Have given up on this “let’s find a moderate perspective on ‘AI’ and stop yelling” essay about a dozen times, then restarted it about a dozen times when I read something that got under my skin, and now it’s just 7,000 words of me pointing out that everyone other than me is wrong without a conclusion, so I guess I’m going to work on my baguette shaping technique some more.
For now, I need to work on developing more stretch without knocking it down too much. Next time I might roll them out. Or maybe I’m too worried about knocking it down.
Maybe a better way to say the thing I’m trying to say is that a whole lot of people who feel a desperate urge to tell the world (1) “ANNs are better than us and also the new bitcoin, which is good” or (2) “actually, ANNs actually aren’t even real, actually” is: If you start by tying your sense of what a piece of software is doing to a massive, categorical, totally abstract philosophical idea about the nature of being itself, maybe go outside and look at the stars for a minute.
Perhaps there is a narrower way to make your case about what the software is doing, and it might make your case more convincing to people who don’t happen to subscribe to that particular grand theory of how cognition works.
I’ve closed a lot of tabs of “well, obviously cognition is computation” or “well, obviously cognition is not computation” or “clearly, truth is/isn’t XYZ” or whatever. These are far-reaching arguments that depend in super nuanced ways on a whole shelf of context. They’re weighing you down, not helping, when you want to say is “merely” something like “this model is/isn’t useful in that context and will have these larger consequences”.
Free scare quotes to distribute as you see fit: “ ” “ ” “ ”
@vruba "it depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
@vruba no layoff from this condensers
@vruba ugh should be “condensery”. A semiobscure Lorine Niedecker reference
Another exhausting and lonely day in the being right factory.