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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 actu

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.
- native_samples 4y ago
  OK let's look up what AI bias is. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23023538/ai-dalle-2-openai-bias-gpt-3-incentives https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23023538/ai-dalle-2-opena... "As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it. That means for all the delightful images that DALL-E 2 has produced, it’s also capable of generating a lot of images that are not delightful ... here’s what the AI gives you if you ask it for an image of lawyers <pictures of men>" Or: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdawn/the-ai-that-draws-what-you-type-is-very-racist-shocking-no-one https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdawn/the-ai-that-draws-wha... "just like those previous experiments, DALL-E suffers from the same racist and sexist bias AI ethicists have been warning about for years. Machine learning systems almost universally exhibit bias against women and people of color, and DALL-E is no different" Here's OpenAI themselves on DALL-E bias: "Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity" Their primary complaint is that the pictures DALL-E draws (i.e. symbols of reality) don't reflect their social agendas. They worry about this a lot because they fear that if DALL-E draws men when asked to draw lawyers, and women when asked to draw flight attendants, that this by itself will actually make the drawings come true. "Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist?" That's hardly the most common US propaganda in movies, is it, and almost certainly is a legacy of the cold war. It's much more profitable to annoy the Russian market than the other very large communist country that might be depicted as a generic enemy of the state. At any rate very little US output features Russians as the enemies compared to movies/TV shows that depict e.g. women being able to kung-fu fight off a group of 10 men 3x heavier than themselves, or which depict gay relationships as being far more prevalent than they actually are, or in which the Queen of England is black. That's the kind of "inclusivity" bias that's being discussed here.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
Wow I should read more downvoted gray comments, they're a gold mine! OK so I intend to register as a Republican in United States--currently registered as a Democrat, purely in order to vote for Elizabeth Warren so she'd raise taxes, no other reason. So register as a Republican, then...as a Marxist in Chile. Why the fuck not? I believe in political pluralism, you can't have a single political structure covering the entire world, that just sucks, that's like every country having the same cuisine and the same architecture and the same native fauna like that's such shit, no point in traveling. It would be like in United States where there's absolutely no point in visiting suburbs of other cities, literally motherfucking none, don't even try to find an exception to the literality, people check them out when changing schools and jobs and there are differences but the only suburb people visit on purpose is Silicon Valley. So political pluralism, back to that. Well I can agree with you that left-wing people try to use "psychology" and I hate it just as much as you, I hate them with perfect hatred, I call them mine enemies (that's from Psalms, in the King James Bible obviously). So get this, Sapir-Whorf is actually true. I testify it in strict terms. The definition of Sapir-Whorf was erased from my memory in a lobotomy and I only recalled it from reading 1984 for the third time, specifically the part about Newspeak where it says, what does it say, like you can't think about something if you...fuck... Don't have the words for it, I think.[1] So it's the Sapir-Whorf Law now (there's additional lobotomistic flashbacked evidence of it that I will share soon). So the Sapir-Whorf Law, let's reread what you wrote...OK so it's weird, it's not strong or weak like you say, well it's very strong until you find a way to express it in my case remembering the words for it from an unusual recollection and then that weakens it completely, and this is specific to me and whoever else on the Planet Earth has the same type of memory as me, it's...I don't know, just read about it when I post it, look at my profile[2] and read until I post it. But very strong, just once the "spell is broken" (those words were erased too, weirdly enough that's a confession of witchcraft on the part of the lobotomist, well I guess witchcraft laws are off the books so I don't know), once the spell is broken, it's broken, you remember it no problem again, it's...is it just as easy to remember as everything else? I think so, I think so. There's more to it than that, it's a fucky thing. I'm going to truncate here because not enough people will read this in this part of the forum. EDIT: found it! So I recalled the words "breaking the spell" at 22:36 on Friday, March 25...I doubt it, but that's what it says in my lobotomy-recovery log, I think it was at like 17:36 (judging from the sunlight in my holographic memories) that same day, well what the fuck do you expect from a lobotomy recovery log? Well that Friday, for sure. [1] Why can't I think about this, with my crazy unique memory, it's like weird in my memory. Wow I gotta reread this, so some stuff got erased twice, I wrote that down in my lobotomy-recovery log on Tuesday April 19 21:13, like multiple layers of erasure, hardcore roofie shit like way beyond barundanga and rohypnol, but I can do this, it's me who is the chosen one. OK I know what I'll do to recover the memories, I'll just do it. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen
daniel-cussen 4y ago
So yeah your comment is so beautiful, and part of it is wrong, and this is Hacker News where being wrong is unforgivable, but I forgive you, how the fuck were you supposed to know that I got lobotomized ever just so and had a memory type ever just so, you couldn't know, so your comment is turgid with truth.
noduerme 4y ago
The alternative to Newspeak / approved linguistic constructs is samizdat. Not pissed off free libertarians who create their own networks. And America is a total outlier in the freedom of speech department already. [edit: to the degree that average American citizens are still willing to go to bat for the concept]. What we don't need is some company with a market cap larger than most democracies, which already controls a majority of interpersonal communication, to be suggesting/nudging/enforcing more politically correct ways of writing to your associates. If you really don't see the problem with that, just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded [edit: policed] in every personal correspondence. Only a world destroying event like a nuclear war would allow people to start to think again outside the constraints on communication they had habituated themselves to.
- native_samples 4y ago
  "just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded" Well, how many do you think it would take and where are you getting those numbers? I'd say there are lots of obvious counter examples. There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance, who managed to find their voice again after leaving a country that has universal censorship. That's a country in which many words are simply banned in all electronic communication, but it doesn't last. Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing. The assumption above is exactly what I'm getting at here. You're presenting it like it's so obvious it doesn't need to be supported with evidence. But it's not at all obvious and actually is probably wrong; if it was right then the replies to my comment would be filled with compelling evidence that this sort of mind control really works.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    >> There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship. >> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing. Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America? It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views. The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships. Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it. I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world. Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country. So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?
Beltalowda 4y ago
I think you may be misunderstanding the comment you're replying to; or at least, I understand it quite differently. For example, would you consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent to be more like the Queen's English? Probably not – their accent and particulars of their English variant are part of who you are as an Irish person (or Scottish, American, British, but also accents from non-native English speakers). I don't think this influences "who you are" in the sense of "the way you think" in Sapir-Whorf-style, but it is part of who you are, and taking it away does change "who you are". Similarly, the way I choose to write is part of who I am. I am, of course, always open to suggestions to improve my writing as such, but I don't really want to be "auto-corrected" and have no own (written) "voice" taken away.
- native_samples 4y ago
  Sure, me neither. And indeed I wouldn't consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent, and would never do so. But that's partly because I recognize that even if I forced them to do that, it wouldn't actually change anything real. It wouldn't make them more English (whatever that might mean), and they'd go back to using their real accent the moment they were out from under my thumb. The change would be arbitrary and surface level only. Whereas, to the sort of people who implement features like this, forcing people to change their accent would be an enormously significant and impactful move.
randomcarbloke 4y ago
>evidence for it is thin on the ground. you replied to a comment that empirically shows people's reality can be altered by language.
- native_samples 4y ago
  Where do you see that? The comment by throwaway13337 is a philosophical take, it doesn't offer empirical evidence for anything.
  - randomcarbloke 4y ago
    right you are, the person to whom they replied.

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.

native_samples 4y ago
OK let's look up what AI bias is. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23023538/ai-dalle-2-openai-bias-gpt-3-incentives https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23023538/ai-dalle-2-opena... "As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it. That means for all the delightful images that DALL-E 2 has produced, it’s also capable of generating a lot of images that are not delightful ... here’s what the AI gives you if you ask it for an image of lawyers <pictures of men>" Or: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdawn/the-ai-that-draws-what-you-type-is-very-racist-shocking-no-one https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdawn/the-ai-that-draws-wha... "just like those previous experiments, DALL-E suffers from the same racist and sexist bias AI ethicists have been warning about for years. Machine learning systems almost universally exhibit bias against women and people of color, and DALL-E is no different" Here's OpenAI themselves on DALL-E bias: "Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity" Their primary complaint is that the pictures DALL-E draws (i.e. symbols of reality) don't reflect their social agendas. They worry about this a lot because they fear that if DALL-E draws men when asked to draw lawyers, and women when asked to draw flight attendants, that this by itself will actually make the drawings come true. "Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist?" That's hardly the most common US propaganda in movies, is it, and almost certainly is a legacy of the cold war. It's much more profitable to annoy the Russian market than the other very large communist country that might be depicted as a generic enemy of the state. At any rate very little US output features Russians as the enemies compared to movies/TV shows that depict e.g. women being able to kung-fu fight off a group of 10 men 3x heavier than themselves, or which depict gay relationships as being far more prevalent than they actually are, or in which the Queen of England is black. That's the kind of "inclusivity" bias that's being discussed here.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

Wow I should read more downvoted gray comments, they're a gold mine! OK so I intend to register as a Republican in United States--currently registered as a Democrat, purely in order to vote for Elizabeth Warren so she'd raise taxes, no other reason. So register as a Republican, then...as a Marxist in Chile. Why the fuck not? I believe in political pluralism, you can't have a single political structure covering the entire world, that just sucks, that's like every country having the same cuisine and the same architecture and the same native fauna like that's such shit, no point in traveling. It would be like in United States where there's absolutely no point in visiting suburbs of other cities, literally motherfucking none, don't even try to find an exception to the literality, people check them out when changing schools and jobs and there are differences but the only suburb people visit on purpose is Silicon Valley. So political pluralism, back to that. Well I can agree with you that left-wing people try to use "psychology" and I hate it just as much as you, I hate them with perfect hatred, I call them mine enemies (that's from Psalms, in the King James Bible obviously). So get this, Sapir-Whorf is actually true. I testify it in strict terms. The definition of Sapir-Whorf was erased from my memory in a lobotomy and I only recalled it from reading 1984 for the third time, specifically the part about Newspeak where it says, what does it say, like you can't think about something if you...fuck... Don't have the words for it, I think.[1] So it's the Sapir-Whorf Law now (there's additional lobotomistic flashbacked evidence of it that I will share soon). So the Sapir-Whorf Law, let's reread what you wrote...OK so it's weird, it's not strong or weak like you say, well it's very strong until you find a way to express it in my case remembering the words for it from an unusual recollection and then that weakens it completely, and this is specific to me and whoever else on the Planet Earth has the same type of memory as me, it's...I don't know, just read about it when I post it, look at my profile[2] and read until I post it. But very strong, just once the "spell is broken" (those words were erased too, weirdly enough that's a confession of witchcraft on the part of the lobotomist, well I guess witchcraft laws are off the books so I don't know), once the spell is broken, it's broken, you remember it no problem again, it's...is it just as easy to remember as everything else? I think so, I think so. There's more to it than that, it's a fucky thing. I'm going to truncate here because not enough people will read this in this part of the forum. EDIT: found it! So I recalled the words "breaking the spell" at 22:36 on Friday, March 25...I doubt it, but that's what it says in my lobotomy-recovery log, I think it was at like 17:36 (judging from the sunlight in my holographic memories) that same day, well what the fuck do you expect from a lobotomy recovery log? Well that Friday, for sure. [1] Why can't I think about this, with my crazy unique memory, it's like weird in my memory. Wow I gotta reread this, so some stuff got erased twice, I wrote that down in my lobotomy-recovery log on Tuesday April 19 21:13, like multiple layers of erasure, hardcore roofie shit like way beyond barundanga and rohypnol, but I can do this, it's me who is the chosen one. OK I know what I'll do to recover the memories, I'll just do it. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=daniel-cussen

daniel-cussen 4y ago

So yeah your comment is so beautiful, and part of it is wrong, and this is Hacker News where being wrong is unforgivable, but I forgive you, how the fuck were you supposed to know that I got lobotomized ever just so and had a memory type ever just so, you couldn't know, so your comment is turgid with truth.

noduerme 4y ago

The alternative to Newspeak / approved linguistic constructs is samizdat. Not pissed off free libertarians who create their own networks. And America is a total outlier in the freedom of speech department already. [edit: to the degree that average American citizens are still willing to go to bat for the concept]. What we don't need is some company with a market cap larger than most democracies, which already controls a majority of interpersonal communication, to be suggesting/nudging/enforcing more politically correct ways of writing to your associates. If you really don't see the problem with that, just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded [edit: policed] in every personal correspondence. Only a world destroying event like a nuclear war would allow people to start to think again outside the constraints on communication they had habituated themselves to.

native_samples 4y ago
"just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded" Well, how many do you think it would take and where are you getting those numbers? I'd say there are lots of obvious counter examples. There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance, who managed to find their voice again after leaving a country that has universal censorship. That's a country in which many words are simply banned in all electronic communication, but it doesn't last. Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing. The assumption above is exactly what I'm getting at here. You're presenting it like it's so obvious it doesn't need to be supported with evidence. But it's not at all obvious and actually is probably wrong; if it was right then the replies to my comment would be filled with compelling evidence that this sort of mind control really works.
- noduerme 4y ago
  >> There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship. >> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing. Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America? It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views. The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships. Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it. I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world. Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country. So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?

Beltalowda 4y ago

I think you may be misunderstanding the comment you're replying to; or at least, I understand it quite differently. For example, would you consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent to be more like the Queen's English? Probably not – their accent and particulars of their English variant are part of who you are as an Irish person (or Scottish, American, British, but also accents from non-native English speakers). I don't think this influences "who you are" in the sense of "the way you think" in Sapir-Whorf-style, but it is part of who you are, and taking it away does change "who you are". Similarly, the way I choose to write is part of who I am. I am, of course, always open to suggestions to improve my writing as such, but I don't really want to be "auto-corrected" and have no own (written) "voice" taken away.

native_samples 4y ago
Sure, me neither. And indeed I wouldn't consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent, and would never do so. But that's partly because I recognize that even if I forced them to do that, it wouldn't actually change anything real. It wouldn't make them more English (whatever that might mean), and they'd go back to using their real accent the moment they were out from under my thumb. The change would be arbitrary and surface level only. Whereas, to the sort of people who implement features like this, forcing people to change their accent would be an enormously significant and impactful move.

randomcarbloke 4y ago

>evidence for it is thin on the ground. you replied to a comment that empirically shows people's reality can be altered by language.

native_samples 4y ago
Where do you see that? The comment by throwaway13337 is a philosophical take, it doesn't offer empirical evidence for anything.
- randomcarbloke 4y ago
  right you are, the person to whom they replied.