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I think, every academic discipline, we should demand it demonstrate that its got something true and useful to say. And, “Word embeddings utilize neural networks

I think, every academic discipline, we should demand it demonstrate that its got something true and useful to say. And, “Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words..." – "word embeddings" and "neural networks" are true (they clearly exist), and they are clearly useful (we can do things with them, that we couldn't do before). Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute; any impartial person, sufficiently familiar with the discipline, has to admit that. Of course, there are still some things up for debate – how far these technologies will scale, whether scaling them or searching for completely new approaches to replace them is the more fruitful path for future research, etc. But the basic validity of the concepts (truth and usefulness) no longer is. Compare that to the following sentence taken from the field of "feminist technoscience": "Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET..." [0] Even if we can provide some kind of meaningful definition of "masculine-coded technology" such that ARPANET counts as one – is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate than the equivalent questions for "word embeddings" and "neural networks". And that's why it isn't really fair to compare machine learning, as a discipline, to feminist technoscience – the truth and usefulness of the former is rather beyond dispute, the same things are much much more open to question for the latter. > I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl. There are some approaches to social studies, which while they might not be "reproducible in Perl", seem on a much firmer footing – I mentioned before the rational choice theory of religion, advocated by the late sociologist Rodney Stark. It is far easier to derive testable hypotheses from it, for one thing. People write whole books attacking it (whether successfully or not) – like Steve Bruce's Choice and Religion – precisely because it makes claims which are firm enough to be attacked. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_technoscience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_technoscience

SanderNL 4y ago
For the record, I'm no proponent of feminist cyborgism. I'm a programmer, I don't know shit. But I find these statements interesting. I held them for a long time and am now doubting their usefulness: > Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute; That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on. Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying. Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies. > is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.
techno_tsar 4y ago
I just read the feminist technoscience article and I found it very interesting and can imagine it being very relevant to some people. The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research. I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code. It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.
- skissane 4y ago
  > I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing. "Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?

SanderNL 4y ago

For the record, I'm no proponent of feminist cyborgism. I'm a programmer, I don't know shit. But I find these statements interesting. I held them for a long time and am now doubting their usefulness: > Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute; That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on. Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying. Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies. > is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.

techno_tsar 4y ago

I just read the feminist technoscience article and I found it very interesting and can imagine it being very relevant to some people. The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research. I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code. It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.

skissane 4y ago
> I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing. "Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?