EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?
Yes, just like pretty much all European languages, except English and French. But I think even French spelling is more regular than English. (To nitpick: it isn't pronounced phonetically, but written phonetically)
Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere. But probably not, just like the concept of "spelling bee" contests makes no sense and they don't exist for non-English, European languages (elsewhere I don't know). It's useful to think about, in order to understand how fundamentally human this topic is and how far reaching the conclusions can be.
to be facilitators and encouragers which was a much more flattering self-image than that of the traditional strict schoolmarm
Why? I think this is a key question. Why is it more flattering to one's self-image to be a pseudo-peer to the kids than to be feared, obeyed, and hierarchically much higher than the kids? When did it become so? Previous generations of teachers didn't seem to have a problem with being authoritative. Is it a kind of expanding empathy? Or is it because it's too militaristic and after WW2 got associated with Nazi-"vibes"? Is it because the teachers don't want to grow up and want to "relate" to the "fellow kids" as we are supposed to be eternal teenagers now? Is it like when a mother and a daughter say they are "besties" and use first names to call each other?
Also I don't think it's exactly a book-rich parental environment that you need. Rates of higher education have shot through the roof in recent decades, especially in poorer countries like Eastern Europe, bringing many first-generation educated people, who did not have an academically oriented home environment. But still there are styles of existence that can better foster learning and academic success later on. I mean when the parents are conscientious, have a long time horizon etc. For example they may have no books at all, but if they discuss plans at the dinner table, like "next year we are going to have X chickens, I'll go and buy them two weeks from now at the market", "once we have 3 pigs and sell them, we can earn X money, which will allow us to build a new shed", "tomorrow we'll have to go fix the fence that the neighbor's horse kicked down". As opposed to, eg. shouting, fighting, drinking, leaving the yard to disarray, with garbage everywhere, no plans beyond the next hour, etc. In a good, sober, smart environment a kid can pick up the necessary skills for academic success even if the parents never talk about Shakespeare. What's needed is something else, something deeper. Similarly I don't think it's the reading of a bedtime story, but probably simply the affection, attention and time for the kid. It could also be an evening chat about stories about when grandma was young or what happened at school. (And of course there's the argument that all these parental behaviors are simply indicators of genetic propensities that anyway already get inherited by the kid.)
I wonder if any such controversy or split exists outside the English-speaking countries. In languages where the spelling doesn't lag behind pronunciation by several centuries as it does with English, something like phonics seems just obvious. In my Hungarian school we first learned the vowels (as they are easy to pronounce in isolation), the teacher would show big cards with these letters, and we pronounced it out loud, she would show another letter and we'd pronounce that etc. (We'd also do exercises of circling pictures in a workbook whose name contains the new letter/sound that we just learned.) Then after learning the vowels, we learned each consonant and immediately combined them into syllables. E.g. lesson about the letter "b": teacher writes syllables on the chalkboard like "ba, bá, be, bé, bi, bí, bo, bó, bö, bő, bu, bú, bü, bű" and we'd go over them, entire class pronouncing them. Then she may ask if any of these are meaningful words by themselves. Or if we know any word that starts with any of these syllables. This seems closer to phonics than to whole word. Then gradually we'd move to longer words, then very short sentences, then longer sentences in large font, short stories etc.
I'm a bit confused on the whole-word method though. Does it mean that they simply don't have a dedicated class/timeslot for each letter, they don't say that "hey this is the letter b, the capital letter looks like B and the cursive handwritten looks like this and this". That they don't do syllables? That it's all just "here's the word 'hello' and we pronounce it as hello", before the kid was ever told that the letters h, e, l, and o are things? Seems very silly. English spelling is far from pronunciation but isn't so far...
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Maybe because the sort of people who would carry swords rather carry guns in the US, as they are easily available.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
No, not causation. I mean correlations that will hold at test time and aren't just coincidences. Causation is a different thing.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Those sound absurd, but it's more ambiguous which style is better for things like musical instruments (learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right) or foreign languages (memorize conjugation tables or just watch Netflix in the target language with subs and start speaking on day 1).
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Sure, but my point is that saying "It's just a number! That's ridiculous to ban!" gets around the meat of the argument (any digital information can be encoded in binary and therefore as a number). It's lazy. Argue the substance.
In turn women are also tools in the game, to show to other men how much better you are for getting hotter/classier women than they can.
I used to believe what you say, but I don't think it makes sense. Simply physically getting into the panties of a hot woman isn't worth grinding yourself to the bone. It must be seen and known. By other people. Simply being powerful, being respected, feared, obeyed, exerting control over the course of things feels good as an end to itself not just as a means to get your dick wet physically in private, behind closed doors.
Success with women is an ego confirmation/validation that you are important, high status etc. That's not to say that powerful men don't enjoy the sex part, but it's not the only goal.
Human motivation is multi-faceted. We enjoy eating food, enjoy relaxing, enjoy accumulating resources and status, enjoy sex, enjoy being accepted as part of communities and friend groups, enjoy having good shelter and warm clothes etc. There's no need to pick one and claim that they others are just proxies for that one.
If only we had a way to make sure that a (sexual/romantic) relationship is socially acceptable (according to whatever the local moral rules are) within your community. Maybe we'd gather a bunch of friends and family together and give everyone the opportunity to chat with both parties, see that they are willingly there etc. Maybe even let the government know that you're fucking. And if someone opposes the sex-having (based on laws or morality) they have to bring their arguments up there and then. But from that day on, the sex between those people will be normal, accepted and expected.
But wait, no, that would be marriage and that's conservative and patriarchal (except when it's same-sex marriage - then it's liberating). We're supposed to enjoy the fruits of the sexual revolution, have flexibility etc. Just enjoy sex without marriage, no worries at all, pleasure is king. Oh, except a bunch of people can still scrutinize your sex life and decide at any point that the kind of sex you are having does not get the stamp of approval, retroactively.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
There have been many attempts on the Motte to somehow explain the left-right divide from deep archetypes or psychology, life strategies, etc. I think the supposed insight is a mirage. There are no perfect mappings to such clean sides, the two American sides are idiosyncratic cultural developments specific to time and location; their positions on issues does not follow from basic human first principles. But this is the particular battle that keeps your mind busy so it looks fundamental. Maybe an Indian would find that Hindu vs Muslim is the fundamental eternal opposition based on wholly different human types and brains.
This particular attempt seems weak to me, it's guesswork without evidence. Conscientiousness is one of the traits on the "big five" model of personality, and is about something like being organized and structured, keeping to a schedule, remembering rules, etc. Conformism as a concept maybe maps to low openness to experience. I can't really see how Conscientiousness and Conformism form two ends of some kind of axis.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Try blasting the song "Nigga Nigga Nigga" as a white guy next to some wokes. I guess they'd disapprove.
(also CDs are grandfathered in, their analog predecessors were made much earlier than the current progressive morals around race).
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I thought they just want to cancel the use case of training an AI to rap about tough black life in the hood while throwing about the word nigga. I believed they would be fine with I don't know an AI that explains things to blind people or summarizes news articles or generates sport news from the match records or whatever.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
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There's a danger in following such stories because it can distort one's sense of reality. If a mom follows kidnapping stories and 24/7 stranger danger news, she'll have a distorted view of how likely abductions are. Similarly, an inexperienced very online guy can think every woman is a ticking time bomb like this and they had better never interact with women without 5 layers of CYA. This sort of stuff is probably still rare, though it depends on your location and how famous you are.
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There may be more to the story of why this guy was singled out for cancellation. Good or bad reason, but something other than the mere fact of the relationship.
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If the problem is that he was married then this isn't the introduction of some weird new morals but a condemnation of the oldest kind: for adultery.
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Relationships and marriages between coworkers are normal, I know many such couples. If every boss who married his secretary would be fired, we'd have many jobless bosses (though I think these direct supervisor cases aren't ideal and it's best switch roles within the company if such a relationship is established).
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It's probably better not to search for romantic partners at work, if there is a way to avoid it (though some people have no life outside work as they work 80 hour weeks or something). Not necessarily because you will be canceled or fired or arrested but because it can be awkward after breaking up, your coworkers will know more about your private life than otherwise (she may gossip-complain about you to other colleagues when the relationship is going through a rougher time) etc.
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Regardless of the particulars of this story (again, not talking about bosses only), there's a tendency recently to look suspiciously at any relationship with significant status/power differential towards the man. This will mess things up and cause tension and stress that people (especially many women) won't be able to even conceptualize properly.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Sure, this is a much better argument because now you have to address the substance of who (or what, if an AI isn't a who) is allowed to utter the n-word and whether non-blacks can utter it indirectly through the operation of AI systems or whether it causes "harm" or not.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
If I oppose you shooting a bunch of cannon balls at my house, I'm not canceling ballistics, I'm canceling your use of ballistics in this particular way.
"Cancelling" math would be something like what the Pythagoreans did (though cancel isn't the best verb) when trying to suppress the proof/discovery that root 2 isn't rational (please let's not get bogged down in the historicity of my characterization of this particular example, it's an analogy). To consider mathematical facts themselves as dangerous or harmful. These people didn't cancel machine learning or convergence proofs or gradient descent. They cancelled an application of machine learning. If I say that a Chinese style social credit system or all encompassing surveillance infrastructure are bad or should not be implemented, I'm not cancelling the math. Just the application area.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I see it totally opposite. What they are doing is precisely not about canceling the math but the social context, the use. That people made a black man imitator robot, which they consider some kind of blasphemy/taboo, like depicting the prophet for Muslims or how some tribes don't want to be photographed. It's a sacred thing for them. Just like putting some fancy Native American headdress onto some random robot or scarecrow would probably be.
You can argue against that view and that it's bad to consider such things sacred. But it's strawmanning them to pretend that they are simply arbitrarily canceling a bunch of math. They are canceling the building of software tools that impersonate black rappers, as a legitimate endeavor out of quasi religious reasons.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Not shocked at all. Circumcision is an ancient sacrificial ritual. People do it for the traditional, cultural reasons, and justifications like hygiene etc. by Christian or non-religious Americans is just post-hoc. People do it so the son matches the father, because that's just the effortless default in the area etc.
The fact that it may be somewhat inconvenient in later life could be seen as a feature too, it's supposed to be a sacrifice, an expression of having gone through something hard just like your whole community.
If you expect that rationalists only do things that can be derived from first principles based on logic (objective things like medical reasoning and studies) then you're in for more surprises.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Which begs the question of why we should care what journalists say, but lots of people do anyways
I don't think the companies specifically care about the journalists' opinions as a terminal goal. Rather, the (realistic) fear is that average people (potential paying customers or just people who might popularize the brand) read the articles written by the journalists and adopt those opinions and stances.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Also, regarding the gun example:
Stupid arguments: "guns aren't banned, just possessing guns is banned". "Banning guns makes no sense, guns are just molecules and atoms arranged in a certain configuration! You can't ban physical reality!"
Sensible arguments: "Guns should be banned because they are dangerous and people may accidentally fire them or shoot someone in the heat of the moment", "Guns should be allowed because if criminals know that people have guns, they won't break into people's homes and this makes life safer and we can all sleep better."
These are just examples.
I wonder if they would be okay with it if it (the rapper AI) was operated by black people. If yes, then it's not merely about the AI as an object or the math. You have to argue (and I don't think it's hard) that blacks don't have a monopoly on rap, it's not enough to say "hurr durr it's just math".
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I'm referring to dismissals along the lines that "it's increasing the accuracy therefore it can't be unfair", which is often a very narrow minded view. Note by the way that I am certainly closer to the techie nerd type than the humanities type. My point is though that it's not so simple. And also that fairness, justice, ethics etc. are important values and they should not be conceded to be claimed by the woke as their own conceptual turf.
Maybe you train a model based on inputs age, sex and race, and you can predict some important social outcome with 76% accuracy. The conclusion shouldn't be "Great, now deploy it because it clearly captured something about reality", but to think more "why did we choose the aspects that we did? Could we use inputs that are more in control of each person and has clearer causal connection to the outcome? What happens to those that are wrongly classified? Are there substantially different subgroups who we should handle separately instead of lazily lumping them together? What is the right granularity?" etc. I'm not saying that this isn't done, but many techies like to short circuit all this and almost seem to say that if the model is more often correct than it would be by chance then its good and should be used.
All I'm saying is that this stuff is not trivial and not all of this can be easily dismissed. If you already think about these things, that's great. But I see many tech people go too much to the other end (what the woke call tech solutionism - though they overuse the term to wrangle any credence or authority or stake out of the hands of the engineer types to boss them around from their DEI offices).
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
In machine learning the aim is to distinguish signal from noise, to extract things that will generalize to future data, as opposed to merely coincidental, contingent things that appear in the training data. This however leads to deeply philosophical issues that some engineer types tend to ignore out of a feeling of superiority over humanities types. It's not clear for example how to distinguish real, fundamental correlations from mere happenstance. For example one may say that a female US president is perfectly possible, it's not a logical contradiction. The fact that we haven't had one is just a contingent fact about our timeline so far. Or perhaps that the fact that black people currently commit more crimes is not an inherent property to them but a happenstance based on external conditions and so on.
By the way, Saul Kripke just died a few days ago. He had a lot to say about necessity. I'm not convinced that the necessary vs contingent stuff (which goes back all the way to theological arguments) is actually all that meaningful but it's good to recognize that people have already discussed these sorts of things.
They cancelled a pile of math...
Clearly they didn't. They "canceled" actions of people for (to them) socially relevant reasons.
This kind of "they canceled math" reminds me when pirates said that "a number was banned", meaning that the sharing of an encryption key was banned (my point is independent of agreeing with that ban), or "I just used words" or "I just moved a mouse and clicked on things". Or saying "it's just pixels" if you were caught with CP.
(Another somewhat similar trick is "no person is illegal", making it seem as if someone who uses the phrase "illegal immigrant" meant that the person themselves is illegal besides being an immigrant, when clearly it means a person who immigrates illegally. The person isn't illegal, but their actions are. Similarly here, it's not the math that is canceled but an action performed through math.)
It's an annoying rhetorical tool. It's not "just" that, and the fuss isn't about that "just" part but the consequences, the context, the intent, the usage, etc. Everything is, at the end of the day, "just" something. A bomb is just some chemicals, just some molecules. Everything is just a bunch of quarks and electrons and so you can make any action sound absurd.
For anyone that needs advice, it seems there's a universal template invented by GPT-3, as I found out in a recent ACX post. Here's some examples.
It's hilariously and obnoxiously snarky and mocking, while also maybe weirdly encouraging and motivating (and it seems like it isn't from an actually existing copypasta or meme template as far as my google fu goes).
The template goes:
[person] stubbornly postponees [...] citing [...] reasons despite [...]??? negatively effecting [...] both [...] and [...] thoghtwise? want change this dumbass shitty ass [...] now please pls halp
Fill in the blanks for your situation and be enlightened.
You don't need all the racism and plantation aspects to explain the disappearance of dialects. The same is happening in many European countries with no such history. Dialect is associated with peasants, low skill workers, poor and uneducated people, etc. Probably due to infrastructure, media, urbanization, telecommunications, but also standardized schooling etc.
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