6 ms·

Define Wokeness Or how you shall know a word by the company it keeps

h2odragon 4y ago
> Politically neutral AI systems that provide balanced sources and a diverse set of legitimate viewpoints Deus ex machina, then? If humans can't decide truth for each other, why would machines be better at it?
- methodin 4y ago
  The irony is that a lot of people on this earth have opinions already formed by bots and AI without knowing it
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Able to perform observations that human senses are unable to. Able to hold more data in memory at once. Able to perform calculations at a much faster rate. Freedom from emotional bias. There's four reasons right there.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Our priors strongly suggest that AI will have similar biases to ourselves and are not immune to cognitive faults. I am not sure it is possible to train an AI (or possibly any intelligence) with no biases. ChatGPT's working memory seems to be less than a human's, as does its ability to perform correct calculations (although it is fast about it). To suggest that AI will be better at something without evidence just because it runs on a computer would be contrary to available evidence.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > Able to perform observations that human senses are unable to. What sources of observations do AIs have that human senses don't? I mean, you could talk about something like the Webb Telescope, which can see things that humans can't. But humans can see what Webb sends back just as well as an AI can. If you mean that AIs can spot things in, say, medical images that humans can't, even when looking at the same image, that's true, but I'm not sure that it's all that relevant to the current question.
- Nevermark 4y ago
  Machines can learn information from all available resources. Humans can’t. Often don’t want to.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    Machines can't `learn' anything at all. They just recognize patterns.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      LLM have no mechanism for determining truth. They have a dataset which determines what is truth to them. If you include "all sources" they are just going to include a lot of junk next to useful information. An ML algo consuming content generated from other ML algos (which will be the reality very soon) is basically just recycling garbage over and over. It's certainly no mechanism for elevating "truth".
      - jkea 4y ago
        What are humans mechanisms for determining truth?
        tstrimple 4y ago
        As far as I'm aware, the scientific method is the best we have at the moment and it has delivered pretty good results.
    - Nevermark 4y ago
      They don’t just recognize patterns. They learn to recognize patters. Any algorithm that captured anything useful from exposure to data is learning. Machines most definitely learn. Watch a plot of generalization accuracy over training iterations (by testing with non-training data). You will see periods of slow improvement, alternating with periods of very fast improvement, as important relationships are discovered. Machines earn.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  Why would machines trained by human writings be better at it?
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> red and blue America have very different ideas in mind when they use the terms woke/wokeness. This renders the two groups almost unable to communicate with each other Whichever side (or both) then have poisoned the word as it can now never be used without being divisive — intentionally or otherwise. I'm not sure there is any other recourse but to abandon the word. I don't think that would necessarily be a horrible thing to do — the idea can still exist (although Orwell might have believed otherwise). It is unfortunate though that forces exist that would try and poison any discussion. Perhaps going after a specific word though is an easy means to do that?
- Nevermark 4y ago
  I am around enough people from different bands of the political spectrum that I avoid the word. Its definition varies wildly as a function of the listener. And, as demonstrated by both of the graphs, it is strongly associated with negative concepts. But that’s just my experience, in my context.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > It is unfortunate though that forces exist that would try and poison any discussion. Take "inherent white racism", for example. (That idea is out there. Whether it should properly be considered part of "woke" is not the point.) I mean, if I'm white, there's no way I can engage with that. If I disagree, someone holding the idea regards my disagreement as proving the correctness of their view. And if I agree, then I just categorized myself as the one having the flawed worldview, and therefore someone not to be listened to going forward. So that idea completely poisons the discussion. I don't think that just "woke" poisoned the discussion. I think it reflects that some of the ideas that people lump into "woke" are themselves poisonous to real discussion. You used the phrase "forces exist". It's a bit unclear whether you mean sociological dynamics, or whether you mean people. My own two cents: I think there are people on both sides who want to shut down discussion, for at least two reasons: because they think that they'll win more that way, and/or because it's easier to try to win by default than to actually win peoples' hearts and minds in an honest discussion. ("By default" meaning "the other side's position is completely unreasonable, therefore my position is the only one standing, therefore I win".) When too many people on both sides are engaged in such tactics (or too many who have the microphone), it becomes impossible to have a reasonable conversation on those topics. Reasonable people just tune out the shouting and shake their heads. All you can do is wait for the shouters to shut up and go away. Except they never will, because this has become part of electoral politics, and elections are every two years, and campaigns are nearly two years long, so it never really goes away. Which brings us to sociological dynamics. And I'm going to stop here, because I don't know what to say...
spacephysics 4y ago
Wall Street journal isn’t right leaning [0]. This may be a case of Overton window at work. [1] A google search says NYT categorizes them as leaning conservative, which given the climate is like asking Russia if they think Ukraine is the bad guy. This just further displays what the author was probably getting at, that were in different realities based on the assumptions made. To be a classic moderate of the early 2000’s is unheard of in mainstream “discussions”, yet I’d bet many adult Americans hold a moderate view. As a society we don’t know how to handle the insane communication technology we have, and not many know how to effectively filter stuff out (I sure don’t fully know) [0] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-med... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- crenwick 4y ago
  The author may have pulled data from WSJ news and opinion https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opinion https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opi...
- skywal_l 4y ago
  On this site, 25% of people believe that Fox News is Left/Center Left [0]. I wouldn't give much credit to those polls. [0] https://www.allsides.com/blog/fox-news-bias-rated-right-allsides-blind-bias-survey https://www.allsides.com/blog/fox-news-bias-rated-right-alls...
- hadrien01 4y ago
  But can you trust "allsides.com" to be impartial in its determination? Another widely known website [0] classifies the WSJ as centre-right (which as a European I would tend to agree more). According to Wikipedia [1], AllSides was founded... by a Republican. [0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
msravi 4y ago
> Left-leaning news media tends to use the terms woke and wokeness in the vicinity of terms such as bogeyman, trumpists, denigrate, deride, vilify, ridiculed, reactionaries, pejorative, fearmongering, demagoguery, and racism. This has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the term "woke" - this only serves to say that the term is currently viewed as a pejorative term, a negative term. The left and the right don't "understand" it differently, as the article concludes. No, they aren't speaking different languages. The term is understood well enough, and is deliberately used so.
- the_gastropod 4y ago
  When pressed to define the term, Ron Desantis’s general counsel provided this definition: > the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them So maybe the left and right do agree on its meaning! But much of the lizard-brained shrieking about it doesn’t usually seem all that related to the definition above.
  - mpweiher 4y ago
    This sounds like selective and out-of-context quoting. Let's see. https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desantis-officials-answer-during-andrew-warren-trial https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desan... Yup. Let's see what he goes on to say: "To me, it means someone who believes that there are systemic injustices in the criminal justice system, and on that basis they can decline to fully enforce and uphold the law," And all this was in the context, specifically, of a legal battle around a suspension, so very much tailored to that situation. All in all, the meme that "woke is a made up term" is tiring, and no, it certainly doesn't just mean "there are systemic injustices". "You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try. If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one. You can’t just bitch on Twitter every time someone tries to describe your political cohort, which again you yourself say intends to change the world. Name yourself or you will be named." https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...
bedhead 4y ago
I see woke as mainly two things. First, it’s the elevation of feelings above reality, and if need be redescribing reality to contort to certain people’s feelings. (“Certain people” leading into the second point) Second, it’s seeing everything through the lens of historical power imbalances, but importantly it’s taking an “ends justify the means” approach that discards all principles to rectify those imbalances…that rectification is itself the only principle. It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Yeah, see, this is what you've been trained to believe by people with an agenda against addressing systemic reform. They have made you a really great little political pawn. As another poster said: > When pressed to define the term, Ron Desantis’s general counsel provided this definition: >> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them So to people who understand the term this way, which apparently includes a conservative political front runner's legal counsel, what you're saying when you are using "woke" as a pejorative is that there are no such injustices and it is silly to believe otherwise. Which is why people with that understanding of the word would rightly think all sorts of ungenerous things about you for saying that. Which is just fine, as far as the people pushing your definition are concerned, since further divide and unreasonable discourse helps cement their base.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    "The need to address them" is key there. There is no need for everyone to work to address or think about the injustices, people who push the "you are either with us or against us" onto people and force them to make a choice instead of being bystanders are "woke". Most people dislike that kind of "woke", no matter if they are left or right, being forced to take a stand when you are stressed and tired enough already is very uncomfortable.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      There is definitely an element of that, and I think most people would agree that that behavior is harmful. But I think we would say that such behavior is not actually that common and is very much exaggerated by the loud "anti-woke" crowd, who seem to equate any steps taken to address the issue or even draw attention to it as some kind of assault. See: "go woke go broke" nonsense, anti-CRT education legislation, etc. From the other side, I could say that a lot of the "anti-woke" rhetoric is just bigotry in disguise, but I know that is only a relatively small minority of very loud assholes who, naturally, draw the most attention. Unfortunately many of them are also elected officials.
srobilliard 4y ago
This article misrepresents the theory of distributional semantics. The article implies that words that most often appear "in the vicinity of" each other, or words that are "colocated", are semantically similar. For example, colocation as a predictor of similarity would imply the two words "bank" and "statement" are semantically related. This is not how word embeddings are trained. Distributional semantics states that words which appear in the same contexts have similar meanings. For example, consider these two sentences: The desert is hot The desert is dry "hot" and "dry" both appear in the same contexts, they both appear after "the desert is", this is what gives them semantic similarity.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
Just posted: ‘How to define “wokeness”’[0] [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/03/how-to-define-wokeness.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/03/how-to-define-woken...
motohagiography 4y ago
A related thread yesterday was about how to programatically determine whether a text has been generated by an ML model and how it's very difficult to do it. There are still some aesthetic cues but we will likely become economically indifferent to them in coming months. I've been working on a related idea from a different direction about ascertaining whether a belief is the product of an underlying ideology, and in particular, whether there is a difference between ideas formulated by the filter of ideology - and direct experiences. It's a similar error prone aesthetic judgment. The rationale is that I think LLM's can illuminate how these cultural differences are not just political opinions or religious pieties, but divides in entire theories of mind. The basic idea is that a belief that is the effect of interpreting an experience through ideology is equivalent to a text produced by a LLM. They aren't the real, they are just artifacts of language. What I think happened is that some early 20th century intellectuals codified an older theory of mind that reduced the self-itself to the artifacts of language. Without either spiritual belief or physical competence or experience to anchor an identity to and resist it, they figured out how to install entirely new ontologies into vulnerable minds, which subordinated people to their 'enlightened' critics. Think of it as inventing "self-as-a-service," where you place your identity and sense of self and worth in the hands of a priest, a mentor, an officer, a pimp, a professor, a leader, a therapist, or lately, an activist, and in exchange for subordination to them, you get Pavlovian drips of approval and rewards, in a theoretical Skinner box. The techniques are ancient, but transmitting them through texts is modern. In the philosophy of mind, (I'm trying to source it, probably Dennet) there was an idea that the self-itself reduces to how it expresses itself through language and that language was consciousness. What i think LLM's are demonstrating today is, given we can simulate all the consistent artifacts of language with some code and a computer, language has an arbitrary substrate. Therefore it is not the real, even if your experiences are affected by it. Your identity and self-itself is not the artifact of language or symbols, because experiences that are the internally consistent artifacts of language are easily simulated. Unless you can also be easily simulated, either you aren't real, or they aren't. The message of the medium here is that the existence of LLM's means the end of subjectivity, but also I hope the beginning of a common theory of mind that has some innoculation against being subordinated through indoctrination.
brodouevencode 4y ago
Sort of disappointed on the comments so far: everyone seems to want to argue the definition rather than examining the approach taken by the author, which is the more interesting point in the article. I'd rather see more arguments on the quality of the process (this comment seems to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287984) and whether or not it works as a satisfactory means. Whether or not you agree with the answer is secondary.

> Politically neutral AI systems that provide balanced sources and a diverse set of legitimate viewpoints Deus ex machina, then? If humans can't decide truth for each other, why would machines be better at it?

methodin 4y ago
The irony is that a lot of people on this earth have opinions already formed by bots and AI without knowing it
fallingknife 4y ago
Able to perform observations that human senses are unable to. Able to hold more data in memory at once. Able to perform calculations at a much faster rate. Freedom from emotional bias. There's four reasons right there.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Our priors strongly suggest that AI will have similar biases to ourselves and are not immune to cognitive faults. I am not sure it is possible to train an AI (or possibly any intelligence) with no biases. ChatGPT's working memory seems to be less than a human's, as does its ability to perform correct calculations (although it is fast about it). To suggest that AI will be better at something without evidence just because it runs on a computer would be contrary to available evidence.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > Able to perform observations that human senses are unable to. What sources of observations do AIs have that human senses don't? I mean, you could talk about something like the Webb Telescope, which can see things that humans can't. But humans can see what Webb sends back just as well as an AI can. If you mean that AIs can spot things in, say, medical images that humans can't, even when looking at the same image, that's true, but I'm not sure that it's all that relevant to the current question.
Nevermark 4y ago
Machines can learn information from all available resources. Humans can’t. Often don’t want to.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  Machines can't `learn' anything at all. They just recognize patterns.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    LLM have no mechanism for determining truth. They have a dataset which determines what is truth to them. If you include "all sources" they are just going to include a lot of junk next to useful information. An ML algo consuming content generated from other ML algos (which will be the reality very soon) is basically just recycling garbage over and over. It's certainly no mechanism for elevating "truth".
    - jkea 4y ago
      What are humans mechanisms for determining truth?
      - tstrimple 4y ago
        As far as I'm aware, the scientific method is the best we have at the moment and it has delivered pretty good results.
  - Nevermark 4y ago
    They don’t just recognize patterns. They learn to recognize patters. Any algorithm that captured anything useful from exposure to data is learning. Machines most definitely learn. Watch a plot of generalization accuracy over training iterations (by testing with non-training data). You will see periods of slow improvement, alternating with periods of very fast improvement, as important relationships are discovered. Machines earn.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Why would machines trained by human writings be better at it?

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> red and blue America have very different ideas in mind when they use the terms woke/wokeness. This renders the two groups almost unable to communicate with each other Whichever side (or both) then have poisoned the word as it can now never be used without being divisive — intentionally or otherwise. I'm not sure there is any other recourse but to abandon the word. I don't think that would necessarily be a horrible thing to do — the idea can still exist (although Orwell might have believed otherwise). It is unfortunate though that forces exist that would try and poison any discussion. Perhaps going after a specific word though is an easy means to do that?

Nevermark 4y ago
I am around enough people from different bands of the political spectrum that I avoid the word. Its definition varies wildly as a function of the listener. And, as demonstrated by both of the graphs, it is strongly associated with negative concepts. But that’s just my experience, in my context.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> It is unfortunate though that forces exist that would try and poison any discussion. Take "inherent white racism", for example. (That idea is out there. Whether it should properly be considered part of "woke" is not the point.) I mean, if I'm white, there's no way I can engage with that. If I disagree, someone holding the idea regards my disagreement as proving the correctness of their view. And if I agree, then I just categorized myself as the one having the flawed worldview, and therefore someone not to be listened to going forward. So that idea completely poisons the discussion. I don't think that just "woke" poisoned the discussion. I think it reflects that some of the ideas that people lump into "woke" are themselves poisonous to real discussion. You used the phrase "forces exist". It's a bit unclear whether you mean sociological dynamics, or whether you mean people. My own two cents: I think there are people on both sides who want to shut down discussion, for at least two reasons: because they think that they'll win more that way, and/or because it's easier to try to win by default than to actually win peoples' hearts and minds in an honest discussion. ("By default" meaning "the other side's position is completely unreasonable, therefore my position is the only one standing, therefore I win".) When too many people on both sides are engaged in such tactics (or too many who have the microphone), it becomes impossible to have a reasonable conversation on those topics. Reasonable people just tune out the shouting and shake their heads. All you can do is wait for the shouters to shut up and go away. Except they never will, because this has become part of electoral politics, and elections are every two years, and campaigns are nearly two years long, so it never really goes away. Which brings us to sociological dynamics. And I'm going to stop here, because I don't know what to say...

spacephysics 4y ago

Wall Street journal isn’t right leaning [0]. This may be a case of Overton window at work. [1] A google search says NYT categorizes them as leaning conservative, which given the climate is like asking Russia if they think Ukraine is the bad guy. This just further displays what the author was probably getting at, that were in different realities based on the assumptions made. To be a classic moderate of the early 2000’s is unheard of in mainstream “discussions”, yet I’d bet many adult Americans hold a moderate view. As a society we don’t know how to handle the insane communication technology we have, and not many know how to effectively filter stuff out (I sure don’t fully know) [0] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-med... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

crenwick 4y ago
The author may have pulled data from WSJ news and opinion https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opinion https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opi...
skywal_l 4y ago
On this site, 25% of people believe that Fox News is Left/Center Left [0]. I wouldn't give much credit to those polls. [0] https://www.allsides.com/blog/fox-news-bias-rated-right-allsides-blind-bias-survey https://www.allsides.com/blog/fox-news-bias-rated-right-alls...
hadrien01 4y ago
But can you trust "allsides.com" to be impartial in its determination? Another widely known website [0] classifies the WSJ as centre-right (which as a European I would tend to agree more). According to Wikipedia [1], AllSides was founded... by a Republican. [0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

msravi 4y ago

> Left-leaning news media tends to use the terms woke and wokeness in the vicinity of terms such as bogeyman, trumpists, denigrate, deride, vilify, ridiculed, reactionaries, pejorative, fearmongering, demagoguery, and racism. This has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the term "woke" - this only serves to say that the term is currently viewed as a pejorative term, a negative term. The left and the right don't "understand" it differently, as the article concludes. No, they aren't speaking different languages. The term is understood well enough, and is deliberately used so.

the_gastropod 4y ago
When pressed to define the term, Ron Desantis’s general counsel provided this definition: > the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them So maybe the left and right do agree on its meaning! But much of the lizard-brained shrieking about it doesn’t usually seem all that related to the definition above.
- mpweiher 4y ago
  This sounds like selective and out-of-context quoting. Let's see. https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desantis-officials-answer-during-andrew-warren-trial https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desan... Yup. Let's see what he goes on to say: "To me, it means someone who believes that there are systemic injustices in the criminal justice system, and on that basis they can decline to fully enforce and uphold the law," And all this was in the context, specifically, of a legal battle around a suspension, so very much tailored to that situation. All in all, the meme that "woke is a made up term" is tiring, and no, it certainly doesn't just mean "there are systemic injustices". "You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try. If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one. You can’t just bitch on Twitter every time someone tries to describe your political cohort, which again you yourself say intends to change the world. Name yourself or you will be named." https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...

bedhead 4y ago

I see woke as mainly two things. First, it’s the elevation of feelings above reality, and if need be redescribing reality to contort to certain people’s feelings. (“Certain people” leading into the second point) Second, it’s seeing everything through the lens of historical power imbalances, but importantly it’s taking an “ends justify the means” approach that discards all principles to rectify those imbalances…that rectification is itself the only principle. It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Yeah, see, this is what you've been trained to believe by people with an agenda against addressing systemic reform. They have made you a really great little political pawn. As another poster said: > When pressed to define the term, Ron Desantis’s general counsel provided this definition: >> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them So to people who understand the term this way, which apparently includes a conservative political front runner's legal counsel, what you're saying when you are using "woke" as a pejorative is that there are no such injustices and it is silly to believe otherwise. Which is why people with that understanding of the word would rightly think all sorts of ungenerous things about you for saying that. Which is just fine, as far as the people pushing your definition are concerned, since further divide and unreasonable discourse helps cement their base.
- Jensson 4y ago
  "The need to address them" is key there. There is no need for everyone to work to address or think about the injustices, people who push the "you are either with us or against us" onto people and force them to make a choice instead of being bystanders are "woke". Most people dislike that kind of "woke", no matter if they are left or right, being forced to take a stand when you are stressed and tired enough already is very uncomfortable.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    There is definitely an element of that, and I think most people would agree that that behavior is harmful. But I think we would say that such behavior is not actually that common and is very much exaggerated by the loud "anti-woke" crowd, who seem to equate any steps taken to address the issue or even draw attention to it as some kind of assault. See: "go woke go broke" nonsense, anti-CRT education legislation, etc. From the other side, I could say that a lot of the "anti-woke" rhetoric is just bigotry in disguise, but I know that is only a relatively small minority of very loud assholes who, naturally, draw the most attention. Unfortunately many of them are also elected officials.

srobilliard 4y ago

This article misrepresents the theory of distributional semantics. The article implies that words that most often appear "in the vicinity of" each other, or words that are "colocated", are semantically similar. For example, colocation as a predictor of similarity would imply the two words "bank" and "statement" are semantically related. This is not how word embeddings are trained. Distributional semantics states that words which appear in the same contexts have similar meanings. For example, consider these two sentences: The desert is hot The desert is dry "hot" and "dry" both appear in the same contexts, they both appear after "the desert is", this is what gives them semantic similarity.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

Just posted: ‘How to define “wokeness”’[0] [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/03/how-to-define-wokeness.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/03/how-to-define-woken...

motohagiography 4y ago

A related thread yesterday was about how to programatically determine whether a text has been generated by an ML model and how it's very difficult to do it. There are still some aesthetic cues but we will likely become economically indifferent to them in coming months. I've been working on a related idea from a different direction about ascertaining whether a belief is the product of an underlying ideology, and in particular, whether there is a difference between ideas formulated by the filter of ideology - and direct experiences. It's a similar error prone aesthetic judgment. The rationale is that I think LLM's can illuminate how these cultural differences are not just political opinions or religious pieties, but divides in entire theories of mind. The basic idea is that a belief that is the effect of interpreting an experience through ideology is equivalent to a text produced by a LLM. They aren't the real, they are just artifacts of language. What I think happened is that some early 20th century intellectuals codified an older theory of mind that reduced the self-itself to the artifacts of language. Without either spiritual belief or physical competence or experience to anchor an identity to and resist it, they figured out how to install entirely new ontologies into vulnerable minds, which subordinated people to their 'enlightened' critics. Think of it as inventing "self-as-a-service," where you place your identity and sense of self and worth in the hands of a priest, a mentor, an officer, a pimp, a professor, a leader, a therapist, or lately, an activist, and in exchange for subordination to them, you get Pavlovian drips of approval and rewards, in a theoretical Skinner box. The techniques are ancient, but transmitting them through texts is modern. In the philosophy of mind, (I'm trying to source it, probably Dennet) there was an idea that the self-itself reduces to how it expresses itself through language and that language was consciousness. What i think LLM's are demonstrating today is, given we can simulate all the consistent artifacts of language with some code and a computer, language has an arbitrary substrate. Therefore it is not the real, even if your experiences are affected by it. Your identity and self-itself is not the artifact of language or symbols, because experiences that are the internally consistent artifacts of language are easily simulated. Unless you can also be easily simulated, either you aren't real, or they aren't. The message of the medium here is that the existence of LLM's means the end of subjectivity, but also I hope the beginning of a common theory of mind that has some innoculation against being subordinated through indoctrination.

brodouevencode 4y ago

Sort of disappointed on the comments so far: everyone seems to want to argue the definition rather than examining the approach taken by the author, which is the more interesting point in the article. I'd rather see more arguments on the quality of the process (this comment seems to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287984) and whether or not it works as a satisfactory means. Whether or not you agree with the answer is secondary.