10 ms·

There is indeed something deep going on here. When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are. This is a profound change when sca

There is indeed something deep going on here. When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are. This is a profound change when scaled to the society as a whole and when the way we communicate is dominated by the tools we use. Our tools are an extension of ourselves. It's for this reason that it's a very scary direction we are going with all tools - smart phones, home automation, email software, brain-computer interface, etc - that are extensions of ourselves but agents of companies acting not on behalf of the end user but on the behalf of their own interests. Tools that are an extension of ourselves need to be the agent only of ourselves. We, as individuals, require that to keep our own personhood. It sound dramatic to say, but our essence of being is what's at stake here.

lern_too_spel 4y ago
- mnd999 4y ago
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  > You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions. Sure, then please kindly also install the upcoming Russian version of it, which merely makes suggestions like using the "neutral" word "special operation" when you inappropriately call it an "invasion". These will be mere suggestions, and you are free to ignore them, but you should always be aware of the "consequences" of the words you choose.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    If I were writing a document to be shared with Russian government officials, I would want those suggestions. The consequences of making my document not suit its audience already exist. If I'm writing a suggestion to my mail carrier, I wouldn't want to use the the word "mailman" because she could see it as being passive aggressive and interpret the suggestion accordingly. This, just like spell-checking, just makes it easier to write a document that won't make the audience quibble over diction or make negative inferences about tone.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  >"just an extension of the outrage culture that got us the War on Christmas." It's funny you mention that, because even as an Atheist I realize that Christmas as it exists today is almost completely secularized and has very little to do with Jesus Christ and the religion of Christianity. If you look at the celebrations and the iconography with an outsider's perspective, the holiday seems to be about Santa Claus and presents. I don't think any other major religion has had one of its holiest holidays commercialized and secularized to such an extent. I'm no Christian, far from it actually, but I can see the merit behind their reaction. "War" is hyperbolic but I understand how they feel. Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Halloween has come a long way from the pagan festival of Samhain, and the takeovers of Easter and Thanksgiving by the chocolate and retail industries has been a lot less politicized. We don't see it for holidays of other religions and regions as the full religious variant was never practised in the west, but my understanding is that e.g. the Haj is big business too - Saudi Arabia's biggest economic industry after oil and gas is Haj tourism.
  - adriand 4y ago
    That’s not the fault of the left, that’s because of consumerism, capitalism and a general drift away from religion generally or more purist interpretations of religion specifically. Look at how Christianity itself is practiced by many of its adherents and compare that against the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. There is very little overlap there. Materialism is just one glaring example. The so-called followers of Christ are hardly following in his footsteps, and that is certainly not the fault of the left.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    > Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized. The thing that MADE christmas a "high holy holiday" WAS the de-christianizing of the holiday. Nobody really cared all that much about christmas until the lore of santa and presents gained popularity in the 1800s. The popularity of christmas grew because of the commercialization. Everyone loves giving/receiving presents and having an excuse for a big family get together and meal. The fact that it was initially stolen from pegan holidays to celebrate the birth of jesus was tangential. I'd suggest giving the wiki article on christmas a good read through [1]. The war on christmas is something made up to make christians mad. It's revisionist history to try and claim that "just a few years ago, christmas was all about jesus! But now it's all commercial". It hasn't been about Jesus since the 1820s. And, at that time, it was one of the less popular holidays. Fun fact, christmas was at one point banned in england by the puritans because it was associated with drunkeness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
- xg15 4y ago
  > You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions. And you're free to decline all the tracking cookies and newsletter subscriptions, you just have to navigate through 30 layers of intentionally confusing UI every time you use the feature to do so. Honestly, this is not how it works. Nudging is a thing. No one is building a controversial feature with the expectation that people can simply disable it if they don't want to use it.
native_samples 4y ago
When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are. Well, probably not. The people doing this certainly believe that's true, but actual robust evidence for it is thin on the ground. The conflation of symbols and abstractions with reality itself is an ideological assumption/intuition that's been a problem for the left for as long as it's existed. That's why 1984 features Newspeak so centrally, and why only one kind of politics is obsessed with altering representations of reality like movies, statues, stock artwork, etc. It's also why leftists at tech firms are so obsessed with the non-problem of AI bias: they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality. Can you actually change how people think by subtly manipulating words? Psychology - a field very dominated by the left - has repeatedly claimed you can, but then when the claims get a little too good to be true they get investigated and don't replicate: - Strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis (wrong) - Weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis (very shaky even for ultra-weak forms like color words) - Priming (wrong) - Implicit association test (wrong) There are probably way more examples. For less psych oriented stuff, consider that people have been systematically manipulating the presentation of job gender balances in movies and TV shows for decades, with nothing to show for it. Seeing lots of heroine hackers on the big screen didn't convince lots of girls they wanted to work with computers in real life. That's why there's now so much concrete discrimination going on: attempts to change things via more subtle symbolic means had no effect. If Google Docs tries to stop people using "problematic" words, all it'll do is piss off lots of users and reinforce the general impression that Google is in no way populated by people as smart as it once was. The Google of 2004 would never waste time on cynical, nasty and entirely data-free attempts to mind control its userbase via underlining WrongThink.
- kaba0 4y ago
  > they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality. This is just ridiculous. Do look up what the hell AI bias is. Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist? Where do you get these nonsense baseless claims? You are seeing nonexistent enemies everywhere.
thomassmith65 4y ago
our essence of being is what's at stake here Indeed: the purity of our essence, our precious bodily fluids.
- V-eHGsd_ 4y ago
  "mandrake, have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?"
woodruffw 4y ago
I say this to be both funny and thought provoking: it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system. On the long scale of human history, both are mere blips, and yet we completely take for granted the implicit structure they impose upon us. The takeaway from the above shouldn’t be “dictionaries are bad” or “schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having); it should be that our latest communication tools are the latest generation in power structuring, not novel in and of themselves in that regard.
- whiddershins 4y ago
  The examples you give aren’t intrusive in real time. There is something fundamentally different between these cases.
  - codeyperson 4y ago
    Yep agree. Something more analogous would be dictionary.com vs a physical dictionary.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      In the last few years, Google translate has dramatically improved for many languages. This has allowed me to explore other written languages more quickly. I can just copy a phrase into Google translate and get a sense of the meaning. It is also interesting to see how different languages phrase things or the terms they use.
  - ertian 4y ago
    Try misusing the words 'ironic' or 'literal', and tell me it's not intrusive in real time...
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
      > misusing the words 'ironic' Like rain on your wedding day
daniel-cussen 4y ago
You know? Totally right. I thought of this and wanted to disable the autosuggest feature, but until now didn't have it in me, it's actually useful in a way. Comes up with hilarious shit when you invent words, like when I speak Spanisco with friends, we're inventing Spanisco on the fly but basically it's transliterations of Spanish palabres with English grammatic, the algorithm totalmently mierds its pantaloons trating to adeeveen what I'll deece proxim.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  Ah, so Latin evolved from Spanish and English.
treeman79 4y ago
Nothing dramatic. Look at China. Every communication is actively monitored by the government. Any unimproved ideas are harshly dealt with
- anshorei 4y ago
  *approved
Beltalowda 4y ago
I had a very similar feeling when I had to start using Google Docs for my job a few months ago; it would "autocomplete" my sentences. On the face of it this is a useful and helpful feature, and many of the suggestions were not bad at all. But many were also not what I would have written, exactly. Neither is necessarily better or worse: just different. A lot of people write in their own way, often with little things, but these kind of "hey, here's a sentence for you" kind of takes away your own personal "voice". I turned this feature off.
- bencollier49 4y ago
  Unfortunately, this will be very popular with schoolchildren on their homework, so it'll become normalised in culture.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Idiocracy was, it seems, a prediction. They just got the time scale wrong, we won't need 500 years. Software means we don't need to wait for social-economic factors and genetics to run their course.
    - gota 4y ago
      Yet again I have to comment that formal education levels of the parents do not affect the genetic predisposition of prole to be intelligent And that Idiocracy got the "hereditary" aspect completely and utterly wrong It was also completely unnecessary - a better and more accurate idiocracy would have people becoming progressively more stupid juste because they can, not because their parents being poor/uneducated made their brains limited Sorry if this is a rant or too out of topic. I'm just kind of amazed by how Idiocracy progressively becomes this representative piece for a completely bogus argument
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    Or we’ll go full circle and get them using pen and paper again. Even in the 90’s, the use of computers for schoolwork was banned due to fears over cheating. Why people think it’s less of a problem now I don’t know.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
This is simply not something that should be left to Google. English isn't my native tongue and I basically learned it on the internet. Of course people will think I express myself with utmost hostility. I would guess Google will try to exempt words that some over-educated employee has a strong opinion about. But no word would ever carry the amount of offense that this paternalism of Google itself expresses.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

mnd999 4y ago
cato_the_elder 4y ago
> You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions. Sure, then please kindly also install the upcoming Russian version of it, which merely makes suggestions like using the "neutral" word "special operation" when you inappropriately call it an "invasion". These will be mere suggestions, and you are free to ignore them, but you should always be aware of the "consequences" of the words you choose.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  If I were writing a document to be shared with Russian government officials, I would want those suggestions. The consequences of making my document not suit its audience already exist. If I'm writing a suggestion to my mail carrier, I wouldn't want to use the the word "mailman" because she could see it as being passive aggressive and interpret the suggestion accordingly. This, just like spell-checking, just makes it easier to write a document that won't make the audience quibble over diction or make negative inferences about tone.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
>"just an extension of the outrage culture that got us the War on Christmas." It's funny you mention that, because even as an Atheist I realize that Christmas as it exists today is almost completely secularized and has very little to do with Jesus Christ and the religion of Christianity. If you look at the celebrations and the iconography with an outsider's perspective, the holiday seems to be about Santa Claus and presents. I don't think any other major religion has had one of its holiest holidays commercialized and secularized to such an extent. I'm no Christian, far from it actually, but I can see the merit behind their reaction. "War" is hyperbolic but I understand how they feel. Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
- Macha 4y ago
  Halloween has come a long way from the pagan festival of Samhain, and the takeovers of Easter and Thanksgiving by the chocolate and retail industries has been a lot less politicized. We don't see it for holidays of other religions and regions as the full religious variant was never practised in the west, but my understanding is that e.g. the Haj is big business too - Saudi Arabia's biggest economic industry after oil and gas is Haj tourism.
- adriand 4y ago
  That’s not the fault of the left, that’s because of consumerism, capitalism and a general drift away from religion generally or more purist interpretations of religion specifically. Look at how Christianity itself is practiced by many of its adherents and compare that against the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. There is very little overlap there. Materialism is just one glaring example. The so-called followers of Christ are hardly following in his footsteps, and that is certainly not the fault of the left.
- cogman10 4y ago
  > Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized. The thing that MADE christmas a "high holy holiday" WAS the de-christianizing of the holiday. Nobody really cared all that much about christmas until the lore of santa and presents gained popularity in the 1800s. The popularity of christmas grew because of the commercialization. Everyone loves giving/receiving presents and having an excuse for a big family get together and meal. The fact that it was initially stolen from pegan holidays to celebrate the birth of jesus was tangential. I'd suggest giving the wiki article on christmas a good read through [1]. The war on christmas is something made up to make christians mad. It's revisionist history to try and claim that "just a few years ago, christmas was all about jesus! But now it's all commercial". It hasn't been about Jesus since the 1820s. And, at that time, it was one of the less popular holidays. Fun fact, christmas was at one point banned in england by the puritans because it was associated with drunkeness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
xg15 4y ago
> You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions. And you're free to decline all the tracking cookies and newsletter subscriptions, you just have to navigate through 30 layers of intentionally confusing UI every time you use the feature to do so. Honestly, this is not how it works. Nudging is a thing. No one is building a controversial feature with the expectation that people can simply disable it if they don't want to use it.

native_samples 4y ago

When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are. Well, probably not. The people doing this certainly believe that's true, but actual robust evidence for it is thin on the ground. The conflation of symbols and abstractions with reality itself is an ideological assumption/intuition that's been a problem for the left for as long as it's existed. That's why 1984 features Newspeak so centrally, and why only one kind of politics is obsessed with altering representations of reality like movies, statues, stock artwork, etc. It's also why leftists at tech firms are so obsessed with the non-problem of AI bias: they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality. Can you actually change how people think by subtly manipulating words? Psychology - a field very dominated by the left - has repeatedly claimed you can, but then when the claims get a little too good to be true they get investigated and don't replicate: - Strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis (wrong) - Weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis (very shaky even for ultra-weak forms like color words) - Priming (wrong) - Implicit association test (wrong) There are probably way more examples. For less psych oriented stuff, consider that people have been systematically manipulating the presentation of job gender balances in movies and TV shows for decades, with nothing to show for it. Seeing lots of heroine hackers on the big screen didn't convince lots of girls they wanted to work with computers in real life. That's why there's now so much concrete discrimination going on: attempts to change things via more subtle symbolic means had no effect. If Google Docs tries to stop people using "problematic" words, all it'll do is piss off lots of users and reinforce the general impression that Google is in no way populated by people as smart as it once was. The Google of 2004 would never waste time on cynical, nasty and entirely data-free attempts to mind control its userbase via underlining WrongThink.

kaba0 4y ago
> they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality. This is just ridiculous. Do look up what the hell AI bias is. Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist? Where do you get these nonsense baseless claims? You are seeing nonexistent enemies everywhere.

thomassmith65 4y ago

our essence of being is what's at stake here Indeed: the purity of our essence, our precious bodily fluids.

V-eHGsd_ 4y ago
"mandrake, have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?"

woodruffw 4y ago

I say this to be both funny and thought provoking: it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system. On the long scale of human history, both are mere blips, and yet we completely take for granted the implicit structure they impose upon us. The takeaway from the above shouldn’t be “dictionaries are bad” or “schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having); it should be that our latest communication tools are the latest generation in power structuring, not novel in and of themselves in that regard.

whiddershins 4y ago
The examples you give aren’t intrusive in real time. There is something fundamentally different between these cases.
- codeyperson 4y ago
  Yep agree. Something more analogous would be dictionary.com vs a physical dictionary.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    In the last few years, Google translate has dramatically improved for many languages. This has allowed me to explore other written languages more quickly. I can just copy a phrase into Google translate and get a sense of the meaning. It is also interesting to see how different languages phrase things or the terms they use.
- ertian 4y ago
  Try misusing the words 'ironic' or 'literal', and tell me it's not intrusive in real time...
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    > misusing the words 'ironic' Like rain on your wedding day

daniel-cussen 4y ago

You know? Totally right. I thought of this and wanted to disable the autosuggest feature, but until now didn't have it in me, it's actually useful in a way. Comes up with hilarious shit when you invent words, like when I speak Spanisco with friends, we're inventing Spanisco on the fly but basically it's transliterations of Spanish palabres with English grammatic, the algorithm totalmently mierds its pantaloons trating to adeeveen what I'll deece proxim.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
Ah, so Latin evolved from Spanish and English.

treeman79 4y ago

Nothing dramatic. Look at China. Every communication is actively monitored by the government. Any unimproved ideas are harshly dealt with

anshorei 4y ago
*approved

Beltalowda 4y ago

I had a very similar feeling when I had to start using Google Docs for my job a few months ago; it would "autocomplete" my sentences. On the face of it this is a useful and helpful feature, and many of the suggestions were not bad at all. But many were also not what I would have written, exactly. Neither is necessarily better or worse: just different. A lot of people write in their own way, often with little things, but these kind of "hey, here's a sentence for you" kind of takes away your own personal "voice". I turned this feature off.

bencollier49 4y ago
Unfortunately, this will be very popular with schoolchildren on their homework, so it'll become normalised in culture.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Idiocracy was, it seems, a prediction. They just got the time scale wrong, we won't need 500 years. Software means we don't need to wait for social-economic factors and genetics to run their course.
  - gota 4y ago
    Yet again I have to comment that formal education levels of the parents do not affect the genetic predisposition of prole to be intelligent And that Idiocracy got the "hereditary" aspect completely and utterly wrong It was also completely unnecessary - a better and more accurate idiocracy would have people becoming progressively more stupid juste because they can, not because their parents being poor/uneducated made their brains limited Sorry if this is a rant or too out of topic. I'm just kind of amazed by how Idiocracy progressively becomes this representative piece for a completely bogus argument
- madaxe_again 4y ago
  Or we’ll go full circle and get them using pen and paper again. Even in the 90’s, the use of computers for schoolwork was banned due to fears over cheating. Why people think it’s less of a problem now I don’t know.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

This is simply not something that should be left to Google. English isn't my native tongue and I basically learned it on the internet. Of course people will think I express myself with utmost hostility. I would guess Google will try to exempt words that some over-educated employee has a strong opinion about. But no word would ever carry the amount of offense that this paternalism of Google itself expresses.