This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I guess the point of my conjecture is that understanding is required for intelligence. And one way to get after intelligence is putting an agent in a situation where it has no previous experience or models to work from and expect it to solve problems.
Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that. Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer. But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt. It cannot answer the new questions because it specifically doesn’t understand any of tge old questions nor can it understand the new ones. And likewise if the questions in English are not understood it would be impossible to get the agent to understand Japanese because it’s unable to derive meanings from words, it’s just stringing them together in ways that it’s training tells it are pleasing to users.
It’s also a pretty good test for human understanding of a given subject. If I can get you to attempt to use the information you have in a novel situation and you can do so, you understand it. If you can only regurgitate things you have been told in exactly the ways you have been told to do it, you probably don’t.
Perhaps I'm not as familiar with the Chinese Room experiment as I thought I was. I thought the Chinese Room posited that the room contained mappings for literally every single thing that could be input in Chinese, such that there was literally nothing a Chinese person outside the room could state such that a response indicated a lack of understanding of Chinese? If the Chinese Room posits that the mappings contained in the room are limited, then that does change things, but then I also believe it's not such a useful thought experiment.
I personally don't think "understanding," at least the way we humans understand (heh) it, is a necessary component of intelligence. I'm comfortable with calling the software that underlies the behavior of imps in Doom as "enemy artificial intelligence," even though I'm pretty sure there's no "understanding" going on in my 486 Thinkpad laptop that's causing the blobs of brown pixels to move on the screen in a certain way based on what my player character is doing, for instance. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and is otherwise completely indistinguishable from a duck in every way that I can measure, then I'll call it a duck.
Yeah, to tie this back to the above thread about the ramifications of massively-increased automation, what the hell does it matter if an AI really understands anything, if it puts most of us out of a job anyways? Philosophy is for those who don't have to grind for their bread.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link