this? Bloody Well Right
Creeping Australianisation, I calls it.
I blame Neighbours.
Doesn’t Bloody-well Work
That, comrade, is Oldspeak. In Newspeak one says “Doesn’t Bloodywise Work”, as “-wise” is the universal termination for adverbs.
Sign: “One man, one vote.”
Worker A: “What does that mean now?”
Worker B: “Why, it means, ‘one bloody man, one bloody vote’. See?”
“Pravda said [funny but irrelevant Russian phrase] – it stinks, but Izvestiya said [another funny but irrelevant Russian phrase] – it stinks”.
Why irrelevant? The first was the first line of the Song of the Flea and the second was “that I should go where the czar himself went on foot” (with mild mistakes, I leave the meaning as a riddle here)
Irrelevant = “average listener does not know any phrases in Russian apart from do svidanja or na zdorovje”
Why irrelevant?
Irrelevant in context: it’s a real Russian phrase but it has nothing to do with the context or the purported translation.
(I’ve actually read somewhere that when Lehrer performed that song to an audience that would be expected to actually know Russian he substituted those phrases with gibberish – they weren’t intended to be understood.)
he substituted those phrases with gibberish
Interesting. But he did choose bits of Russian which make sense in the context if you understand them.
But he did choose bits of Russian which make sense in the context if you understand them.
Only way I could think of remotely quickly that it would work – and it took me several minutes to even think of that option – is that it’s trying to imply that the newspapers are also plagiarizing their reports and trying to pretend that the result makes sense.
I guess there could be some other way I’m missing in which it’s somehow legitimately relevant. It’s a little less completely absurd because 1) in context it’s a direct quote and those can be weird, and 2) it’s in the right language to be a direct quote from the specified source, which already counts for a lot.
I’ve actually read somewhere that when Lehrer performed that song to an audience that would be expected to actually know Russian he substituted those phrases with gibberish
I’m not sure where I’ve read that (it was well before 2022), but Lehrer’s own version of the lyrics on his website has the following description:
“At each of these two junctures one should insert some phrase in Russian (if the audience does not speak Russian) or some Russian double-talk (if it does). The author’s own choices varied from performance to performance, ranging from the merely inappropriate to the distinctly obscene.”
I don’t recall having ever heard a version that didn’t match the sentences described in the corresponding Wikipedia article (namely the Song of the Flea and the riddle about the czar), but it’s possible that the online versions are mostly derived from just a few performances that happened to use those.
I think there are only two recordings of Lehrer performing “Lobachevsky.” One is the original 1953 studio version. The other is a live 1960 concert recording. He didn’t perform it at his 1967 concert filmed in Copenhagen, and there just aren’t a lot of other recordings of him, period. In Lehrer’s whole career, he played less than a hundred shows.
RL Moore’s Axiom 1
It’s stuff like this that makes me have no use for axiomatic logic, whereas I love natural deduction, in which there are no axioms, just the rule of inference called (by Hofstadter) the Fantasy Rule, informally: “If we assume A is true, and on the basis of that and everything else we know we can prove B, then ‘if A then B’ is a theorem.” Truths bootstrapped out of nothing.
natural deduction, in which there are no axioms
Not so fast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles
My response to the Tortoise is basically to short-circuit him at the first step by saying “If you reject the Fantasy Rule, you’re an idiot.” Consider Franklin (an imaginary person), who rejects the Conjunction Rule (“If A is a theorem, and B is a theorem, then ‘A and B’ is a theorem”). He too is an idiot. More politely, Franklin and I have (at best) different understandings of the word and. In either case there is nothing to talk about. Similarly, the Tortoise is not going to actually reject, the fantasy rule, but he is going to postpone its application indefinitely, which is in itself a kind of rejection. He pretends that he doesn’t know what “if … then” means, when of course he does.
Formally, the rules of inference are just as abstract and “undefined” is the axioms in axiomatic logic. But the interpretation schema for them is a great deal more intuitive, and that’s a Good Thing. It’s nice to have a machine for cranking out theorems (it can’t find them all, but nothing can). However, it is good if each step in the process makes sense to us, rather than dragging in incomprehensible axioms and leaving us bewildered.
On a historical note, Hofstadter first gives us this dialogue, and then proceeds to use natural deduction in all his following dialogues. Crafty man.
(This seems to be the most appropriate thread to lodge:) John Searle Obituary
A good account of his importance to philosophy, but it’s a shame they just toss in his sexual harassment near the end as an oh-by-the-way.
De mortuis nil nisi bene, because otherwise they come back and haunt you.
I am admittedly no student of philosophy, but I have never been able to understand why (some) people take Searle’s Chinese Room argument seriously. Here is the very brief explanation from the Guardian obit:
It asks us to imagine a man who, through a slot in a sealed-off room, receives slips of paper covered with what seem to him squiggles, but are in fact Chinese characters. Guided by a manual, he rewrites these in different combinations, and posts the results through another slot. Chinese-speaking recipients outside read them as answers to the questions originally posed, for “the outputs are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker”.
This is absurd. What, pray, is this magic manual that is able to take input in Chinese and, with the scribe’s help, transform it into coherent output? That is exactly what current LLMs try but fail to do.
Well, it’s the philosophical ideal of an LLM.
(Good question, maybe, if “it” is the manual or the whole room here.)
LLMs don’t even aspire to that, since to really give responses indistinguishable from a native speakers, they’d have to simulate emotions, fatigue, and such.
Talking of “AI”, I see that Nature (qua organisation: let us not speak of the mag) has been maintaining its high standard of rigour of late:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-24662-9
“Figure 1” is a good place to start.
(Found via Charlie Stross’ Bluesky. Astonishingly, this seems to be entirely genuine.)
Hm. This seems to be about good old machine learning, not LLMs; xAI is not an XAI.
But fig. 1, which is hilarious, was definitely generated by an unmentioned LLM, and “explainable” (the X) seems to mean “it’s possible to generate hypotheses about what the AI did after it’s done”.
Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study, …
What did they think they were consenting to under ‘Medical fryrmblal’?
Does Nature no longer employ even an office junior to skim through articles?
Scientific Reports is a sewer.
What is this a typo for? It doesn’t occur in the article.
Did it ever? Noticing and flagging nonsense is the unpaid job of the reviewers.
It doesn’t occur in the article.
It’s in Figure 1, under “validation.”
Oh. I’m so pleasantly surprised almost all the shapes in the figure that are supposed to be letters or numbers actually are that I overlooked this! Fexcectorn indeed. The figure obviously escaped peer review.
I can’t actually find any evidence that the article is reviewed. There’s no mention of any reviewers in or around the acknowledgments. In Nature you get “Nature thanks X. Y. and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for” their reviews, but here there’s nothing. There’s no mention of an editor either. All that is about as bizarre as fig. 1.
@David Marjanović: Scientific Reports has a totally different kind of editing and refereeing process from Nature. It’s run as a high-volume, open access, profit-making publication, with the Nature brand slapped on.
I know the last part, but what different kinds of refereeing process are there even? I’ve refereed for Nature (once) and didn’t notice anything different from maybe 20 other journals (none of them Nature-branded, though).
@David Marjanović: It probably doesn’t seem that different from the point of view of an individual referee, but the overall process is quite different. At Nature or Science (and some other journals that are half a tier down in prestige; Cell may be an example), the handling editor will read the entirety of each short paper. Based on this first, pass, a lot of submissions will be desk rejected. Getting a full evaluation from the editor is not possible for top journals that mostly publish longer papers—like the Physical Review journals or the Journal of the American Chemical Society. However, even there the editor still weeds out the obvious crackpottery or inconsistency with a journal’s scope as the first step.
Then the paper will be sent out to a number of referees. For Nature or Science, that usually means three; for Cell or the Journal of the American Chemical Society, two; for Physical Review publications, usually only one. At good journals like these, the referee choices are made based on the editors’ experiences and relationships with scientists, informed by a careful look at the content and references in the submitted manuscript. Once the requests are sent out, an editor wants to hear back from every reviewer they sent the manuscript to; they will normally wait for all the invited referees either submit reports or respond that they can’t review the manuscript. (Sometimes, that’s not possible, obviously, and some invitees just never reply at all, but the editor will send out reminders for a while, before marking a particular reviewer as nonresponsive.) How many positive reports are needed for a paper to be published vary from journal to journal, but it’s generally very hard to get a paper published without at least half the reports being positive. Moreover, even when the referee reports recommend moving towards publication, they still generally request some revisions, and unless the revisions are very minor, another round of reviewing will be required.
For the online, open-access journals that serve as profit centers, charging high publication fees, the editors typically send out reviewer invitations haphazardly. I routinely get requests from such publications to review articles on topics I know little to nothing about.* Once a publisher has you in their database as a potential referee, all the publisher’s journals may start contacting you. For each manuscript, several invitations are sent out, with the expectation that a lot of them will be turned down or ignored. Moreover, editors frequently take action based on just the first report that comes in. So if an invitation goes out to someone who doesn’t know the subject matter and/or just doesn’t take the refereeing duty seriously, that person may quickly send back a desultory positive report, meaning that the manuscript moves into the production process.
* This past week, I turned down a referee request from Physica Scripta, which is an established, respected journal, because it didn’t really fit my expertise. In this case, it was a natural mistake on the part of the editor, because the manuscript dealt with two topics, both of which I have published on recently. However, I have never done research on a problem that dealt with both of those topics at the same time. In reality, I could certainly have reviewed the paper. However, it would have been a lot more work than most refereeing jobs, and (given all the crazy stuff going on in my life right now) I just did not feel like making that time commitment.
Now that’s a culture shock. In my world, a single reviewer means the editor tried to find another for a month or more likely two and eventually gave up, and that’s extremely rare.
(I also don’t think I’ve ever seen a review that recommended acceptance as-is of a first submission.)
Wow. Sure, that’s what I figured predatory publishers do, but Scientific Reports? Scientific Reports often seems to be used as the second option for manuscripts that were originally submitted to Nature, and are still formatted accordingly, but were desk-rejected there for not being breathtakingly groundbreaking enough.
Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B use two referees not infrequently, but making decisions based on a single referee report is just the norm in physics. That may just be a contingency of history, but it was probably influenced by the traditional arrogance of physicists, who have often considered their time to be more “valuable” that that of scientists working in more applied fields. Making decisions based on a single review is also common in mathematics, although there it makes somewhat more sense. Refereeing in math is much more time consuming than in other sciences, since it often involves checking long, complicated proofs line by line.
I have had two papers (out of eighty-some) accepted without revisions. The first time was when I was a student, and the paper was co-authored with my advisor, who was a real big shot in theoretical particle physics. The other example was this paper, which went from conception to publication extremely quickly. It deals with a mathematical physics problem that I had been thinking about for many years. Various techniques had been applied, by myself and other people, to other versions of the problem, but the hardest case seemed impervious to all attempts at solution. One Sunday evening, I had a brainstorm and thought of a completely new way to approach the problem. I finished the main calculation on Monday and wrote a first draft of the paper on Tuesday. (This is a normal part of my workflow. I like to write up results in LaTeX, complete with explanations, once I have them. This helps me clarify to myself what I am doing and helps me see if there are any holes in my reasoning. If a project stalls, it also gives me something concrete to go back to if I return to the topic later; I don’t need to rely on just my memory and hand-scrawled notes to figure what I had been doing.) Wednesday and Thursday, I added a simple auxiliary calculation and fleshed out the manuscript, which was submitted to the journal on Friday morning. The editor and referee instantly recognized that I had solved an open problem, and I got an unqualified acceptance notice on Tuesday, less than nine days after my brainstorm. I subsequently have published five more papers based on that initial one, falling into two groups. Some applied the same method more generally, either to related problems or converting the perturbative analysis in the first paper into an exact solution. Others discussed why other methods of solving the problem had failed, based on what we now understood about the actual solution.
I like to write up results in LaTeX, complete with explanations, once I have them. This helps me clarify to myself what I am doing and helps me see if there are any holes in my reasoning
I’m not in your league when it comes to things like this (and can’t/don’t need to cope with LaTeX), but I find this too. Write it up like you’re already submitting it for publication, and the gaps in the logic rapidly become a lot easier to see. Sometimes, reasonable ways to plug the gaps become easier to see, too.
…That’s probably less scary than it sounds because of the insistence on 7 σ on measurements and whatnot that other sciences can hardly dream of…
Congratulations on the superfast paper, though. Explaining why the night sky isn’t glowing blue seems like a big deal! I think I can see why it was accepted immediately; theoretically, such a case is absolutely possible in my field, it’s just much harder in practice.
…That’s probably less scary than it sounds because of the insistence on 7 σ on measurements and whatnot that other sciences can hardly dream of…
That doesn’t seem to inhibit a steady stream of astrophysics/maths papers getting published, only for Sabine Hossenfelder to pull them to shreds in a 20-minute Youtube. She has a bullshit meter that regularly rates 7 or 8 out of ten. (It’s not that she wants to spend her time doing that, but these papers regularly get ‘reported’ (as in wildly oversold) in the popular press. Even after she’s cleared away the hyperbole, the claims usually fail to be supported by the evidence — or at least the evidence would equally support any number of more mundane explanations.)
I haven’t seen her review Brett’s paper — which looks interesting/I can only see the abstract, congratulations! I suppose published before she was a Youtuber.
Write it up like you’re already submitting it for publication, and the gaps in the logic rapidly become a lot easier to see.
Yes, even with comments here, I write first, then read back: is that already discussed above; can I source the answer/evidence myself; after that is there anything left worth commenting on? No, then Cancel.
Hossenfelder
Nonono.
I saw a few of her shows, and I liked her clarity and was charmed by the German humor. But — she is crossing, or has crossed, over to the dark side of conspiracies and anti-science, alongside some Bad People (see here, here). I would not trust her opinions.
I would not trust her opinions.
Oh, I don’t — not that she really proffers her own theories in these take-downs. More, she’s critiquing the lack of scientific rigour.
(I’m not talking about her general social/political commentary, which is worth no more than the next neighbour around the coffee table.)
I do think it’s reasonable to ask whether throwing bazillions of Euros into the hole in the ground that is the LHC is producing any actual science. The proposed FCC echoes Deep Thought‘s “even more powerful” successor. How are we doing, Science [as Stephen Colbert likes to ask] with cutting down electricity (and water) consumption when running the LHC and all those AI data centres? Did we solve global warming already?
I’ve never run across claims like that from her. Are you sure it isn’t this Jonathan Jarry that’s fabulating.? Is Jarry even competent to comment on particle physics? Most of their stuff seems to be medical-oriented.
The second link (from McGill U) links to this video of hers, entitled, “Should We Defund Academia?” I didn’t listen to it, but read the transcript, which starts with “I recently angered some people by saying that if I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t want my taxes to pay for research on the description of smell in the English literature. Some have taken that to mean that I want to defund all of academia.” (i.e. “the humanities are a bunch of nonsense.” Me, at first glance, I certainly would want my taxes to fund research on the description of smell in English literature. Reactionary conservatives are not the only taxpayers.) Then we have,
— “It’s a planned economy. Yes, academia is a planned economy. We’re financing it the same way that the communists financed their production chains.”
— “People have complained about useless research in academia for half a century and nothing has happened, so why should this time be different? It’s because of what Elon Musk and his fans have called the ‘woke mind virus’.” (The video is from Feb. 27, just before Musk and his goons started their destruction.)
— “Elon Musk has called academia ‘a bastion of communism’ that ‘operates with no feedback loop to reality’ and he said, entirely correctly, that most scientific papers are useless.” (He meant, I suppose, that academics are a. leftists and b. don’t admire him.)
She goes on about DEI ruining everything by rewarding the unworthy, and wraps it all up with a glorious vision of libertarian science, privatized and for profit (except “any research to do with national security. Or research that is necessary to inform parliament, preserve national heritage, or that allows federal agencies to check claims made by companies.” How original.) She quotes certified terrible people Marc Andreesen (“the ivory tower is an enemy of progress”) and Peter Thiel (“scientists are basically on ‘governmental welfare.’”) She argues that yes, the moon landing and space telescopes and CERN would not have existed without government funding, but surely that money could have gone to other worthy causes, which would have also been profitable to business.
Anyway.
Yes we can all agree Peter Thiel is a thoroughly nasty piece of work. You seem to be engaging in a hand-wavey attempt at guilt by association.
“Should We Defund Academia?” and/or defund public ‘pure’ science research and/or an opinion that DEI is ruining academe has what bearing on competence to critique the mathematics of papers on sub-atomic particles? Or to provide the detail of why so much of the mathematics is merely rearranging the deckchairs of cosmological consonants?
If I might apply the same critical thinking as Hossenfelder exhibits: you’ve provided no evidence that she lacks scientific rigour when she’s commenting on scientific rigour.
Newton was bigly into Alchemy, and engaged in vituperative and entirely unjustified discrediting of fellow scientists. Does that make his Laws of Motion wrong?
She is eager to jettison a great part of the scientific enterprise because she finds it uninteresting, or because she does not find it worthy of any public spending, even about things she knows nothing about. As to guilt by association, oh yes indeed. In 2025, if you quote Musk on the worthiness of academia, you are discredited. I don’t know how far her expertise goes to judge work outside her particular field, and she may have indeed found out a vein of inherently unproductive science. But with that kind of association, I would not trust someone berating, say, Chomskyan grammar.
AntC: Wow, you’re determined to defend the indefensible — something you mock believers for (in your opinion) doing.
What corporate sponsor was mentioned in the S. Hossenfelder video y’all are talking about, if any? Maybe that corporation sees universities as the competition. I’m not going to watch the video myself because y’all’s description of it has disinclined me to give her any clicks.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. One of these things is not like the others!
And the Humboldt brothers are chopped liver!?!
You don’t know whether research is useless before you’ve actually done it.
@MallChick: I didn’t notice sponsors. I just opened the page long enough to copy the transcript and paste it to an easier to read document. I don’t think any corporations really see academia as competition though. In fact, the big tech companies are happy to fund academic engineering programs.
Technocrats regard it as transparently obvious that the sole legitimate role of government funding to universities is to provide an adequate supply of technohelots.
Hossenfelder appears to have the more liberal view that research supporting national myths (to “preserve national heritage”) is also worthy of public support. Also anything directly related to informing current government policy.
What corporate sponsor was mentioned in the S. Hossenfelder video y’all are talking about, if any?
Apparently
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_News
about whom I know only what is in this article. The basic concept seems to be that we should be attaching more weight to reporting from Trump-supporting outlets before rushing to judgment on issues.
I noticed Hossenfelder going off the deep end some time ago, in a rant about German trains, and bailed. (Very bad, it seems: and who doesn’t rant about trains? But it’s all in how you rant.)
German trains are reliably unreliable, in my meager experience. A German friend ascribed it to privatization, several years back.
(I’m not talking about her general social/political commentary, which is worth no more than the next neighbour around the coffee table.)
Ground News sponsors a lot of YouTube videos. (I often see it in pro-Ukraine ones.) It seems mostly harmless; apparently it shows you how many different media carry the latest story, and how reliable they each are on some complex if arbitrary scale. I’ve never seen it support Trump; if anything, the opposite, in that Trump-supporting outlets are more likely to present alternative facts that nobody else has heard about.
The German rail network is already at 120% of its capacity, and then on top of that there are all the construction sites that disrupt everything. Part of the reason for their huge number is that Germany has chronically neglected its infrastructure in general over decades, especially the rail network, because in the 1970s the politicians did the American thing and decided rail wasn’t the transport of the future anymore. (…Obviously that’s the west. The east, meanwhile, still has lines that aren’t even electrified. You’re on a train, and it sounds like a bus, and you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry.) German ministers of transportation traditionally come from the CSU and are really BMW-Minister. And to top it all off, in the 90s or so, the Deutsche Bahn was… not really privatized, but ordered to make a profit anyway, arguably the worst of both worlds; and the chairmen of its board have often been people who don’t go by train but prefer to drive and/or fly, so they never experience the problems they’re theoretically supposed to do something about.
Ground News sponsors a lot of YouTube videos.
Yes, I see it a lot from legal analysis videos of all the ways Trumpodules are violating the Constitution. (Ground News tries to counterbalance when Fox News goes on about RadicalMarxistActivistJudges without mentioning they were appointed by Trump round 1, Reagan, Bush, etc.)
Explaining why the night sky isn’t glowing blue seems like a big deal!
I wouldn’t be able to follow Brett’s argument, but I understand what he accomplished somewhat differently: There’s a lot of evidence for Lorentz symmetry (Special and General Relativity). What Brett showed was that the lack of Cherenkov radiation in vacuum isn’t part of that evidence, since even without Lorentz symmetry, that radiation wouldn’t exist. Is that right, Brett?
Yes, that’s basically correct.