tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56885992024-03-14T14:48:16.836-07:00Deep Freeze 9"in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has their reasons"
--- attrib. to Jean Renoir (details in the <u><a href="https://quotesjournal.blogspot.com/2022/01/in-this-world-there-is-one-awful-thing.html">Quotes blog</a></u>.)JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.comBlogger702125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-23550397248724971722024-03-14T14:38:00.000-07:002024-03-14T14:47:15.253-07:00A goal<p> Thinking about what I might want to see in a tech & myth conference/workshop has led me to a goal formulation that also speaks to what I'm looking for personally.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Here's the goal/value statement for an event; change "yourself" to "myself" and I think it's pretty much what excites me.<p></p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>Discovering things about yourself [myself] and the world</b></p><p><b>through listening, making, and conversation.</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>The first line is the End, and the second is the Means. As far as personal goals, different people have different ends and means. Some other personal ends:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Win</li><li>Improve myself</li><li>Take revenge</li><li>Make the world a better place</li><li>Be safe</li><li>Take care of those close to me</li></ul><p></p><p>Some means - one can mix and match like in a flip book:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Inventing</li><li>Fighting</li><li>Rebuilding</li><li>Meditating</li><li>Designing</li></ul><div>Notes about the formulation</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The "and" in the first line is intentionally ambiguous.</li><li>"Listening" includes any kind of reception, including reading and intuiting.</li><li>"Making" is also broad, and includes writing, speaking, speaking -- creativity of all kinds.</li><li>I have learned about the importance of conversation in conversations with Paul Diduch and Cheryl DeCiantis.</li></ul></div><div><br /></div><p></p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-40414673748650077502024-03-08T14:03:00.000-08:002024-03-08T14:04:14.343-08:00Ogregore fairy tales<p>Our dreams are different every night, but there are patterns (cf. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Louise_von_Franz" target="_blank">Marie-Louise von Franz</a>, endnote [1]). Similarly, while corporate PR spin—and other ogregore stories—is slightly different every time, there are perhaps patterns that reveal their deep motivations. In other words, PR could be a way to access an ogregore’s “psyche,” if it has one.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>While C.G. Jung was interested in grand myths, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie-Louise_von_Franz" target="_blank">Marie-Louise von Franz</a> opens <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/introductiontoin00fran/page/n5/mode/2up" target="_blank">An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales</a></i> (1970, 1971) by saying, “Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes” (see endnote [3]). She continues, “They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche.” Perhaps the stories ogregores tell can give us an understanding of what’s going on in their collective psyche.<div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCukqm-kHsutHzeAonRPzD0NEoRzS_kf3p8mzztn-7OpFtN8n0fFbt2isZjklXSN7pssWleV0Er4kdQCnMSNnRTY04YURNvP5IEOtHZVr2NgsvDwhKsIL9yM20pNqIscNCQ3UywkVqttUPQvFEhw49u8BX5WJiGg1HdgfffA3dKSdlY8EMjGYp/s1256/Von-Franz-Photo-202078376.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1256" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCukqm-kHsutHzeAonRPzD0NEoRzS_kf3p8mzztn-7OpFtN8n0fFbt2isZjklXSN7pssWleV0Er4kdQCnMSNnRTY04YURNvP5IEOtHZVr2NgsvDwhKsIL9yM20pNqIscNCQ3UywkVqttUPQvFEhw49u8BX5WJiGg1HdgfffA3dKSdlY8EMjGYp/w306-h320/Von-Franz-Photo-202078376.jpg" width="306" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marie-Louise von Franz</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><p>Corporations and other organizations are constantly spinning stories to influence other ogregores, especially governments. There is often a pattern to these stories which reveal the values and worldviews of these entities. Perhaps corporation-speak captured in PR spin, press releases, and filings with government agencies reveal the collective unconscious of ogregores. (There may well be different species of ogregores, with differing unconscious “minds.”) It’s very easy to talk about the Big Myths of, say, capitalism or technology, but perhaps the intimacy of ogregore folk tales is a way to avoid being caught up too quickly in ideology.</p><p>Looking at some stories from early 2024 (endnote [3]), the corporate pitch in the face of, say, proposed new regulation goes something like this:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Everything is OK, things are going well.</li><li>In general, what we do leads to social progress and human well-being. (endnote [4])</li><li>If you regulate us, bad things will happen like less investment in stuff you want, less innovation, less economic growth, and less competition. This will damage the economy overall, small business especially, and citizens individually.</li><li>Even if you did regulate, it won’t address the root causes of the problem you’re trying to solve, and will have unintended consequences.</li><li>If you still want to take action, you already have sufficient authority under existing rules and regulations.</li></ul><p></p><p>Since the regulation is proposed by government, and the harms are to the collective good, the argument is that steps taken against the organizations by the state will harm the state itself.</p><p>One could frame this as a rudimentary fairy tale:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A Monster appeared in the land.</li><li>The Hero was doing their best to fight it.</li><li>An evil advisor persuaded the Ruler that the Hero was actually helping the Monster rather than fighting it.</li><li>The Ruler decided to poison the Hero.</li><li>In a dream, the Ruler saw that poisoning the Hero would make the Ruler and his people sick, and hamper the Hero in fighting the Monster.</li><li>The Ruler changed his mind, and together the Ruler and the Hero defeated the Monster.</li></ul><p></p><p>Corporate responses to criticism and scandal go something like this, judging by statements by Facebook spokesman Andy Stone in response to the <i>WSJ</i>’s <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039" target="_blank">Facebook Files</a> exposé in 2021 (endnote [5]). The associated fairy tale is quite similar to the one just outlined.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The platform reflects society. Our systems are not the root cause of the problem.</li><li>While the criticism is fair, it’s out of date since systems have been improved.</li><li>We recognize the problem and have been working diligently to combat it, over a long period.</li><li>We are incented to fix the problem because it’s bad for business.</li><li>The metrics being used to attack the company are out of date, partial, or performance against them has improved.</li></ul><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Notes</h4><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Many public policy arguments involve hypotheticals: what would happen (or not happen) if the government took a certain course of action. One could tell them as prophecy stories or, as I did above, as dreams.</li><li>One can apply a similar analysis to other organized groups like political parties or labor unions. For groups on the political left, the movement/organization is the Hero, in alliance with the Ruler. Big companies are often the Monster. In these stories, the Monster tries to deceive the Ruler.</li></ul><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Endnotes </h3><p>[1] <b>From “The process of individuation,” Marie-Louise von Franz</b>, in Part 3 of <i>Man and his Symbols, edited, with an introduction, by Carl G Jung</i> (Laurel Edition paperback, Dell Publishing Co, 1964), pp. 159, 161</p><p></p><blockquote><p>By observing a great many people and studying their dreams (he estimated that he interpreted at least 80,000 dreams), Jung discovered not only that all dreams are relevant in varying degrees to the life of the dreamer, but that they are all parts of one great web of psychological factors. He also found that, on the whole, they seem to follow an arrangement or pattern. This pattern Jung called "the process of individuation." Since dreams produce different scenes and images every night, people who are not careful observers will probably be unaware of any pattern. But if one watches one's own dreams over a period of years and studies the entire sequence, one will see that certain contents emerge, disappear, and then turn up again. Many people even dream repeatedly of the same figures, landscapes, or situations; and if one follows these through a whole series, one will see that they change slowly but perceptibly. These changes can be accelerated if the dreamer's con- scious attitude is influenced by appropriate interpretation of the dreams and their symbolic contents.</p><p>Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth—the process of individuation.</p><p>Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges, and by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. The fact that we often speak of "arrested development" shows that we assume that such a process of growth and maturation is possible with every individual. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolized by the tree, whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfills a definite pattern.</p><p>. . . .</p><p>The organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems seems to be a sort of "nuclear atom" in our psychic system. One could also call it the inventor, organizer, and source of dream images. Jung called this center the "Self" and described it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from the "ego," which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>[2] <b>From <i><a href="https://archive.org/details/introductiontoin00fran/page/n5/mode/2up" target="_blank">An introduction to the interpretation of fairy tales</a></i>, Marie-Louise von Franz</b> (Spring Publications, 1970), Chapter 1, pp. 1-2 </p><p></p><blockquote><p>Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious cultural material and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.</p><p>In terms of Jung's concept, every archetype is in its essence an unknown psychic factor and therefore there is no possibility of translating its content into intellectual terms. The best we can do is to circumscribe it on the basis of our own psychological experience and from comparative studies, bringing up into light, as it were, the whole net of associations in which the archetypal images are enmeshed. The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation; that is, its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story. The unconscious is, metaphorically speaking, in the same position as one who has had an original vision or experience and wishes to share it. Since it is an event that has never been conceptually formulated he is at a loss for means of expression. When a person is in that position he makes several attempts to convey the thing and tries to evoke, by intuitive appeal and analogy to familiar material, some response in his listeners; and never tires of expounding his vision until he feels they have some sense of the content. In the same way we can put forward the hypothesis that every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolical pictures and events and is dis- coverable in these.</p><p>After working for many years in this field, I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician's variations are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic totality of an individual and also, paradoxically, the regulating center of the collective unconscious. Every individual and every nation has its own modes of experiencing this psychic reality.</p><p>Different fairy tales give average pictures of different phases of this experience. They sometimes dwell more on the beginning stages, which deal with the experience of the shadow and give only a short sketch of what comes later. Other tales emphasize the experience of animus and anima and of the father and mother images behind them and gloss over the preceding shadow problem and what follows. Others emphasize the motif of the inaccessible or unobtainable treasure and the central experiences. There is no difference of value between these tales, because in the archetypal world there are no gradations of value for the reason that every archetype is in its essence only one aspect of the collective unconscious as well as always representing also the whole collective unconscious.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>[3] <b>Corporate responses to public policy debates from early 2024</b></p><p>For example, <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2024/0216/East-Palestine-crash-prompted-rail-safety-bill.-Why-it-stalled" target="_blank">reporting by the <i>CS Monitor</i></a> on the failure of the Railway Safety Act, a response the derailment of a train carrying 100,000 gallons of hazardous chemicals had derailed in East Palestine, Ohio in February 2023, contains several lines of argument that look familiar to anyone who follows corporate responses to regulatory initiatives:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It’s important to enhance safety, but one should create a regulatory burden that reduces how much freight can move and make it more expensive.</li><li>The bill does not address the root causes of the crash.</li><li>It’s been expanded to become a conduit for onerous regulatory mandates and union giveaways.</li><li>The additional labor costs it entails would hurt railroads’ ability to innovate in ways that could more effectively boost safety.</li><li>Industry has already taken steps to address problems exposed by what happened in East Palestine.</li></ul><p></p><p>The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is advocating against the re-adoption of “net neutrality” rules (reclassifying broadband as a “telecommunications service” under Title II of the Communications Act) by the Biden FCC (<a href="https://www.uschamber.com/technology/broadband/u-s-chamber-launches-seven-figure-ad-buy-to-combat-a-pattern-of-regulatory-overreach-jeopardizing-broadband-connectivity" target="_blank">advertising program</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvVvJZX0z80" target="_blank">video spot</a>, <a href="https://www.uschamber.com/technology/broadband/u-s-chamber-comments-on-the-federal-communications-commissions-proposed-rulemaking-on-title-ii-net-neutrality" target="_blank">FCC comments</a>). It argues that:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Predictions by pro-Title II advocates that reversing net neutrality rules would lead to catastrophic consequences did not come to pass; quite the contrary – broadband is now better.</li><li>Re-regulation will turn back the clock and threaten investments in critical infrastructure.</li><li>The FCC doesn’t justify why Title II classification is necessary.</li><li>There are remedies for any problems that might arise under existing FCC authority.</li><li>Rather than regulate, the FCC should focus on pro-competitive, pro-growth policies that will help America continue to lead in the global race for next-generation connectivity.</li></ul><p></p><p>The <a href="https://www.uschamber.com/energy/u-s-chamber-says-new-particulate-matter-standards-will-cause-permitting-gridlock" target="_blank">U.S. Chamber of Commerce objected</a> to the tightening of EPAs air quality rules for particulate matter. It argued that</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The new rule would lead to hundreds of counties going out of compliance, threatening economic growth.</li><li>Compliance with the new standard will be very difficult.</li><li>Seeking exemptions for wildfire sources is time-consuming and difficult, and the EPA hasn’t granted such exemptions in the past.</li></ul><p></p><p>After the FTC <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/ftc-launches-inquiry-generative-ai-investments-partnerships" target="_blank">announced</a> an inquiry into five Big Tech companies about generative AI investments and partnerships in January 2024, the <a href="https://itif.org/publications/2024/01/25/the-ftcs-inquiry-into-ai-firms-undermines-us-competitiveness/" target="_blank">ITIF decried</a> it, suggesting that</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Startups – and companies generally – will be deterred from partnering with Big Tech, fearing the legal problems and costs of an FTC inquiry</li><li>This will chill AI start-ups, hurting US competitiveness. </li><li>It will deter funding since a hostile regulatory environment deters investors. This will limit the ability of AI start-ups to grow.</li></ul><p></p><p>[4] Cf. “About TechFreedom” banner at the bottom of <a href="https://techfreedom.org/" target="_blank">its web pages</a>, “<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Technology is the great driver of social progress and human well-being, and we aim to keep it that way</span>” (accessed 6 Mar 2024)</p><p>[5] <b>Andy Stone’s statements as examples of corporate spin</b></p><p>Statements by Facebook (now Meta) spokesman Andy Stone in the WSJ’s 2021 <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039" target="_blank">Facebook Files</a> package (and a bonus one from Feb 2024).</p><p><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353" target="_blank">Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt</a>, WSJ 13 Sep 2021, about XCheck, a program that “has given millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment, a privilege many abuse”</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The criticism is fair, but the system was introduced to create additional screening steps.</li><li>The “self-remediation window,” a perk for VIP, was phased out at some unspecified date.</li><li>The program didn’t include all candidates running for office, but Facebook made multiple efforts to ensure everyone was included.</li><li>Performance on a bad metric has improved, though without giving evidence</li></ul><p></p><p>In a story about how Zuckerberg resisted efforts to fix a change in how Facebook ranked divisive content, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zuckerberg-11631654215?st=8sj1zje242rmuw5&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank">Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead</a>, WSJ 15 Sep 2019</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A change in ranking isn’t the source of the world’s divisions – it was going on before Facebook existed.</li></ul><p></p><p>Responding to employee alarms about how Facebook is used in developing countries, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-drug-cartels-human-traffickers-response-is-weak-documents-11631812953?st=rr7jexsgmmhcm2j&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank">Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show</a>, WSJ 16 Sep 2021</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Facebook has a comprehensive strategy for countries at risk for conflict and violence.</li><li>It prohibits human trafficking and combat it on its platforms since 2015. There’s a dedicated team of employees.</li></ul><p></p><p>In a profile of the former employee, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122?st=62ccla2jalntpzo&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank">The Facebook Whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Says She Wants to Fix the Company, Not Harm It</a>, WSJ 3 Oct 2021</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It untrue to suggest that Facebook encourages bad content and does nothing about it.</li><li>There are ongoing work and significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content.</li><li>Facebook has invested heavily in people and technology to keep our platform safe.</li><li>Why would we do this? Hosting hateful or harmful content is bad for businesses.</li><li>Even if Facebook doesn’t make its research public, it uses it to inform changes in its apps.</li></ul>In a story about the effectiveness of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ai-enforce-rules-engineers-doubtful-artificial-intelligence-11634338184?st=9wxxf75mys59t5o&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank">AI in removing problematic content, Facebook Says AI Will Clean Up the Platform. Its Own Engineers Have Doubts</a>, 17 Oct 2021<br /><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The low success rate of AI in removing posts doesn’t take into accounts other actions the company takes.</li><li>While Facebook introduced “hate speech cost controls” to save money, the funds were shifted to hire more people to train Facebook’s algorithms.</li><li>Moves that seem to reduce detection were intended to make the system more efficient, and in any case, some of them have been rolled back.</li></ul><p></p><p>Responding to a report that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-spread-religious-hatred-in-india-internal-documents-show-11635016354" target="_blank">Facebook Services Are Used to Spread Religious Hatred in India, Internal Documents Show</a>, 23 Oct 2021</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Declined to comment on the Hindu nationalist groups’ activities on Facebook, but the company has a careful process to ban groups or individuals.</li><li>Declined comment on proposals internal researchers had made, but emphasized Facebook invest in research to improve over the long term.</li><li>Given Facebook’s massive global audience, everything in society will find expression on the platform.</li><li>The company continues to work to improve its systems.</li></ul><p></p><p>In a story that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-stolen-content-copyright-infringement-facebook-files-11636493887?st=ovh671j7zsz7zmb&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank">Facebook Allows Stolen Content to Flourish, Its Researchers Warned</a>, 9 Nov 2021</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Facebook has taken steps to address the issues raised by an employee in a 2019 presentation.</li><li>It’s a working document showing preliminary results and doesn’t reflect solutions implemented since then.</li></ul><p></p><p>In response to a Feb 2024 WSJ story that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-staff-found-instagram-subscription-tool-enabled-child-exploitation-the-company-pressed-ahead-anyway-a18e81e6" target="_blank">Meta Staff Found Instagram Tool Enabled Child Exploitation. The Company Pressed Ahead Anyway</a>, Mr Stone averred that </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The tools in question were launched with a robust set of safety measures in place.</li><li>The company had ongoing safety work to limit pedophiles from subscribing to children’s accounts.</li><li>The presence of a gift button in the UI didn’t mean that Meta had actually paid money to suspect accounts.</li></ul><p></p><p><br /></p></div></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-83349068413265104512024-01-12T16:16:00.000-08:002024-01-16T12:25:11.925-08:00Memoranda of the Boulder Ogregore Observatory<p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">When the University of Colorado Boulder’s quantum computer came online recently, a diagnostic core dump revealed unexpected data. It seems to be fragments from the 2028 annual report of the so-called Boulder Ogregore Observatory (BOO), an institution that does not (yet?) exist.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Parts of the corpus are unintelligible and reconstruction is ongoing. Physicists speculate that the Observatory stored its data on a successor to the recently inaugurated Boulder quantum computer. Time-entangled qubits allowed the archives to worm their way back to the present. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><i>The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.</i></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Jose Luis Borges, Prologue to <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges" target="_blank"><i>The Garden of Forking Paths</i></a>, <br />in <i>Ficciones</i>, edited and with an introduction by <br />Anthony Kerrigan, Grove Press (New York), (1941, 1962:15)</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">There are indications that plans were afoot in 2028 to create other Ogregore Observatories, including in Tokyo, New York, and perhaps Frankfurt.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Here is the BOO corpus reconstructed so far. It appears to be a list of papers published by institution researchers. Reconstruction of another text that appears to be their resumes is under way. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Abbasov, Y. S., Antonescu, G. , Galli, F., & Kumar, T. (2026). “Ogregore appeasement rituals in popular culture: Placating and cajoling social media applications.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Abbasov, Y. S., Galli, F., Heijman, A., & Beauchêne, C. (2027). “From ‘They’ to ‘It’ and back: Ambiguity in the perception of corporate agency in the public mind.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Abbasov, Y. S., Kumar, T., & Antonescu, G. (2027). “Stockholm Blindsight: Why consumers underestimate the impact of social media platforms.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Barwegen, M., & Lefèvre, L. (2026). “Facebook’s nervous breakdown: Corporate dysfunction and crisis in the face of internal research and external political pressure.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Barwegen, M., Lefèvre, L., & Nikolić, V. M. (2027). “The incredible disappearing CEO: How corporate crises reveal collective decision making.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Barwegen, M., Schnur, E., Beauchêne, C., & Xanthopoulos, C. (2028). </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">“</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Great founders vs. Ogregores: The role of leadership and collective agency in large corporations.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Barwegen, M., Xanthopoulos, C., Patel, J. A., & Sundström, V. (2027). “Taxonomic metrics for corporate and government ogregores.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Beauchêne, C., Abbasov, Y. S., & Lefèvre, L. (2026). “Stroke the CEO, blame the bureaucracy: Methods for discerning organizational agency through press coverage of government and commercial institutions.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Beauchêne, C., Lefèvre, L., Chambers, S. A., & Heijman, A. (2026). “The bloating of the Pentagon: How collective dynamics fed an ogregore.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Ekmekçi, E. K., Patel, J. A., & Barwegen, M. (2028). “Ogregore communication: Using data analytics and market signals to trace and reconstruct communication between corporate collectives.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Haraguchi, S. T., & Pinto, R. O. (2028). “A natural history of ogregores.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Haraguchi, S. T., Pinto, R. O., & Heijman, A. (2027). “The impact of GDPR on European ogregore metabolism and umwelt.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Haraguchi, S. T., Pinto, R. O., Lefèvre, L., & Beauchêne, C. (2028). “An Ogregore Field Guide: How to identify, classify, and observe large collective agents.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Hüber, U. E., Lefèvre, L., Nikolić, V. M., & McKenzie, A. S.. (2027). “A comparison of the Apple ogregore in the Jobs and Cook eras.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Hüber, U. E., Patel, J. A., & Lefèvre, L. (2028). “Scale dependence of the emergence of collective agency in technology businesses.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Kumar, T., Beauchêne, C., & Chambers, S. A. (2028). “The ogregore pushes back: Resistance and countermeasures by corporations to research into collective organizational agency.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Kumar, T., Heijman, A., & Chambers, S. A. (2027). “Tracing collective communication between government and commercial ogregores.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Kumar, T., Lefèvre, L., & Haraguchi, S. T. (2026). “Kami Chameleon: How ogregores hide in plain sight.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">McKenzie, A. S., & Beauchêne, C. (2027). “Kings and Bureaucracies: The deep archaeological history of ogregores.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">McKenzie, A. S., Kumar, T., & Beauchêne, C. (2026). “Capitalism isn’t an ogregore: Distinguishing agents, ideologies, institutions, and social imaginaries.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Meztli, H., Antonescu, G., Galli, F., & Xanthopoulos, C. (2028). “An animist analysis of ogregore phenomenology.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Meztli, H., Galli, F., & Xanthopoulos, C. (2027). “Gods, archetypes, and ogregores: Human-centric perceptions as clues to the nature of meta-human agency.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Nikolić, V. M., Haraguchi, S. T., & Pinto, R. O. (2027). “Collective perception of the business environment in social media corporations.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Novelist, & Schnur, E. (2028). “Inventing new deities: Fictive biographies of digital media ogregores.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Patel, J. A., Zhao, J. L., Barwegen, M., & Heijman, A. (2026). “Talking to ogregores: Large language models trained on corporate corpora as organizational oracles.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Sundström, V, Patel, J. A., & Okafor, O. C. (2027). “Using agent-based modeling to simulate emergent agency in large organizations.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Pinto, R. O., Barwegen, M., & Ekmekçi, E. K. (2028). “Data appetites and money metabolism: The biology of social media companies.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Sharma, R. D., Ekmekçi, E. K., & Patel, J. A. (2028). “Human consciousness metrics applied to corporations.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Xanthopoulos, C., Barwegen, M., & Chambers, S. A. (2026). “Degrees of agency in corporate ogregores: First steps towards a taxonomy.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Xanthopoulos, C., Pinto, R. O., & Sharma, R. D. (2028). “If agency is sufficient, why worry about ogregore sentience?</span></span></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-58998556510172909162024-01-03T17:37:00.000-08:002024-01-04T09:27:09.394-08:00Social Media and Martians<p>The Martians in H.G. Wells’ <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36" target="_blank"><i>The War of the Worlds</i></a> (1898) resemble ad-funded social media companies in some ways.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDnYLFNUP1q7tnZJp0LT6uKPy4Ybf38yTIhAl8ggu7vEUubWLWl73P1C0K8hQS3PxEdr4REPmdQtWcMHiBESoKqXf1ZDSxcCcWYGQQWl7hkYTAYIFWYoFRzWhT2DPDRsuZv7n-aLqCmuzB32fMwr-Sq7Cx9HcLIsIceNHKFxcOyILkp5IhXumS" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="613" data-original-width="482" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjDnYLFNUP1q7tnZJp0LT6uKPy4Ybf38yTIhAl8ggu7vEUubWLWl73P1C0K8hQS3PxEdr4REPmdQtWcMHiBESoKqXf1ZDSxcCcWYGQQWl7hkYTAYIFWYoFRzWhT2DPDRsuZv7n-aLqCmuzB32fMwr-Sq7Cx9HcLIsIceNHKFxcOyILkp5IhXumS=w315-h400" width="315" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">The history of the world, my sweet – … Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat!</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><i>Sweeney Todd, discussing baking people <br />into pies with Mrs Lovett (<a href="https://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/s/sweeneytoddlyrics/alittlepriestlyrics.html" target="_blank">LyricsOnDemand</a>)</i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><div>I’ve arranged my musings around three excerpts. </div><div><br /></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Scrutinizing Intelligences</h4><p>First, the opening sentences—Chapter I, “The Eve of the War,” in Book One, “The Coming of the Martians”:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own</span>; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water</span>. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Social media companies and their software tools to be intelligent even leaving aside the fact that they consist of thousands of intelligent people. They’re intelligent because they adapt to unpredictable changes in their environment (generated by user behavior, competitors and regulators) in order to meet their goals. One can debate whether their intelligence is “greater than man’s” like the Martians’. Their ability to process vast amounts of data in real time and to solve problems certainly makes it seem that way. They certainly keenly scrutinize and study all our doings. </p><p>On the other hand, unlike Wells’ oblivious Earthlings, we’re certainly aware of social media scrutiny. Many people frequently draw attention to social media as a source of danger to humans.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Blood-suckers</h4><p>Next, a passage on Martian physiology from Chapter II, “What We Saw from the Ruined House,” in Book Two, “The Earth Under the Martians”:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Social media companies make a living off user attention: generating it and then streaming ads past it. Attention is the stuff of life, and the users’ attention streams become the companies’ data streams. This profiling data is then “metabolized” into ad revenue. [Endnote 1]</p><p>Wells conceives of the Martians’ ultimate goal as not to eradicate humans but to farm them. This is not completely alien to social media companies farming human attention. And it’s close to the underlying premise of the Matrix movies where machines confined humans to pods to harvest their bioelectric power.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-VivofmGByLDcyQZukVhJoUi9kA26oLr27TVC9_LF8K0lY1r9wfSIr5vljGOIsYERAJZXntroJjwvtD0zEKjQYGTX45nm1Lfgu1uvHzy5cR-BuaTGt2ruWvjc86XNRWWOMz0QP_YYpni6fdmE0-_F8mzgpqagFyX-sALLov17VORfiGb0IH5K" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img data-original-height="368" data-original-width="705" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg-VivofmGByLDcyQZukVhJoUi9kA26oLr27TVC9_LF8K0lY1r9wfSIr5vljGOIsYERAJZXntroJjwvtD0zEKjQYGTX45nm1Lfgu1uvHzy5cR-BuaTGt2ruWvjc86XNRWWOMz0QP_YYpni6fdmE0-_F8mzgpqagFyX-sALLov17VORfiGb0IH5K=w640-h334" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Matrix (<span style="font-family: "Georgia",serif; font-size: 10.5pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="http://i1.wp.com">i1.wp.com</a></span>)</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Intelligence without Emotion</h4><p>Also from Ch. II, “What We Saw from the Ruined House” in Book Two, “The Earth Under the Martians”:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course, become <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being</span>.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Wells implies that this makes Earthlings superior to Martians: we have emotions, but they are “mere selfish intelligence.” That could true about social media companies, too. Few people consider even the most advanced AI to be sentient. Behavioral advertising algorithms don’t have bodies and thus can’t have emotions. [Endnote 2]</p><p>However, for those at the receiving end, emotions and sentience don’t matter—the actions they take do. While some institutions might be conscious (cf. Schwitzgebel’s <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0387-8" target="_blank">If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious</a>), it’s more important that they have agency: they are differentiated, autonomous, interactive, and adaptive (cf. my <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/11/defining-agency.html" target="_blank">Defining Agency</a>).</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">And if it came to war?</h4><p>Unlike the Martians, social media companies haven’t declared war on people – but how would we defend ourselves if they (or “AI”) did? </p><p>Perhaps Wells’s idea of bacteria as the surest defense might be the answer. For example, Shan & colleagues describe Nightshade, a data poisoning attack using images that “manipulate[s] training data to introduce unexpected behaviors into machine learning models at training time” (<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13828">https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13828</a>). Unfortunately, our algorithms have been exposed to malware since the beginning, unlike the Martians, “slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared” since “there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow”.</p><p>Trying to switch them off probably won’t work, if science fiction is to be believed. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” </p><p><i>Update, 4 Jan 2024</i>: Added Amazon and Temu to endnote 1.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Endnotes</h3><p>[1] A simple commercial-biological analogy to a food chain doesn’t work, though. (In the car business, say, raw materials are refined into metals; those metals are assembled into parts; those parts are combined into cars. Similarly, algae might photosynthesize carbohydrates; algae are eaten by shrimp; shrimp are eaten by fish.) Social media companies (and e-commerce sites like Amazon and Temu, too) are two-sided platforms, not links in a one-way value chain. Two-sided markets are third parties that bring buyers and sellers together. </p><p>GPT-4 <a href="https://poe.com/s/FiyNZw3vgr6bZojkx98o" target="_blank">suggested</a> mutualism as a biological analogy. It brings together “buyers” and “sellers”; examples include bees get nectar to make honey, while flowers get pollinated; and ocean “cleaning stations” where cleaner fish or shrimp (service providers) remove and eat parasites and dead tissue from larger fish (clients). However, that still doesn’t get to a third-party platform extracting value through facilitating interactions. GPT-4 offered three <a href="https://poe.com/s/P1lwkulsFzltYiVwOzFG" target="_blank">examples</a> but none of them really capture platform dynamics: (1) a fig tree (the multi-sided market) is the third party that facilitates the interaction between the fig wasps which need a place to reproduce and in so doing pollinate fig trees, and fruit-eating animals disperse seeds; (2) predatory fish at cleaning stations that don’t eat cleaner fish, thus maintaining a more healthy population of nicely-cleaned prey; (3) animals, like squirrels and birds, that disperse the spores of mycorrhizal fungi which help plants with nutrient absorption in return for carbohydrates. These are three-way mutualisms, perhaps, but not two-sided markets though the fig tree comes close. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhiuhaDkAICXxSq4ywHmq_3c5BtjIRoTLJvVLS-7pbcemK6G-6L8hc9Hq7AnzPcSkrH7DfDhdYF-CBOIdobLdyq1wfmv3OOaluP670qiCLbSqMG3nCMqW0tSB4vmVwPVdoRDvh20RPxQNbtWHUahr2ItDfYPOOpwjg-bx8GyRvL3DUD1P9CLd_j" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img data-original-height="974" data-original-width="974" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhiuhaDkAICXxSq4ywHmq_3c5BtjIRoTLJvVLS-7pbcemK6G-6L8hc9Hq7AnzPcSkrH7DfDhdYF-CBOIdobLdyq1wfmv3OOaluP670qiCLbSqMG3nCMqW0tSB4vmVwPVdoRDvh20RPxQNbtWHUahr2ItDfYPOOpwjg-bx8GyRvL3DUD1P9CLd_j=w320-h320" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.bing.com/images/create/show-biological-mutualism-as-a-two-sided-market-in/1-6594b1372ffd4fb6915e9267e369c5de?id=Ie4PYegnUS%2bH389YOo04fg%3d%3d&view=detailv2&idpp=genimg&FORM=GCRIDP&mode=overlay" target="_blank">Bing Image Creator</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p>[2] That will not necessarily always be the case, however. Algorithms may become embodied, but more interestingly, one might not need a body to have emotions. I lean towards the Damasio view of consciousness as higher order representations that correlate changes in the body with the objects that triggered these changes (cf. my <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2010/04/knowing-with-body.html" target="_blank">Knowing with the Body</a>). In this model, one doesn’t need a physical body to have consciousness, just (1) a representation of self, (2) a representation of outside objects, and (3) a representation of co-occurring changes in (1) and (2). This could all be in software, and so digital systems could be conscious in the Damasio sense.</p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-22263248792151793302023-12-24T10:54:00.000-08:002023-12-24T10:56:21.234-08:00Text and design distortion<p>The recent <a href=" The recent Tune Tech episode on the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast covered the history of distortion in popular music. That got me thinking about the use of distortion in other media like UI design and film. https://youtu.be/wwsyoHchnHQ I’ve been musing about Uncanny UI recently, and came across “glitch art” which is all about distortion. See e.g. #glitchart on YouTube. See also one by Himelstein on r/glitch_art, and Indigo Wounds by ORACLE02000. Distorted fonts are a thing, but I find them rather boring. ZXX, for example, was a heavily distorted font that supposedly made it hard for the NSA read communications—as long as they were printed images, that is (cf. the nice discussion by Graham Cluley). Emil Kozole’s Random typeface “features six alternatives of each glyph that shuffle automatically and create random contextual combinations”; they sure are random, to the point of illegibility. A more controlled (and to my eye, more interesting) effect was reported in Knuth’s “Mathematical Typography” (StackExchange extract, see Fig. 21 below; see also the StackExchange thread, “How do I make my document look like it was written by a Cthulhu-worshipping madman?”). Knuth, D. E. (1979). Mathematical typography. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 1, 337–372. https://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1 Subtlety, please! These examples are rather too all-or-nothing for my taste. There is a uniformity and continuity in the amount of distortion of each example. I’d rather the distortion creeps up on me, or is one thread in an otherwise harmonious tapestry. Here are some examples, all of them under the shadow of the “If I can think of something, it’s already been done” Rule. • A font which varies in its amount of distortion as the letters get used (i.e., a letter gets rendered a slightly different way every time, sometimes more distorted and other times less) (see StackExchange thread above). I can imagine some ways to do this. OpenType variable fonts could be used to introduce random variations in the rendering of glyphs, though it typically used for smooth transitions between styles. Presumably another SMOP would be to manipulate fonts in real-time using scripting languages or libraries like Three.js. Alternatively, https://instafonts.io/create seems to do randomized font generation, but each occurrence of a glyph is the same. • A web page design where the alignments are just sliiiightly off in some places, or the design colors are sometime just sliiiightly different – might be a way to subliminally draw a user’s attention • In film, rather than have the whole film be surreal (like the short film, Thank You For Not Answering by Paul Trillo, or Wes Anderson’s color palette), the color balance shifts just slightly from one cut to another – not enough to notice, but enough to make you uncomfortable. • In prose, an “anti-grammar checker” that adds back infelicities, e.g., randomly breaking Strunk & White’s commandments: multiple topics in one paragraph or one topic spread over many paragraphs; use the passive voice; add in and multiply redundantly superfluous words and verbiage; use multiple tenses; put emphatic words in the middle of sentences. • A more general version would be an LLM that slowly cycled the temperature parameter up and down, from sentence to sentence. A chatbot that shifted from being play-it-safe corporate counsel to manic surrealist and back again. • It would be interesting to combine a fluctuating font with a dull-to-deranged chatbot, with a very staid font when the text was at its most manic, become more disjointed as the text became more staid. • In all of these, do it subtly and serendipitously." target="_blank">Tune Tech</a> episode on <i>Twenty Thousand Hertz </i>covered the history of distortion in popular music. That got me thinking about the use of distortion in other media like UI design and film.</p><span><a name='more'></a></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wwsyoHchnHQ" width="320" youtube-src-id="wwsyoHchnHQ"></iframe></div><p style="text-align: center;">Toys in the Static (2023), "<a href="https://youtu.be/wwsyoHchnHQ" target="_blank">P-Type Ringing Across the Sea</a>" </p><p>I’ve been <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2023/12/uncanny-silicon-valley.html" target="_blank">musing</a> about Uncanny UI recently, and came across “glitch art” which is all about distortion. See e.g. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/glitchart" target="_blank">#glitchart</a> on <i>YouTube</i>. See also <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/comments/18dv6nd/new_glitch_video_made_for_idm_track/" target="_blank">one by Himelstein</a> on <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/" target="_blank">r/glitch_art</a>, and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/comments/18l8kx7/indigo_wounds/" target="_blank">Indigo Wounds</a> by ORACLE02000.</p><p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22distorted+fonts%22&t=brave&ia=web" target="_blank">Distorted fonts</a> are a thing, but I find them rather boring. ZXX, for example, was a heavily distorted font that supposedly made it hard for the NSA read communications—as long as they were printed images, that is (see the <a href="https://grahamcluley.com/zxx-font-nsa/" target="_blank">discussion</a> by Graham Cluley). Emil Kozole’s Random typeface “features six alternatives of each glyph that shuffle automatically and create random contextual combinations”; they sure are random, to the point of illegibility. A more controlled (and to my eye, more interesting) effect was reported in Knuth’s “Mathematical Typography” (<a href="https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/161920/randomized-drawing-of-individual-glyphs" target="_blank"><i>StackExchange </i>extract</a>, see Fig. 21 below; see also the <i>StackExchange </i>thread, “<a href="https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29402/how-do-i-make-my-document-look-like-it-was-written-by-a-cthulhu-worshipping-madm?noredirect=1&lq=1" target="_blank">How do I make my document look like it was written by a Cthulhu-worshipping madman?</a>”).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT8SA8zZDs76oACM8qOG66wHuD05SQWdp4BOYRFcFVa2N2pvykwe5SxGFiF5jvT3TGkVTaTH8qck3WhquKG7i3EdguBzdnPHY15pCmbjOoDHA4vI7bIL5LGSK0U9K8KU6uO753xEY68n3kcaLVSfi7xpk-jHMe_ke32kb1SRn25untw26QZXd7/s817/knuth.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="690" data-original-width="817" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT8SA8zZDs76oACM8qOG66wHuD05SQWdp4BOYRFcFVa2N2pvykwe5SxGFiF5jvT3TGkVTaTH8qck3WhquKG7i3EdguBzdnPHY15pCmbjOoDHA4vI7bIL5LGSK0U9K8KU6uO753xEY68n3kcaLVSfi7xpk-jHMe_ke32kb1SRn25untw26QZXd7/w400-h338/knuth.png" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;">Knuth, D. E. (1979). Mathematical typography. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 1, 337–372. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1">https://doi.org/10.1090/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1</a></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Slippery subtlety</h4><p>These examples are too all-or-nothing for my taste. There is a uniformity and continuity in the amount of distortion of each example. I’d rather the distortion creeps up on me, or is one thread in an otherwise harmonious tapestry. Here are some examples, all of them under the shadow of the “If I can think of something, it’s already been done” Rule.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>A font which varies in its amount of distortion as the letters get used (i.e., a letter gets rendered a slightly different way every time, sometimes more distorted and other times less) (see StackExchange thread above). I can imagine some ways to do this. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_font" target="_blank">OpenType variable fonts</a> could be used to introduce random variations in the rendering of glyphs, though it typically used for smooth transitions between styles. Presumably another SMOP would be to manipulate fonts in real-time using scripting languages or libraries like Three.js. Alternatively, <a href="https://instafonts.io/create">https://instafonts.io/create</a> seems to do randomized font generation, but each occurrence of a glyph is the same.</p><p>A web page design where the alignments are just sliiiightly off in some places, or the design colors are sometime just sliiiightly different – might be a way to subliminally draw a user’s attention</p><p>In film, rather than have the whole film be surreal (like the short AI-assisted film <a href="https://vimeo.com/821101511" target="_blank"><i>Thank You For Not Answering</i></a> by Paul Trillo, or Wes Anderson’s color palette), the color balance shifts just slightly from one cut to another – not enough to notice, but enough to make you uncomfortable. </p><p>In prose, an “anti-grammar checker” that adds back infelicities, e.g., randomly breaking Strunk & White’s commandments: multiple topics in one paragraph or one topic spread over many paragraphs; use the passive voice; add in and multiply redundantly superfluous words and verbiage; use multiple tenses; put emphatic words in the middle of sentences. </p><p></p>A more general version would be an LLM that slowly cycled the temperature parameter up and down, from sentence to sentence. A chatbot that shifted from being play-it-safe corporate counsel to manic surrealist and back again.<br /><p></p><p>It would be interesting to combine a fluctuating font with a dull-to-deranged chatbot, with a very staid font when the text was at its most manic, become more disjointed as the text became more staid.</p><p></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-85212983129822449622023-12-11T18:45:00.000-08:002023-12-12T08:43:45.673-08:00Ogregores & Morality<p>To many people, moral considerations apply to any sentient being, e.g., to animals. Ogregores probably aren’t sentient, but do they have moral status as moral agents or moral patients?[1] I’m skeptical that they’re moral agents but intrigued by the possibility that they might be moral patients. </p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Ogregores, as regular readers know, are bounded techno-social structures that respond intelligently to opportunities and threats. They are composed of people, tools, and procedures. Rough synonyms include organizations, institutions, or artificial agents. Examples include corporations and government bureaucracies.<p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">What is a moral agent?</h4><p>Most people seem to accept that most human adults are moral agents. Beyond that, it gets tricky: there many, often hotly debated, criteria for moral agency.[2] It’s often tied to an individual’s ability to make choices based on “right and wrong.”</p><p>My working hypothesis is that morality is a subjective experience, and ascribing morality is an exercise in analogy that goes something like this:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Premise: Some decisions I make feel freighted with considerations of Right and Wrong.[3] </li><li>Conclusion: I’m a moral agent.</li><li>Premise: I’m human.</li><li>Conclusion: moral agency is a property of humans.</li><li>Premise: Alice is human (or alternatively, “like me” in “relevant” ways).</li><li>Conclusion: Alice is a moral agent. </li></ul><p></p><p>There are several problems with this approach. First, just because someone is human doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a moral agent. Children and people suffering from severe mental impairments aren’t considered to be moral agents.[4] Second, trying to circumvent the “human” test by replacing it with a “like me” test raises the question of what should be compared, and what counts as similarity. </p><p>Third, this approach to ascribing moral agency entails “looking inside the box,” that is, assessing that another entity’s internal state and capabilities are similar to mine. It’s hard to know what other people’s internal state is; it’s extremely difficult to with animals, and probably impossible with entities whose internal state has few if any analogies to our own, like software or corporations. </p><p>I’m inclined to focus on behavior rather than internal state. Attention to behavior rather than internal states (notably, sentience) is attractive since it’s hard to assess the internal experience of other entities. It may be warranted since morality is often concerned with both behavior and the internal states that prompt that behavior. That leads me to this analogy for a moral “actor” or moral agent* where the asterisk marks that this isn’t a conventional definition of an agent. </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Premise: Alice behaves as if they have a notion of Right and Wrong similar to my own.</li><li>Conclusion: Alice is a moral actor (or moral agent*).</li></ul><p></p><p>Appropriate behavior includes both action in a morally freighted situation and/or dialogue with Alice about what constitutes moral action. Alice need not be human. However, it could be tricky to be confident that an exchange with a Large Language Model constitutes dialogue.</p><p>It’s probably more effective as a matter of social policy to focus on influencing behavior rather than trying to guess whether entities are moral agents—certainly for ogregores, and perhaps for people too. </p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Ogregores as moral agents</h4><p>Christian List contends that at least some corporate entities have moral agency, e.g., ones with “procedures and mechanisms in place that allow them to make corporate-level judgements about what is permissible and impermissible, and to act on those judgements” (List, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-021-00454-7" target="_blank">Group agency and artificial intelligence</a>, 2022: 1228). “Indeed,” List continues, “many organizations have compliance departments and ethics committees.”</p><p>I’m skeptical. First, compliance seems irrelevant. Compliance with legal requirements or industry standards doesn’t make the complier a moral agent, any more than deciding not to steal something in order to avoid punishment makes me a moral agent. Second, while ogregores are agents, just because they are based on humans and contain humans does not make them <i>moral</i> agents. I’m not persuaded that corporations are moral agents merely because they have “procedures and mechanisms in place that allow them to make corporate-level judgements about what is permissible and impermissible”. </p><p>Some scholars define moral agents in terms of the duties they have, not the treatment they are entitled to by virtue of their subjective states. Syd Johnson, for example, contends that, “Moral agents, then, are not the bearers of unique rights or privileges. Rather, they bear moral responsibilities and duties to others, simply by virtue of the fact that they can bear those responsibilities and duties.” </p><p>This definition allows for ogregores to be moral agents. Johnson argues that “when those duties involve actions that cannot be performed by individuals, and require collective action, we must either view collective entities and groups as moral agents, or we must conclude that no one has moral responsibility” (<a href="https://www.hhrjournal.org/2021/12/shifting-the-moral-burden-expanding-moral-status-and-moral-agency/" target="_blank">Shifting the Moral Burden: Expanding Moral Status and Moral Agency</a>, 2021). Observe that a duty-oriented definition does not require moral states of mind, and thus does not require the entity to be human. Responsibilities and (especially) duties move this definition close to the behavioral criterion for a moral actor or moral agent* introduced above.</p><p>Floridi & Sanders (<a href="https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MIND.0000035461.63578.9d" target="_blank">On the Morality of Artificial Agents</a>, 2004) make the distinction that “any agent that causes good or evil is morally accountable for it” whereas “the agent needs to show the right intentional states” to be “morally responsible.” By the first definition, a hurricane is morally accountable, which I find counter-intuitive. Since it's unlikely that we can make much sense of the intentional states of non-human agents, especially artificial ones like ogregores, the second definition doesn't provide a guide for deciding whether artificial agents are morally responsible.</p><p>Bottom line: Ogregores could be moral agents on some definitions.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Ogregores as moral patients</h4><p>Rewards and punishments for ogregore behavior could be morally undesirable if ogregores are moral patients, i.e., worthy of moral consideration. (They could also be less controversially undesirable if they’re ineffective.)</p><p>Most people don’t consider animals to be moral agents, but do see them as moral patients, that is, entities deserving of moral consideration.[5] The status of animals seems to be tied to the belief that they can suffer, i.e., have some form of sentience; but maybe could also be just because of complexity.</p><p>So, do ogregores suffer? Few would assert that they have subjective experience or sentience. They can certainly “suffer harm,” however. Corporate raiders, asset strippers, and leveraged buy-out funds can damage corporations in their own interests.[6] Private equity involvement in healthcare has been alleged to harm patient care, employee conditions, and the long-term financial health of these organizations.[7] </p><p>The harm to an enterprise is usually assessed in terms of harm to people like employees or patients. Harm to the ogregore as such is secondary since it is usually assumed that only harm to humans (or perhaps other sentient beings) matters. However, damage to the non-human parts of an ogregore may eventually lead to human harm, such as when a country’s infrastructure is destroyed in war, or when a company’s staffing is reduced so much that its patients or customers suffer, or when protocols are changed so much that bureaucracies can no longer function.[8] In such cases, the ogregore is harmed through cumulative harm to its constituent people.</p><p>This argument may be easier to make in Europe than in the United States. US antitrust law focuses on harm to consumers, such as through higher prices, reduced output, or reduced quality. In contrast, EU competition law is concerned with preventing the abuse of a dominant position even if there is no immediate or direct harm to consumers. This means that predatory pricing or exclusive dealing can be considered (<a href="https://poe.com/s/RvVlqZsxjQ5jjoG3oYM9" target="_blank">GPT-4 via Poe</a>, Nov 2023). EU analysis takes impacts on competitors (i.e., ogregores) into account, not just impact on consumers.</p><p><i>Update 12 Dec 2023</i>: added paragraph on Floridi & Sanders.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Endnotes</h3><p>[1] A moral patient is an entity that has moral rights and can be wronged but may not necessary be capable of making moral judgments or taking moral actions itself.</p><p>[2] According to the <i>Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy</i>, they range from having the capacity to conform to external requirements of morality like obeying laws against murder, to acting out of altruistic impulses, to using reason to rise above feelings and passions (Haksar, <a href="https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/moral-agents/v-1" target="_blank">Moral Agents</a>). According to Wikipedia, “Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral choices based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is ‘a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong.’” (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_agency">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_agency</a>, accessed 19 Nov 2023) See also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_responsibility#Artificial_systems">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_responsibility#Artificial_systems</a>. One common theme is that moral agency requires consciousness, i.e., the capacity for inner subjective experience (Himma, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-008-9167-5" target="_blank">Artificial agency, consciousness, and the criteria for moral agency</a>, 2009). A GPT-4 summary suggests that moral agency includes consciousness/sentience, reasoning ability, autonomy, and an understanding of responsibility (<a href="https://poe.com/s/hCUDIiAdy91hQSC32EIo" target="_blank">GPT-4 via Poe</a>, Nov 2023). </p><p>[3] At the risk of circularity, I believe that “right and wrong” are words that describe that feeling associated with making moral decisions.</p><p>[4] I’m conflating terms from two different fields here: fitness to be held responsible in the law, and moral agency in philosophy. I’m suggesting that not being capable of acting with reference to right and wrong—not being a moral agent—means the person is not fit to be held responsible. The inverse does not necessarily follow. A young child might understand that stealing is wrong (making them a moral agent to some extent), but they might still be considered too young to be held legally responsible for theft under the law.</p><p>[5] Susan reminded me of the example of a dangerous dog destroyed after killing a child. Many people would say that the child’s death was not the dog’s fault, but its owner’s. Another example: a bear mauls a person; the bear is destroyed. Here there’s no owner to blame; it’s “death by natural causes,” like a lightning strike, even though the bear is held responsible. Nowadays non-human animals are deemed to lack moral agency and aren’t held culpable for their acts, though <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> reports that animal trials took place in Europe from the 13th to 16th century.</p><p>[6] GPT-4 gives several examples, including the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco by KKR in 1988; Toys "R" Us being taken private in a leveraged buyout in 2005; Sam Zell’s 2007 leveraged buyout of the Tribune Company; the management of Sears Holdings by Eddie Lampert; and Carl Icahn’s involvement in Hertz (<a href="https://poe.com/s/uCJgLOHp53aRgQMk92yr" target="_blank">GPT-4 via Poe</a>, Nov 2023)</p><p>[7] A <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/the-death-of-hahnemann-hospital" target="_blank">New Yorker story</a> alleged that when private-equity firm Paladin bought the Hahneman Hospital in Philadelphia, the most vulnerable patients bore the cost; see also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hahnemann_University_Hospital" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>. Advocates allege that Envision Healthcare, owned by KKR, has played a starring role in America’s surprise medical billing problem (source: <a href="https://pestakeholder.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Envision_CaseStudy_Final_Dec2022.pdf" target="_blank">Private Equity Stakeholder Project</a>). YouTube comic Dr Glaucomflecken does scathing takes on the role of private equity in US healthcare (source: <a href="https://glaucomflecken.com/patients-pay-the-price-private-equitys-healthcare-impact/" target="_blank">Glaucomflecken.com</a>; see, e.g., one of his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2q3Ow1Ijjg" target="_blank">skits</a>).</p><p>[8] War reparations suggest that a country is being punished for the suffering of another country. The punishment bears more or less directly on people, of course, but the primary calculus is geopolitical.</p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-18088535704755016162023-12-10T15:34:00.000-08:002023-12-10T15:35:52.405-08:00Animism & Ogregores<p>A recent conversation about whether there are AI gods prompted thoughts of animism, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/animism" target="_blank">defined</a> by <i>Britannica</i> as “belief in innumerable spiritual beings concerned with human affairs and capable of helping or harming human interests.” Perhaps, I thought, it’s better to think of ogregores as nature sprits than gods.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Spirits, big and small</h4><p>“Gods” connotes very powerful beings, perhaps even omniscient and omnipotent ones. Most ogregores are certainly not that potent. What’s more, there are very large numbers of ogregores even if you just counted publicly held companies and government bureaucracies. Some pantheons may be large, but they range to dozens or hundreds of gods, not thousands.</p><p>Even if one accepts “powerful, pervasive, and mysterious” as a criterion for godlike entities (pace C.R.’s point that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition), important ogregores like Medicare or the Veterans Administration might not be pervasive or mysterious. </p><p>The lightbulb went on for me when ED described coming from a polytheistic culture where everything could be a god—"a stone has a god even though I’m the one kicking it.” She invoked Winston Churchill’s “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” (source: <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/26/shape/#68501009-5b73-4a3c-8650-8f1eddcea749" target="_blank"><i>QuoteInvestigator</i></a>), to make the point that we’re shaped by the things we create. Several other speakers also evoked lesser powers. MN mentioned the existence of pervasive spirits that are enacting their will on us, and MG mentioned expressions like “Let's hope the tech gods are with us and the video works” or “The tech gremlins got me again, my demo failed.” </p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Animism</h4><p>Britannica’s <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/animism" target="_blank">article</a> asserts that particularism is a salient characteristic of all animistic religions, evident in the large number and variety of spirits, each with its own disposition, scope of action, and locality. Unlike the gods of “great religions,” none of these supernaturals has comprehensive control over events. This resonates with tools, apps and technologies. Each has its own character and scope, e.g., TikTok vs. Snapchat vs. Instagram (though their powers bleed into each other as companies copy popular features).</p><p>Many animistic belief systems emphasize taboos and propitiatory rituals. The spirits can be appeased through correct action—like BW’s trick of controlling what the algorithm shows her by liking three Fleabag posts and then refreshing the feed.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">But is it Real?</h4><p>Are nature spirits real? I don’t know how people in animist cultures experience spirits, and there is such a wide range of animist belief systems that it’s impossible to generalize. My guess is that spirits are, to locals (that is, taking an “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic" target="_blank">emic</a>” approach), both real and constructs. They’re real because one has experienced their effects, they fit into a worldview which offers theory and evidence for their existence, and they’re vouched for by respected people. Most of us believe electric fields are real, but we’ve never seen them. We’ve seen effects that are plausibly attributed to them and they’re part of an elaborate conceptual system endorsed both by reputable people and by the successful operation of technologies we rely on.</p><p>At the same time, tribal people probably realize spirits are constructs and are skeptical or even cynical about them: “Of course the shaman says they’re real—but she would, wouldn’t she, because driving them out is how she makes a living.” Their attitudes might be like ours towards superstitions (we know that walking under a ladder doesn’t objectively bring bad luck, but most of us will nonetheless avoid doing that) and politically shaped scientific claims about, say, the hazards of marijuana or the lab origin of covid. </p><p>We don’t doubt TikTok is real, though it’s hard to say what it is. The app on our phone? Is the app the code or the content? The user interface? Is TikTok the algorithm that determines what video to show next or the developers that write and improve the algorithm? The managers, shareholders, and/or Chinese government spies? The billion users whose behavior makes the algorithm recommend videos I want to see? The glib answer is, “Yes, all of that (and more).” However, at that point the object is so multifaceted that our belief in its existence becomes as hard to pin down as that of a caricature primitive’s belief in nature spirits.</p><p>Perhaps the simplest answer is to say that if I interact with something, I’m pretty sure it exists (h/t SPT). I didn’t propitiate the animal’s spirit before I killed it, and the animal mauled me in its death throes. I swipe “next,” therefore I am, sorry, therefore it is.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Implications</h4><p>An animist rather than deist perspective is a better fit for overlapping ogregores. While springs, streams and rivers have individual associated spirits, they’re all somehow part (often “children”) of the river god. Tech ogregores also nest and overlap in confusing ways. Google and Meta both have social media elements (e.g., YouTube and Facebook); both do messaging (Gmail and WhatsApp). Google is an ogregore that contains social media and messaging ogregores, and so is Meta. In their turn, YouTube and Facebook (along with TikTok, etc.) are all part of a social media ogregore. Shein and Temu are both social media and e-commerce platforms; TikTok Shop is doing something similar coming from the other direction (source: <a href="https://jingdaily.com/tiktok-vs-temu-vs-shein-the-chinese-e-commerce-battle-lands-in-the-us/" target="_blank">Jing Daily</a>; <a href="https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/social-commerce" target="_blank">TechTarget</a>). Amazon is an e-commerce behemoth but also a search engine and an advertising platform. It includes social media—Goodreads. These ogregores are manifold and intertwined. </p><p>Animism also supports a more pervasive sense of technology. Tech gods can be mapped to specific tools. If one takes a Heideggerian view, the nature of technology is not that tool making or tool use, but rather the kind of social relations it entails. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism" target="_blank"><i>Wikipedia</i></a> contends that animism “encompasses beliefs that all material phenomena have agency” and “is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence.” Heidegger certainly talks as if he believes that <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2023/07/is-technicity-agent.html" target="_blank">technicity has agency</a>. The realm of technology acts on people ways not unlike spirits: it gathers together; it sets upon and challenges people; “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by” (cf. <a href="https://philtech.michaelreno.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HeideggerTheQuestionConcerningTechnology.pdf" target="_blank">The Question Concerning Technology</a>).</p><p>The animist perspective invites one to see tech spirits everywhere. If one thinks of tracking cookies infesting every website one visits, it’s reminiscent of spirits in every tree and every leaf, rustling messages to one another as we walk through the forest.</p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZSNyiSetZ8Y" width="320" youtube-src-id="ZSNyiSetZ8Y"></iframe></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-83874616638898937712023-12-03T07:31:00.000-08:002023-12-10T15:35:44.570-08:00Uncanny Silicon Valley<p>A recent conversation got me thinking again about whether uncanny UIs could help us to “see the face” of the divine technologies (powerful, pervasive, mysterious) that usually invisible conduits for other things like social media posts and shopping. The paradigm example is the <a href="https://youtu.be/z_KmNZNT5xw" target="_blank">Déjà vu scene</a> of a glitch in The Matrix (which inspired <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/" target="_blank">r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix</a>).</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>G.S. pointed out how an unexpected event, like a plane being rerouted due to bad weather, can reveal new angles on an experience, such as falling into conversation with the passenger next to you and finding something in common. C.R. noted that a change of context, like being an American overseas, could make something familiar (being American in America) become interesting.<p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Heidegger</h4><p>We had been discussing Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (<a href="https://philtech.michaelreno.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HeideggerTheQuestionConcerningTechnology.pdf" target="_blank">pdf</a>), and terms he introduced in <i>Being and Time</i> (<a href="https://archive.org/details/heideggermartin.beingandtime_202003" target="_blank">scan</a>) seem relevant here. Readiness-to-hand (<i>Zuhandenheit</i>) describes an immediate and direct way of interacting with the world. We use a ready-to-hand object without consciously thinking about it, for example when we use a hammer to drive in a nail. Our attention is on the task, not the tool. If we were to take a detached or theoretical view, considering the hammer’s design or its weight, it would exhibit presentness-at-hand (<i>Vorhandenheit</i>). </p><p>When something breaks, it’s no longer ready-to-hand. We suddenly become aware of it in a new way. It’s not fully present-at-hand, though; Heidegger uses the term unreadiness-to-hand. (<i>Wikipedia</i>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Ready-to-hand" target="_blank">Ready-to-hand</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Present-at-hand" target="_blank">Present-at-hand</a>.) Heidegger maintains that our perception and understanding of objects depends on our relationship to them, especially our interaction with them.</p><p>Therefore, breaking an object—or a system, like a user interface or an online service—makes us conscious of it in an unaccustomed way. A system that’s broken in some way becomes unready-to-hand, and through this, may become present-at-hand, that is, more accessible to a more detached analysis.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">UI Design</h4><p>User interface manipulations are an easy place to start an investigation. There are several collections of infuriating UI designs, such as a collection of <a href="https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-worst-input-fields/" target="_blank">59 Hilariously Infuriating Examples Of User Interface That Even Satan Himself Couldn’t Come Up With</a>. Many are educational, such as <a href="https://www.creativebloq.com/features/10-painful-ui-fails-and-what-you-can-learn-from-them" target="_blank">10 painful UI fails (and what you can learn from them)</a> and the site <a href="https://theuserisdrunk.com/">https://theuserisdrunk.com/</a>, a collection of bad UI design examples with the tagline, “Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it.”</p><p>Some designers created purposefully challenging interfaces to make a point about UI and UX design. For example, <a href="https://userinyerface.com/" target="_blank">User Inyerface</a> [sic] by Bagaar makes it makes it intentionally difficult for visitors to complete tasks (Jeff Ramos gives a <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2019/7/12/20687488/user-inyerface-ui-game" target="_blank">tour</a>). The <a href="https://github.com/kawaiidesune/zxx" target="_blank">ZXX Font</a> by Sang Mun, designed to be unreadable by OCR algorithms (<a href="https://grahamcluley.com/zxx-font-nsa/" target="_blank">discussion</a> by Graham Cluley).</p><p>Ben Grosser's <a href="https://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/" target="_blank">Facebook Demetricator</a> is a browser extension that removes all the numbers from the Facebook interface (2012 <a href="https://vimeo.com/51487572" target="_blank">demo video</a> on Vimeo). The stated aim is “to disrupt the prescribed sociality these metrics produce, enabling a network society that isn’t dependent on quantification.” This kind of work straddles design and art.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Uncanny Digital Art</h4><p>The “traditional” gallery art of Duane Hanson and Ron Mueck set a very high bar for uncanny art.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVIrRa-yM6Vlwqbqs8394hNO0o2aaRljlkhaakK8BPNwAZOLGudg8C0iwDzzL0kxTwTOlcwS8CaEzaNiFjz6spou5rn7PC---i4Q7UEO0I_op6FF66MkJRkz5XreJHxzeA-9c9MV9pwUMqemKyIjJg-JSlGkm4O3a7JESrE1w76es713Eh4twS" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="356" data-original-width="474" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVIrRa-yM6Vlwqbqs8394hNO0o2aaRljlkhaakK8BPNwAZOLGudg8C0iwDzzL0kxTwTOlcwS8CaEzaNiFjz6spou5rn7PC---i4Q7UEO0I_op6FF66MkJRkz5XreJHxzeA-9c9MV9pwUMqemKyIjJg-JSlGkm4O3a7JESrE1w76es713Eh4twS" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Duane Hanson, Slab Man, 1974–75</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhy2z1IilsouFf6UkgAFcL-eZcJ1y5a5G7Yb6MICvTjlENoVrOKpu_SKDhoEwNiEumhe8JloZG7xyAh3KgP4xT4jAn43nEtOrRRsTkdQMjqhw6YQVP9eOjZhtVqGk4qZ_VlDQbjvfBSmYMJA_16IqcTJmyGVABgmYGn9MTP5LGTzo9t8M_Z_W1x" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img data-original-height="343" data-original-width="229" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhy2z1IilsouFf6UkgAFcL-eZcJ1y5a5G7Yb6MICvTjlENoVrOKpu_SKDhoEwNiEumhe8JloZG7xyAh3KgP4xT4jAn43nEtOrRRsTkdQMjqhw6YQVP9eOjZhtVqGk4qZ_VlDQbjvfBSmYMJA_16IqcTJmyGVABgmYGn9MTP5LGTzo9t8M_Z_W1x=w213-h320" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ron Mueck, Untitled (Big Man), 2000</td></tr></tbody></table></div><p>According to its YouTube description, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad9zdlaRvdM" target="_blank">Digital TV Dinner</a> is a video art clip from 1979 created by Raul Zaritsky, Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth using the Bally Astrocade console game to generate unusual patterns.”</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ad9zdlaRvdM" width="320" youtube-src-id="Ad9zdlaRvdM"></iframe></div><p><a href="https://net-art.org/jodi" target="_blank">JODI</a> (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) started exploring Internet art in 1994. The <a href="https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/">https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/</a> home page presents a seemingly incomprehensible wall of text and code. <a href="https://sod.jodi.org/" target="_blank">SOD</a> is “a modification of the game Wolfenstein. You can actually attempt to play the game, but everything is scrampled [sic].”</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjPrl9i9J5nHz3WXjFoHr6DpCFwpOpxMyRFpfvSGcq4X32X_Mm3BgBymhOhR_09ZwrEDzIGqh_V4haPosDyy7L33WoohTp9NHolO6ARqfNz8SJam2rrR076Gr_aVjI8kV07x0OhNI3DNtjffyYChS5P5_ZwN5qxcJZPyHJUQYT1jXTlmqVAFhHy" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="643" data-original-width="1297" height="159" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjPrl9i9J5nHz3WXjFoHr6DpCFwpOpxMyRFpfvSGcq4X32X_Mm3BgBymhOhR_09ZwrEDzIGqh_V4haPosDyy7L33WoohTp9NHolO6ARqfNz8SJam2rrR076Gr_aVjI8kV07x0OhNI3DNtjffyYChS5P5_ZwN5qxcJZPyHJUQYT1jXTlmqVAFhHy" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/">https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgPuHyCLaWbzWpe61cI00pVOHwSx6HFM0refC6-45M4gcBEE8Bio8UsLUnrU2vmR5ycOS4aVqWWqc3JS5tVUC3TCNCArM8Eh8uaskLtCi8XcW0LZ0sb6SKJ-_Hx-D4ER4cwF3KP6nBskUbIqJioQIA5BxGYeRVrDuZgnnrNcKePCD9fIJ1XJ6KG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="852" data-original-width="1560" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgPuHyCLaWbzWpe61cI00pVOHwSx6HFM0refC6-45M4gcBEE8Bio8UsLUnrU2vmR5ycOS4aVqWWqc3JS5tVUC3TCNCArM8Eh8uaskLtCi8XcW0LZ0sb6SKJ-_Hx-D4ER4cwF3KP6nBskUbIqJioQIA5BxGYeRVrDuZgnnrNcKePCD9fIJ1XJ6KG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://sod.jodi.org/">https://sod.jodi.org/</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Around 2004, Thomas Ruff produced a series of monumental images based on internet jpegs. <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/149384" target="_blank">According to MoMA</a>, this work “calls attention to the ways digital images are constructed, circulated, and viewed today.” (See also <a href="https://youtu.be/cNoY-PQYEbM" target="_blank">MoMA video</a>.)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4H9ifkeP4RVYvQ07Ul2tqe4H6o-W7l8yU34pUVBcgEP8fpeYJw6VLLt-G9aZKwqjEtcZ0L1qzP05m0DffvL0i1IIQHdWvQGi6oMGZtU2KqZUWKo25bicntzBogGpgqLvMINpZDZZQMWzLSBBdAsxeU8oBtR1M2h6mFpfrOA0Sn44H3cjLpLNN" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="827" data-original-width="1552" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi4H9ifkeP4RVYvQ07Ul2tqe4H6o-W7l8yU34pUVBcgEP8fpeYJw6VLLt-G9aZKwqjEtcZ0L1qzP05m0DffvL0i1IIQHdWvQGi6oMGZtU2KqZUWKo25bicntzBogGpgqLvMINpZDZZQMWzLSBBdAsxeU8oBtR1M2h6mFpfrOA0Sn44H3cjLpLNN=w400-h214" width="400" /></a></div><br />Thomas Ruff (2004), <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/149384" target="_blank">jpeg msh01</a> (detail)</div><p>Rosa Menkman (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Menkman" target="_blank"><i>Wikipedia</i></a>; <a href="https://aboutrosamenkman.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">home page</a>) was an exponent of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art" target="_blank">glitch art</a>.” A statement from the <i>Glitch Studies Manifesto</i> <a href="https://rhizome.org/editorial/2023/jul/28/seed-stories-of-rhizome-and-generative-art/" target="_blank">cited by a <i>Rhizome</i> editorial</a> underlines the way in which glitch can help an audience become aware of conventions that are usually taken for granted:</p><p></p><blockquote>“...the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of conventions, while in reality the computer is a machine that can be bent or used in many different ways. With the creation of breaks within politics and social and economical conventions, the audience may become aware of the preprogrammed patterns.”</blockquote><p></p><p>In an <a href="https://pub.towardsai.net/ai-in-art-discovering-beauty-in-the-uncanny-32028b4549ee" target="_blank">essay</a> about "AI in Art: Discovering Beauty in the Uncanny," Cezary Gesikowski cites a short film, <a href="https://vimeo.com/821101511" target="_blank"><i>Thank You For Not Answering</i></a> by Paul Trillo, that “showcases the beauty of imperfections and uncanny errors in AI-generated images.” Because the film presents as surreal, however, the uncanniness of the AI images were neutered. A lesson, I think, is that it helps if creepiness is unexpected.</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiLvDAQbZySIO3TumKnN_1vlmEFId4Dp5qnh2nGHMxIzQaFmfvKMnJupulqoPzupgOnUgA8eQdL8efoaJ-01ltlhyfHSja9G3zal7YQyjfXLqDMfueiGW5ms7UELa4E7xWYnWqmj2irGprANLRc4rRi51xkrt8VFppHuK4y4MxcSOUHkD3sW6jU" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="891" data-original-width="1352" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiLvDAQbZySIO3TumKnN_1vlmEFId4Dp5qnh2nGHMxIzQaFmfvKMnJupulqoPzupgOnUgA8eQdL8efoaJ-01ltlhyfHSja9G3zal7YQyjfXLqDMfueiGW5ms7UELa4E7xWYnWqmj2irGprANLRc4rRi51xkrt8VFppHuK4y4MxcSOUHkD3sW6jU" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from <a href="https://vimeo.com/821101511" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank"><i>Thank You For Not Answering</i></a><span style="text-align: left;"> by Paul Trillo</span></td></tr></tbody></table><h4 style="text-align: left;">The Uncanny</h4><p></p><p>I've encountered surprisingly disquieting online experiences of something hidden being revealed. The exception that proves the rule is the creepy sense of being followed around by ads from one web site to another after showing an interest in a product somewhere. </p><p>Overall, social media experiences, such as when a service’s algorithm rapidly leans my taste and starts tailoring the feed to my taste, feel less uncanny than they should. That’s probably because online services want us to remain immersed in their experience and work hard to avoid jarring moments when the curtain is suddenly pulled aside. </p><p>It’s easy to imagine uncanny interventions, though. (By the “If I can think of something, it’s already been done” Rule, they presumably already exist.) </p><p>Autocorrect could start to develop a personality or motivations and try to make me say things that it intends but I don’t. (Cf. Elle Cordova’s “<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C0U9ni3LJY9/" target="_blank">Live/hate relationship with Autocorrect</a>” on Instagram.)</p><p>It would also be uncanny—but probably only briefly, see my <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2023/11/adopted-tech-loses-magic.html" target="_blank">Any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic</a>—if chatbots started remembering my interests across sessions, saying things like, “You were asking about X a week ago; here’s a connection from X to your current interest in Y.”</p><p>If we started wearing AR glasses, it would be disconcerting to see swarms of social media snippets hovering over people as they sit on the bus scanning their phone. (The content would have to be invented, since the data is only available to the social media platforms themselves.)</p><p>One could build more visible browser widgets that show how many sites are accessing one’s information as you browse from one web page to another. There are many such tools (<a href="https://privacybadger.org/" target="_blank">Privacy Badger</a>, <a href="https://brave.com/shields/" target="_blank">Brave Shields</a>, <a href="https://gizmodo.com/these-browser-extensions-will-show-you-exactly-whos-tra-1844706235" target="_blank">more</a>) but their interfaces are usually discreet. I imagine a version where the widget unexpectedly overlays tracking information from time to time.</p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-80163131428488246892023-11-16T10:56:00.000-08:002023-11-16T12:38:40.799-08:00Boats, Bands, and Businesses: Sources of ogregore behavior<p>The <a href="https://youtu.be/dfEA-udzjjQ" target="_blank">movie trailer</a> for “The Boys in the Boat” brings to light a unique aspect of some Olympic sports in countries like the US. In sports such as curling and certain rowing classes, the national bodies select teams as cohesive units rather than assembling national teams from individual top athletes (source: <a href="https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/17397/olympic-sports-where-teams-compete-for-entry" target="_blank">StackExchange</a>). Although these are special instances, they underscore that ogregore behavior emerges from both individual and collective agency.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><h4 style="text-align: left;">The Substitution Rule</h4><p></p><p>With curling and rowing, at least, one can’t swap out individuals and maintain the quality of the team. There’s apparently something about group chemistry in these sports that trumps combining the best individuals. In such small groups, the substitution rule for group action is not applicable: “A large organization may be said to be the relevant actor in the explanation of an interorganizational process if a substitution of the people occupying specific roles in its authority structure leaves the organizational policies and its daily routines intact” (DeLanda, <i>A New Philosophy of Society</i>, 2006: 37).</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Bands</h4><p>Symphony orchestras exemplify situations where the substitution rule applies. Even with frequent turnover of players or conductors, they can maintain a distinctive sound. For instance, the Vienna Philharmonic is renowned for its distinctive, warm, and lush sound (source: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/arts/music/what-makes-the-vienna-philharmonic-so-distinctive.html" target="_blank"><i>NYTimes</i></a>). Other examples include the Berlin Phil and Boston Symphony (source: <a href="https://poe.com/s/YDB7bN6EnXbTYFI8buun" target="_blank">GPT-4</a>). </p><p>Similarly, sports teams like the San Antonio Spurs, Manchester United, and the New York Yankees have demonstrated sustained excellence over time despite changes in players and coaches.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Businesses</h4><p>Such consistency leads us to the realm of businesses, where a strong corporate culture can ensure long-term success. Companies like 3M, Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Toyota are often cited as examplars.</p><p>Arie de Geus's concept of “living companies” (source: <a href="https://hbr.org/1997/03/the-living-company" target="_blank"><i>HBR</i></a>) such as Stora, Sumitomo, Nokia, and Shell, are special cases where corporate culture and decentralized management take precedence over high-profile CEOs. According to De Geus, these companies' managers see themselves as stewards rather than short-term profit maximizers. Such attitudes reinforce the collective identity of a company, making it easier to perceive it as an ogregore—an organized human-based entity with intelligent agency comparable to states, corporations, unions, political movements, and standards bodies.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Collectives or Leaders?</h4><p>Corporate actions are often more strongly determined by the business context than top leaders. For example, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/cvs-walgreens-pharmacy-employees-work-2bae98d2?st=oyohwx92027hovm&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank"><i>WSJ </i>reported</a> that “CVS and Walgreens pharmacy employees say they are overworked, understaffed, and more liable to make prescription errors due to the companies prioritizing profits.” Pharmacists at those companies have staged sporadic job walkouts around the country in recent weeks to publicize their complaints. (A Rite Aid pharmacist told me this week that their situation is no better.) The problems are structural, according to the WSJ. Filling prescriptions has become less profitable and online shopping has hurt the retail front end of the pharmacy store. </p><p>Neither CVS’ nor Walgreens’ CEOs were quoted in the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/cvs-walgreens-pharmacy-employees-work-2bae98d2?st=oyohwx92027hovm&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank"><i>WSJ</i> story</a>. That’s typical. When outcomes are favorable, leaders often take credit regardless of their actual influence. However, when things go wrong, CEOs decline interviews, forcing journalists to focus on systemic explanations and citing analysts. Hence, crises often reveal ogregores as collectives.</p><p>Even high-profile CEOs may have less influence than their PR flacks might have one believe. For instance, when Rex Tillerson became CEO of Exxon in 2006, his public acceptance of climate change risks drew much media attention. However, another recent <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-climate-change-documents-e2e9e6af?st=pd3tdrijnc8jpae&reflink=share_mobilewebshare" target="_blank"><i>WSJ</i> story</a> revealed that Exxon leadership continued to question the severity of climate change's impacts internally.</p><p>Of course, individuals can make a difference, and not just well-known ones like Napoleon or Steve Jobs. For example, the firing of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Walentynowicz" target="_blank">Anna Walentynowicz</a>, a popular crane operator and activist, in August 1980 galvanized outraged workers into action at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, eventually leading to the downfall of the communist government. Conversely, movements without central organizing structures, such as Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party, can also have a significant societal impact.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Seeing the forest, not the towering egos</h4><p>Our fascination with celebrity and human-interest stories often impedes our ability to objectively analyze companies (and other ogregores) dispassionately. Those elements are stripped away when executive egos dive for cover. </p><p>An umwelt view of view ogregores, which abandons an anthropocentric perspective and tries to de-humanize our image of nature (Agamben, <i>The Circle</i>, 2004 : 39, <a href="https://monoskop.org/images/7/71/Agamben_Giorgio_2002_2004_Umwelt_and_Tick.pdf" target="_blank">pdf</a>), can also help. While it’s impossible to eradicate our human perspective, especially when telling stories, it helps to imagine what the world feels like to sports teams, companies, and other human-based but non-human entities. Each member of a rowing crew is unique, but the sum is more than its parts.</p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-4858455306573432762023-11-08T09:38:00.002-08:002023-11-16T10:57:45.852-08:00Generative Plato Transformers<p>OpenAI now offers a <a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-can-now-see-hear-and-speak" target="_blank">speech interface to GPT</a>. I’m told it feels like normal conversation. One is talking to a text corpus, bluring the line between “dead” texts and “live” conversation. It prompts me to wonder about Plato’s objections to writing and preference for dialogue in works like the <a href="https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636" target="_blank"><i>Phaedrus</i></a>, particularly in the <a href="https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/myths/phaedrus.htm" target="_blank">story of Thamus & Theuth</a> and subsequent discussion. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Writing talks back</h3><p>With a speech interface to GPT, writing no longer has “this strange feature, which makes it truly like painting. . . . if you ask them something, they preserve a quite solemn silence” that Plato’s Socrates asserts (<i>Phaedrus </i>275d5, transl. Rowe). Works will no longer be vulnerable to Socrates’ objection (if they ever were) that “when once it is written, every composition trundles about everywhere in the same way, in the presence both of those who know about the subject and of those who have nothing at all to do with it …” (ibid. 275e).</p><p>ChatGPT certainly won’t be the enlightened philosopher of Plato’s ideal case as it lacks the wisdom of one who recalls the Forms. The response of a large language model (LLM) will incorporate material beyond the single document queried, depending on the scope of the text being searched and the model training. If the corpus is, say, all Plato’s texts, that might approximate to how Plato’s Socrates would respond to questions in a dialogue. If the corpus includes subsequent commentary, the “speaker” won’t just be Plato. It could be as good as a pedestrian professor leading students through Plato.</p><p>As an example of a tailored LLM, the Technology Policy Institute (TPI), a DC think tank, has created <a href="https://chattpi.org/" target="_blank">ChatTPI</a>, an LLM trained on all their papers. This model drafted a filing to the FCC responding to a new rulemaking that the president of TPI said “isn’t good enough to submit, but it’s close” in a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-may-soon-weigh-in-on-regulation-artificial-intelligence-agencies-public-comment-periods-766436ec?st=pxh3qtm64xrah7v&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" target="_blank"><i>WSJ </i>op-ed</a> (see TPI’s human and AI <a href="https://techpolicyinstitute.org/publications/broadband/net-neutrality/tpi-responds-to-fcc-title-ii-nprm/" target="_blank">filings</a>).</p><p>Last December I <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/12/conversations-with-ogregores.html" target="_blank">speculated</a> that LLMs could enable conversations with, and between, ogregores. <a href="https://chattpi.org/" target="_blank">ChatTPI</a> validated my “If I can think of something, someone’s already done it” rule. Having recently read the <i>Phaedrus </i>again, I’d love to see LLM fine-tuned on Plato’s dialogues so that I could converse with his Socrates. For added entertainment: imagine a Plato bot debating a Nietzsche bot.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Limitations of Generative Plato Transformers</h3><p><a href="https://www.colorado.edu/herbst/paul-diduch" target="_blank">Paul Diduch</a> pointed out to me (personal communication) that a core problem with training an LLM on Plato's corpus is that his writing requires artful reading. It demands more from the reader than merely absorbing surface-level information. As Paul puts it, one must read and interpret the utterances in Plato's dialogues in the light of the drama and the characters' psycho-dynamics. Plato designed his dialogues to minimize the problems of a written text that he highlighted in the <i>Phaedrus</i>, and to mimic in-person conversation as much as possible. He used the interplay of argument and action to create a depth that can be interrogated in a way that resembles interlocution. </p><p>Certainly, the best form of education for most people is 1-1 tutoring by a caring and responsive guide. I strongly doubt that current bot technology can do this. There may well be something uniquely human in a good teacher’s ability to understand their interlocutor's needs that will only be imperfectly imitated (at best) by bot tech. </p><p>However, one should compare like with like. Very few people get one-to-one tutoring from other humans, and very few indeed have a guide that tailors responses to their needs. How many teachers apply a sophisticated theory of mind and high self-awareness to every student (or any student)? Such individuals are scarce. Sages like Socrates and geniuses like Plato only come along once in a millennium. Bots will be imperfect, but most people’s ability to understand others’ needs are also flawed.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Good enough is good enough</h3><p>Consider the critique that AI radiologists aren’t as quite good as humans. Orly Lobel reports in The Equality Machine (2022) that an AI radiology screening algorithm performs slightly worse than — or the same as — two highly trained human radiologists. In most parts of the world there are hardly any trained radiologists; an AI operating as well as a single competent scan-reader could revolutionize care for billions.</p><p>Even if a ChatPlato bot never reached the level of a skilled human interpreter, let alone a writer of genius like Plato, it could help laypeople like me engage with the material. It couldn’t replace careful reading and discussion with a good teacher but could supplement learning, similar to podcasts and lectures.. </p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Generative Plato Transformers in the classroom</h3><p>Some educators may feel threatened by bots replacing them, assuming (optimistically) that bots could be as good or better than the average professor in leading students into a philosophical question or text. (I certainly suspect a fine-tuned LLM could replace me in the T&M seminar, especially teaching over Zoom.) Even a mediocre simulation could be a net advantage for students as a whole, especially in areas lacking competent human teachers. </p><p>It would be a mixed blessing, of course. It would harm students who lose access to a good human teacher, and it would be a loss for culture at large if there are fewer cross-subsidies from teaching to support scholarship.</p><p>A question to consider right now is how to track the performance of bots vs. humans in educational settings. Lots of methodological challenges, from hidden assumptions and begging the question in experimental design to what’s observable, and whether observables reveal outcomes.</p><p> I don’t think bots will replace human teachers and classrooms, any more than TV did (as Neil Postman expected would happen). LLMs do, however, raise the question of what the role of human educators will—and should—be in a few years. They will certainly continue to tutor elites, just like elites still go to live theater even in an age of on-demand streaming. Another possibility is that humans will “teach the teachers,” i.e., fine-tune the bots that directly teach the mass of students.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Bottom Line</h3><p>Plato’s dialogues are literary works, not conversation transcripts. It’s unlikely that one can learn much from them about what it would be like to converse with Socrates. In the same way, plays are artful constructs not a “realistic” record of events. (Whatever an objective record of an event might be; even real-time video footage is taken from a particular perspective and can be open to multiple interpretations.) It’s implausible that one could write new plays by Aristophanes or chat to Oedipus based on Sophocles’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophocles#Theban_plays" target="_blank">Theban plays</a> by training an AI, though this week’s AI sensation of (the deceased) <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@thereiruinedit/video/7295907731372772651" target="_blank">Johnny Cash covering a Taylor Swift song</a> might give one pause. I would love to have a go at training a Shakespearean Fool, though…</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Coda</h3><p>After drafting this post, Paul Diduch shared a Jeff Holmes <a href="https://twitter.com/Jeff_Holmes/status/1721720137286386056" target="_blank">tweet</a> with me: “Try my chat app” becomes the new “check out my podcast.”</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjucUJXJo8n1YiKyEJb83w_uEqBNea0JHbWihT6qpqlk0tacV46yiY2llkv0nH7Jsp6xxRe1nupTZO2AZAm7AYZcUjO-qBNvABjXMuDgqnzQ2BKwlg3BZhgq4THQXHPxeH0WWGuCOQ4wPY8I5BFbEgSTJ9PguDevR4B-SSN48-sE72VDyt25kZz/s761/tweet2%20Screenshot%202023-11-08%20093658.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="761" data-original-width="578" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjucUJXJo8n1YiKyEJb83w_uEqBNea0JHbWihT6qpqlk0tacV46yiY2llkv0nH7Jsp6xxRe1nupTZO2AZAm7AYZcUjO-qBNvABjXMuDgqnzQ2BKwlg3BZhgq4THQXHPxeH0WWGuCOQ4wPY8I5BFbEgSTJ9PguDevR4B-SSN48-sE72VDyt25kZz/w486-h640/tweet2%20Screenshot%202023-11-08%20093658.png" width="486" /></a></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Postscript</h3><p></p><p>Researching this post I ran across researchers using the Socratic method as an approach to prompt engineering: </p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Runzhe Yang and Karthik Narasimhan have proposed <a href="https://princeton-nlp.github.io/SocraticAI/" target="_blank">SocraticAI</a>, a new method for facilitating self-discovery and creative problem solving using LLMs.</li><li>A Constantin Brîncoveanu <a href="https://www.cbrincoveanu.com/posts/large-language-models-and-the-socratic-method/" target="_blank">blog post</a> explores the Socratic method, System 1 and System 2 thinking, and the Tree of Thoughts prompting technique</li><li>An <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08769.pdf" target="_blank"><i>arXiv </i>paper</a> by Edward Chang presents a systematic approach to using the Socratic method in developing prompt templates that effectively interact with large language models, including GPT3</li></ul><p></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-50853474796681295792023-11-01T11:07:00.002-07:002023-11-01T11:07:48.824-07:00Any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic<p>Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>). There's a corollary: any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>It's a truism that new technology amazes, awes, and astounds us. Most recently, most of us were astonished by ChatGPT. But the technology is already losing its magic.<p></p><p>One can multiply examples indefinitely. According to Carolyn Morgan in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/40937" target="_blank"><i>When Old Technologies were New</i></a> (1988, p. 56), the President of the National Electric Light Association said in 1896, “One miracle has followed another until we can but wonder what apparent impossibility will be accomplished next.” During the Victorian era, “railway madmen” were thought to be activated by the sounds and motion of train travel (<a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/railway-madness-victorian-trains" target="_blank">Atlas Obscura</a>). The internet (and telegraphy before it, cf. Tom Standage’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/victorian-internet-9781620405925/" target="_blank"><i>The Victorian Internet</i></a>, 1998) was going to transform society and politics. John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” made this ringing claim: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth” (<a href="https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence" target="_blank">EFF</a>).</p><p>David Nye describes the American technological sublime in an <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262640343/american-technological-sublime/" target="_blank">eponymous book</a> (1996). He looks at several technological achievements that filled the American public with wonder, awe, even terror, including the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, the Eads and Brooklyn bridges, the Empire State Building, the Boulder Dam, the atom bomb tests, and the Apollo mission. Nye starts the book with a short history of the aesthetic sublime, and gives as the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens as examples from nature.</p><p>Weirdly, the natural sublime doesn’t seem to wear off, but the technological one does. The number of visitors to the Grand Canyon just keep growing (pandemics excepted, <a href="https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park Specific Reports/Annual Park Recreation Visitation Graph (1904 - Last Calendar Year)?Park=GRCA">nps.gov</a>) but nobody queues up overnight for the new iPhone anymore. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBZhTN2O6KTgq-3sXYHRHTrYtGmtQTVXILiVmzPVJIhPmFB3cu3wVHoYuy5Bwa3A21NGeG5Q4Wr549WYCg9Mpya4-VCY4weS7GwtNeQy6qmWWOwmYKgjont43od_8MiaSybc_1ehasWJ3vf83r2R6HJJsJ6qrEZ7gpyxbpvHqn8vT1tSrxk5fy" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img data-original-height="643" data-original-width="953" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBZhTN2O6KTgq-3sXYHRHTrYtGmtQTVXILiVmzPVJIhPmFB3cu3wVHoYuy5Bwa3A21NGeG5Q4Wr549WYCg9Mpya4-VCY4weS7GwtNeQy6qmWWOwmYKgjont43od_8MiaSybc_1ehasWJ3vf83r2R6HJJsJ6qrEZ7gpyxbpvHqn8vT1tSrxk5fy=w400-h270" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Grand Canyon National Park, Total Recreation Visits, <a href="http://nps.gov">nps.gov</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>For me, a warm bed in winter is a magical thing; a good curry delights the senses; and the sight of a rising full moon fills me with awe every time. On the other hand, accessing any video on the planet on demand is blaah; I take automatic transmission in our car for granted; and I think nothing of chatting with my family on the other side of the world at a moment’s notice. (One used to have to book transatlantic phone calls.)</p><p>It seems that we quickly <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation" target="_blank">habituate</a> to technology but we don’t habituate to sensual experiences. Perhaps that’s a way to define technology: the experiences we quickly become accustomed to, including not just “tech” but other made things like art and fashion. (This may roughly be what the ancient Greeks called techne, though there wasn’t much consensus about the term even then. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a> it included astronomy, carpentry, farming, generalship, geometry, mathematics, medicine, music, painting, philosophy, politics, rhetoric, sculpture, shipbuilding, and shoemaking.) I suspect we habituate to technology because it’s such an essential part of our make-up; it’s of a piece with our competing cravings for novelty and stability. Nature and sensual experiences are outside us, and surprise us every time. </p><p>It follows from this is that our experience of every technology will go through something like Helen Fisher’s three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attraction (<a href="https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/love-actually-science-behind-lust-attraction-companionship/" target="_blank">Harvard</a>). Gartner’s (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle#Criticisms" target="_blank">much-criticized</a>) Hype Cycle stages inserts a rom-com loss into Fisher’s stages of love: X meets Y, X loses Y, X gets Y back.</p><p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj-ZKYK-FkmGIVl5tAz9f_lQymY4PEVEp5vJsiDUdsoK8D_XaFwPH8PdfhsJkBThrH-YqDDcEL1ZfwO2jqiQsHrOk2C2B3yr1-4U5Zi64aUAxgb6tnHYMKVmb8MhNUrhruX-GE6SpDcDKFBCPswVeKzhiBBjpdbypA8BQGdGeUZecCU5R6Q8Hsn" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="761" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj-ZKYK-FkmGIVl5tAz9f_lQymY4PEVEp5vJsiDUdsoK8D_XaFwPH8PdfhsJkBThrH-YqDDcEL1ZfwO2jqiQsHrOk2C2B3yr1-4U5Zi64aUAxgb6tnHYMKVmb8MhNUrhruX-GE6SpDcDKFBCPswVeKzhiBBjpdbypA8BQGdGeUZecCU5R6Q8Hsn" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Gartner Hype Cycle (Jeremykemp at </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle#/media/File:Gartner_Hype_Cycle.svg" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">English Wikipedia</a><span style="text-align: left;">, </span><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 3.0</a><span style="text-align: left;">)</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>We should expect every new technology to enchant and terrify us at first, and then recede into the boring background. The terrors of previous generations of technology fade as we turn to face the latest monster. </p><p>For example, there was pervasive fear of nuclear war in the Fifties and Sixties, illustrated in films like “On the Beach” (1959, based on Nevil Shute 's 1957 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)" target="_blank">novel</a>) and “Dr. Strangelove” (1964). In 1951, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/vault/226046/gallup-vault-atomic-anxiety-1951.aspx" target="_blank">Gallup asked</a> Americans how safe they would feel in their city or community in the case of an “atomic war.” Half said they would feel unsafe. (See also Erskine, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2746913" target="_blank">The Polls: Atomic Weapons and Nuclear Energy</a>, 1963.) </p><p>There have been several movements when fear about the existential risks of biotechnology spiked, including the late 1970’s when recombinant DNA technology led to fears about genetic manipulation; concerns about GMOs in the late 1990s; and the development or CRISPR and other gene editing technologies in the 2010s. </p><p>Fears about “grey goo” (an end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology coined by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation, 1986) were salient in the early 2000s, following Bill Joy's 2000 Wired magazine article “<a href="https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/" target="_blank">Why the Future Doesn't Need Us</a>” and Michael Crichton's bestselling novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel)" target="_blank"><i>Prey</i></a>, published in 2002.</p><p>Max Weber borrowed the term disenchantment from Friedrich Schiller to describe the devaluation of religion apparent in modern society (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disenchantment" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>). The German term is Entzauberung. Contra Weber, I don’t think this “un-magicking” is unique to bureaucratic and secular Western society. It occurred even in the traditional societies where “the world remains a great enchanted garden” (Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 1920, 1971:270) when technologies—like fire and metallurgy, surrounded by sacred rituals in ancient societies but not in the highly religious Middle Ages—became domesticated. </p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-64613840645964240602023-10-04T12:55:00.002-07:002023-10-04T12:55:44.167-07:00Dueling ogregores: Ford, GM, and Chinese battery technology<div>Ford and GM are arguing about the conditions of a $7,500 EV tax credit. It’s an argument between ogregores. The positions reflect corporate decisions rather than the opinions of the CEOs. Changing office holders wouldn’t change the outcome.</div><div><span><a name='more'></a></span></div><div>According to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/this-ford-vs-gm-feud-could-shape-the-future-of-evs-in-america-ed9a98ae" target="_blank">reporting in the WSJ</a>, the companies are at odds about how a $7,500 tax credit for consumers who purchase new electric vehicles should be applied: “Starting next year, buyers can’t use the credit on cars that contain battery components from any source that the U.S. deems a ‘foreign entity of concern,’ a vague term meant to reduce American reliance on Chinese batteries and materials.”</div><div>Ford plans to license Chinese battery technology for a plan in Michigan and is lobbying for flexible interpretation of the “foreign entity” rule. GM is pushing for a strict interpretation, presumably because it isn’t planning to invest in Chinese battery firms and Ford could gain a cost advantage in EVs if it can use Chinese tech.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ford, according to the reporting, hoped to get ahead by licensing the Chinese technology. GM, like some other manufacturers, opted not to invest in EV supply chains until the government clarifies what Chinese tech would be allowed under the final tax credit rules. (There’s complicated politics around creating jobs in Michigan and not sending US tax dollars to China. GM has invested in a company which will mine lithium in Nevada, replacing a Chinese company as the largest shareholder.)</div><div><br /></div><div>GM is advancing two arguments. The more plausible is that a tax credit on Ford EVs using this technology would put GM at a competitive disadvantage. It also argues that Ford's licensing plans could lead to Chinese domination of the U.S. car manufacturing industry; this “greater good” argument is self-serving. Ford’s arguments are also self-serving, notably the cost efficiency of using the technology. Claims about the benefits of knowledge transfer and job creation are little better.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is no indication in the reporting that their differing positions are the result of strong opinions by either CEO, their C-suites, or boards. Strategic decisions like these typically weigh various factors like existing investments, in-house skills, market trends, competitive landscape, and financial implications. The preferences of key staff would certainly play into an analysis but is unlikely, especially in complex strategic decisions like this, to be decisive. Manuel DeLanda’s substitution rule applies: “a large organization may be said to be the relevant actor in the explanation of an interorganizational process if a substitution of the people occupying specific roles in its authority structure leaves the organizational policies and its daily routines intact” (DeLanda, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-philosophy-of-society-9780826491695/" target="_blank"><i>A New Philosophy of Society</i></a>, 2006). One can therefore fairly say that this is a collective decision; the companies are acting like ogregores. </div><div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGyWUUWvGTkpRpX9sUOcOKr2ACiRdWGJ2pfcxwCPxxMz5JThk2yfZp6zov_S4h0Ug4PxreSZEqXrKyFkApKpNNwvc7tAaBDBYbVUlE0lfe-Eob8C8OPbgXHYQugBZCpP3ZGo3TZ-ZzFO6ZjR8WFDTZ-oZlTYQJRV8pD8NNkcn6_aU7RJt6Awm4=w400-h400" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image by Bing Image Creator</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-44102520216473971002023-09-27T10:00:00.002-07:002023-09-27T10:00:55.730-07:00Fear Orgs not Bots<p> Tom Gauld's delightful cartoon "<a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2286844-tom-gaulds-department-of-machine-poetry-research/" target="_blank">Department of Machine Poetry Research</a>" shows a room full of robots at rows of desks. Two people are looking in from a door at the back, with one saying to the other, "The poetry is absolutely dreadful, but anything that distracts them from rising up and enslaving us has to be a good thing." It beautifully captures both our fear of automation and our inclination to over-attribute agency to machines rather than the organizations in which they're embedded.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Anthropomorphism focuses our attention on human-sized antagonists, whether they're humanoid robots or human-sounding chatbots. Robots like self-driving cars certainly have agency and we should take account of their individual actions. I'm not sure that GPT-4 has agency (I don't believe the software adapts to its environment in a persistent, long-term way, let alone have intentions) but its ilk may develop it. <p></p><p>However, the organizations that created these tools certainly have agency: they invested billions of dollars with a plan in view, and are adapting their behavior to their competitors, users, and regulators. The resulting assemblages of people, technology and protocols (for example, Tesla Inc. rather than individual Model 3's, or OpenAI Inc. rather than an instance of GPT-4 responding to my prompts; and a layer up, the national and international market/regulatory structures) are actors that are far more potent than individual bots.</p><p>It's not either-or. One can have agency at different levels of analysis (cf. Floridi & Sanders' levels of abstraction in <a href="https://doi.org/10.1023/B:MIND.0000035461.63578.9d" target="_blank">On the Morality of Artificial Agents</a>). The most useful level(s) will vary depending on circumstance. In the case AI policy, I suspect it's more useful to consider the organizational assemblages, i.e., the ogregores, than the artefacts.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiZJAalHRvlTwq0pnKoVitNkTCAmpx3wMb50H4vKkNaBti8Oh9GCGIpMj3m0TDGJN87KLQ4P0YNA3IvLEQC0PuxmBy619SAAlV9rJnYeLjahwbmC3pf_owaz39xOLfjFar1xaaAAvWA87boVeqMYp7yga8GmofEBO0FyDKr1t4ONhvAZFUygPsm" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="600" data-original-width="900" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiZJAalHRvlTwq0pnKoVitNkTCAmpx3wMb50H4vKkNaBti8Oh9GCGIpMj3m0TDGJN87KLQ4P0YNA3IvLEQC0PuxmBy619SAAlV9rJnYeLjahwbmC3pf_owaz39xOLfjFar1xaaAAvWA87boVeqMYp7yga8GmofEBO0FyDKr1t4ONhvAZFUygPsm=w400-h266" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-84487879528890395642023-09-18T14:47:00.000-07:002023-09-18T14:47:05.936-07:00 Philosophical origin myths<p>I’ve begun to notice origin myths embedded in philosophical and political theories, thanks to re-reading Dreyfus & Spinosa’s “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0270467603259868" target="_blank">Further Reflections on Heidegger, Technology, and the Everyday</a>” (2003) alongside Segal’s “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/zygo.12198" target="_blank">The Modern Study of Myth and Its Relation to Science</a>” (2015). Adopting a mythical perspective has tempered my skepticism about the historical accuracy of such accounts. I now view them more as moral exhortations than accurate narratives.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><h4 style="text-align: left;">Origin Myths</h4><p></p><p>Robert Segal classifies twentieth-century theories of myth into three categories based on their responses to the nineteenth-century theories of Tylor and Frazer:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>About the world, but not an explanation of the world (Malinowski, Eliade).</li><li>Not about the physical world, not to be read literally (Bultmann, Jonas, Camus).</li><li>About the human mind, not the world (Freud, Jung).</li></ol><p></p><p>For the first group—which is most relevant to my focus here—myth explains the origin of phenomena. Quoting Segal:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>“For both Malinowski and Eliade, myth is as much about social phenomena—customs, laws, and institutions—as about physical ones. For Malinowski, myths about social phenomena serve to reconcile members to impositions that they might otherwise reject. . . . . To say that myth traces back the origin of phenomena is equivalent to saying that myth explains those phenomena.”</p><p>“Eliade’s criterion for myth is that a story attribute to its subject a feat so exceptional as to turn its subject into a superhuman figure. Myth describes how, in primeval, “sacred” time, a god or near-god created a phenomenon that continues to exist. That phenomenon can be social or natural— for example, marriage or rain. . . . Plays, books, and films are mythic-like because they reveal the existence of another, often earlier world alongside the everyday one—a world of extraordinary figures and events akin to those found in traditional myths. Furthermore, the actions of those figures account for the present state of the everyday world. Most of all, moderns get so absorbed in plays, books, and films that they imagine themselves back in the time of the myth.”</p></blockquote><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Periodization in Modern Philosophy and Political Thought</h4><p>The stage-by-stage narratives of thinkers like Rousseau, Marx, and Heidegger explain the present situation by tracing its origin. For example:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Jean-Jacques Rousseau: state of nature → agriculture → private property, social classes → inequality.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Karl Marx: primitive communism → slave society → feudalism → capitalism → socialism and communism.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Martin Heidegger: a series of “total understandings of being in the West” notably <i>physis </i>→ <i>poiesis </i>→ <i>res </i>→ creatures → technicity.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Leo Strauss: three waves of modernity (liberalism → socialism → fascism), all leading to nihilism, the root of modernity's crisis.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Klaus Schwab: four Industrial Revolutions, (1) mechanization of production → factories and mass production; (2) electricity and assembly lines → increased productivity and efficiency; (3) electronics and IT → globalization and the service sector; (4) merging physical, digital and biological worlds → human-centered future.</li></ul><p></p><p>These myths do not necessarily “serve to reconcile members to impositions that they might otherwise reject” (Malinowski per Segal) though Schwab probably does. They may, instead, spur people to attempt a return to or synthesis with an earlier Golden Age (Heidegger) or a rejection of the status quo and an advance to utopia (Rousseau, Marx).</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">More Moral Tale than History</h4><p>Until now, my instinctive response in such cases has been to question the validity of their histories, given that (a) their histories serve an argumentative purpose, (b) they’re not historians, and (c) even professional historians can't agree. Adopting a mythical view is helping me become more accepting, under the premise that these narratives are more about helping me understand the present moment than offering a causal and historical explanation (even though they purport to do so).</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Threads</h4><p>All these narratives imply an underlying theory. There’s a common thread—indeed, an argument—that binds the stages together. The progression also implies a moral judgment, of either progress and improvement or declension and decline. They’re normative judgments dressed up as positive descriptions. They purport to explain how we arrived at our present situation (descriptive) but do so in order to justify recommendations about where we should go next (normative).</p><p>Common threads in the examples above:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The common thread in Rousseau is increasing inequality. Civilization was a fall from grace and not unambiguously positive. Rousseau had many prescriptions, including embracing a simpler life, promoting equality, and revising the social contract.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>In Marx, each stage is defined by a dominant mode of production and resulting class relations. He advocated working towards the transition to socialism and communism.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>For Heidegger’s stages, the common thread is a series of “understandings of Being”; it seems to me that he sees the series as declension from the natural growth and emergence of things in the Greek conception of physis. He wanted us to balance the benefits of a technological worldview with openness to making of the Greeks’ <i>poiesis</i>.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>A common thread in Strauss' three waves of modernity is the deconstruction and rejection of previous standards of morality and truth. Declension again, since the progression leads to the crisis in modernity. Strauss suggested a return to classical political philosophy, especially that of the Greeks.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The common thread for Schwab is technological advancement which transforms economic structures and social norms. His exhortation is to engage with and adapt to these changes.</li></ul><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Why stages?</h4><p>Humans like to understand history and societal development in terms of stages or epochs. For example, stage-by-stage narratives are found in many world religions and mythologies. For example:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Hinduism's four <i>yugas</i>, each representing a phase in the moral and spiritual development of human societies. It’s a tale of decline.</li><li>Hesiod’s Five Ages of Man depict a decline from the Golden Age to the current Iron Age.</li><li>A more progress-oriented stages model can be seen in the Christian tradition with a series of covenants between God and humanity: Adam & Eve; Noah; Moses; Jesus Christ.</li><li>The Mahayana tradition proposes a cycle of degeneration and restoration of the Buddha's teachings.</li></ul><p></p><p>It’s easy to speculate about the reasons:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Stages <i>simplify </i>complex processes.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>We like stories with a beginning, middle, and end. A <i>narrative </i>provides a sense of direction and underscores the <i>meaning </i>the author wishes to highlight in our present situation.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Stages can identify or justify claims of <i>cause and effect</i>, where a common mechanism is seen playing out in a series of settings.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Either cause-and-effect or mere pattern recognition can serve to (claim to) <i>predict </i>future events, providing some certainty and reducing anxiety in an uncertain world.</li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>All these attributes—narrative momentum, meaning, prediction—can motivate or justify the author’s <i>prescription </i>of what we should do, such as advancing in the case of progression, or returning to earlier values in a tale of decline.</li></ul><p></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Coda</h4><p>Just after reading Dreyfus & Spinosa and Segal, I saw a <a href="https://www.aei.org/research-products/book/the-conservative-futurist/" target="_blank">blurb</a> for James Pethokoukis’ new book, <i>The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised</i>. It’s a clear origin & redemption narrative, and moves straight to a Call to Action:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>“America was once . . . . But as we moved into the late 20th century, . . . . We are now at risk of another half century of . . . .”</li><li>“. . . the fascinating story of what went wrong in the past and what we need to do today to finally get it right.”</li></ul><p></p><div><br /></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-79203737935558753322023-08-31T15:06:00.007-07:002023-08-31T15:12:52.499-07:00 Enoch’s Egregores as Bringers of Tech<p>Rereading Mark Stavish’s <i><a href="https://www.innertraditions.com/egregores" target="_blank">Egregores</a></i> prompted me to read the Book of Enoch (aka 1 Enoch) where the term Watcher (<i>egregoros </i>in Greek) is used to describe angels. I was struck that one of the terrible sins of the fallen angels described in Enoch was to teach humans technology. (The other was to have intercourse with women; angels are supposed to be spiritual beings and not be subject to lust.)</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>1 Enoch seems to date from 130–100 BCE (W.O.E Oesterley’s <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe002.htm" target="_blank">Introduction</a> to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Charles_(scholar)" target="_blank">R.H. Charles</a>’s 1917 translation, <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/index.htm" target="_blank">available at sacred-texts.com</a>). Dr. Oesterley describes it as “in some respects, the most notable extant apocalyptic work outside the canonical Scriptures.” (See also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a>.) The quotes below (<i>in italics </i>to set them off from my commentary) are from Charles’s translation.<div><br /></div><div>A <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watcher_(angel)" target="_blank">Wikipedia article</a> lists various biblical occurrences of the term watchers, including in Daniel and Jubilees. <div><p></p><p>Here's a summary (see below for the source passages) of technologies that the angels brought to humankind:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Magic (“charms and enchantments”; “enchantments, and … the resolving of enchantments”)</li><li>Agriculture (“the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants”; “root-cuttings”)</li><li>Weaponry (“swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates”) and warfare (“blows [and] weapons of death”)</li><li>Metallurgy (“made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony”)</li><li>Medicine (“the use of antimony”)</li><li>Cosmetics (“the beautifying of the eyelids”)</li><li>Jewelry (“costly stones”)</li><li>Dyeing (“colouring tinctures”) </li><li>Astronomy (“astrology, … the constellations, … the knowledge of the clouds, … the signs of the earth, … the signs of the sun, and … the course of the moon”)</li><li>Wisdom, including writing</li><li>Curses (“wicked smitings”; oaths)</li></ul><p></p><p>I’m puzzled how (fallen) angels came to be associated with egregores in the occult sense. Oesterley’s Introduction seems to indicate that watchers is a synonym for angels in general, and not just fallen ones. I’ve made an inventory below of all occurrences of “watcher(s)” in the text.</p><p>Last but not least, there’s an implication that “mysteries” came to humankind through women. In 1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe019.htm" target="_blank">16</a>:1–3, the Lord says to the Watchers, “<i>You have been in heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have made known to the women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth.</i>” (See below for full context.) Is this an echo of Eve in the Genesis story?</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The fallen angels and their offenses</h4><p>The watchers are fallen angels. Their offense seems to have been (1) giving up the pure spiritual life and lusting after women, and (2) teaching humans various technologies. The dramatic impact is represented by their offspring being giants, called evil spirits.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: 'Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.' (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe009.htm" target="_blank">6</a>:1–2)</i></p><p><i>And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them</span>, and <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">they taught them</span> charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">bare great giants</span>, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe010.htm" target="_blank">7</a>:1–6)</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Summary of technologies mentioned (note it’s both “magic” and “tech”)</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Magic (“charms and enchantments”)</li><li>Agriculture (“the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants”)</li></ul><blockquote><i>And <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Azâzêl taught men</span> to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. 2. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, (taught) astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven . . . (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe011.htm" target="_blank">8</a>)</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Summary of technologies mentioned (again both “magic” and “tech”)</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Weaponry (“swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates”) </li><li>Metallurgy (“made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony”)</li><li>Medicine (“the use of antimony”)</li><li>Cosmetics (“the beautifying of the eyelids”)</li><li>Jewelry (“costly stones”)</li><li>Dyeing (“colouring tinctures”) </li><li>Magic (“enchantments, and … the resolving of enchantments”)</li><li>Agriculture (“root-cuttings”)</li><li>Astronomy (“astrology, … the constellations, … the knowledge of the clouds, … the signs of the earth, … the signs of the sun, and … the course of the moon”)</li></ul><p></p><p>The angels were not supposed to marry, and their bastard offspring with humans were evil. In the same way that these spirits rose up against people because they "proceeded" from them, perhaps the technologies did likewise.</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>And they have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth, and have slept with the women, and have defiled themselves, and revealed to them all kinds of sins. And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe012.htm" target="_blank">9</a>:8–9)</i></p><p><i>And though ye were holy, spiritual, living the eternal life, you have defiled yourselves with the blood of women, and have begotten (children) with the blood of flesh, and, as the children of men, have lusted after flesh and blood as those ⌈also⌉ do who die and perish. Therefore have I given them wives also that they might impregnate them, and beget children by them, that thus nothing might be wanting to them on earth. <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">But you were ⌈formerly⌉ spiritual, living the eternal life, and immortal for all generations of the world. And therefore I have not appointed wives for you</span>; for as for the spiritual ones of the heaven, in heaven is their dwelling. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe018.htm" target="_blank">15</a>:4–7)</i></p><p><i>And now, <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits</span> upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">born from men, from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin</span>; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called. As for the spirits of heaven, in heaven shall be their dwelling, but as for the spirits of the earth which were born upon the earth, on the earth shall be their dwelling. And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble: they take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst, and cause offences. And <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them</span>. (1 Enoch </i><i><a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe018.htm" target="_blank">15</a></i><i>:8–11)</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>The punishment of the fallen angels is being bound and cast down into darkness, reminiscent of Tartarus. Their sins are not just what they did, but what they taught. This reminds me of Prometheus: he was a Titan, and most of his ilk were cast into Tartarus after the Titanomachy; he was punished—by being bound to a rock, though—for siding with humans against Zeus, with various technologies depending on the telling. </p><blockquote><p><i>And again the Lord said to Raphael: 'Bind Azâzêl hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dûdâêl, and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there for ever, and cover his face that he may not see light. And on the day of the great judgement he shall be cast into the fire. And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe013.htm" target="_blank">10</a>:4–7)</i></p><p><i>And Enoch went and said: 'Azâzêl, thou shalt have no peace: a severe sentence has gone forth against thee to put thee in bonds: And thou shalt not have toleration nor request granted to thee, because of the unrighteousness which thou hast taught, and because of all the works of godlessness and unrighteousness and sin which thou hast shown to men.' (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe016.htm" target="_blank">13</a>:1–2)</i></p><p><i>And these are the names of the holy angels who watch. Uriel, one of the holy angels, who is over the world and over <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Tartarus</span>. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe023.htm" target="_blank">20</a>:1–2)</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>Uriel, one of the Seven Archangels, presides over “Tartarus”; I wonder what the Aramaic/Hebrew original was. I suspect the word in the Greek was <i>tartaros</i>; cf. (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Peter%202:4-6&version=NIV" target="_blank">2 Peter 2:4-6</a>): “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell,[a] putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; 6 if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly.” See also <a href="https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_167.cfm" target="_blank">Don Stewart in the Blue Letter Bible</a>.</p><p>In <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe068.htm" target="_blank">Chapter 65</a>, Enoch foretells to Noah the deluge and his own preservation. The reason given is that people have learned secrets from the angels. [I’ve added in square brackets who I think is speaking. The quote marks in the translation seem garbled.] </p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>And in those days Noah saw the earth that it had sunk down and its destruction was nigh. And he arose from thence and went to the ends of the earth, and cried aloud to his grandfather Enoch: and Noah said three times with an embittered voice: </i></p><p><i>[Noah:] Hear me, hear me, hear me.' And I said unto him: 'Tell me what it is that is falling out on the earth that the earth is in such evil plight and shaken, lest perchance I shall perish with it?' And thereupon there was a great commotion, on the earth, and a voice was heard from heaven, and I fell on my face. And Enoch my grandfather came and stood by me, and said unto me: </i></p><p><i>[Enoch:] 'Why hast thou cried unto me with a bitter cry and weeping? And a command has gone forth from the presence of the Lord concerning those who dwell on the earth that <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">their ruin is accomplished because they have learnt all the secrets of the angels, and all the violence of the Satans, and all their powers</span>--the most secret ones--and all the power of those who practice sorcery, and the power of witchcraft, and the power of those who make molten images for the whole earth: And how silver is produced from the dust of the earth, and how soft metal originates in the earth. For lead and tin are not produced from the earth like the first: it is a fountain that produces them, and an angel stands therein, and that angel is pre-eminent.' </i></p><p><i>[Noah:] And after that my grandfather Enoch took hold of me by my hand and raised me up, and said unto me: </i></p><p><i>[Enoch:] 'Go, for I have asked the Lord of Spirits as touching this commotion on the earth. </i></p><p><i>[Noah:] And He said unto me: </i></p><p><i>[Enoch:] "Because of their unrighteousness their <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">judgement has been determined upon and shall not be withheld</span> by Me for ever. <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Because of the sorceries which they have searched out and learnt, the earth and those who dwell upon it shall be destroyed</span>." And these--they have no place of repentance for ever, because they have shown them what was hidden, and they are the damned: but as for thee, my son, the Lord of Spirits knows that thou art pure, and guiltless of this reproach concerning the secrets. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe068.htm" target="_blank">65</a>:1–11)</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p><a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe072.htm" target="_blank">Chapter 69</a> has an inventory of the names and functions of the fallen angels, which includes another technology inventory that intersects with (i.e., some repeats, but also some omissions and some new items) the one in earlier chapters. [I’ve added line breaks to help with reading.]</p><blockquote><p><i>And behold the names of those angels …: the first of them is Samjâzâ, …, the twenty-first Azâzêl.</i></p><p><i>And these are the chiefs of their angels and their names, and their chief ones over hundreds and over fifties and over tens. </i></p><p><i>The name of the first Jeqôn: that is, the one who led astray ⌈all⌉ the sons of God, … </i></p><p><i>And the second was named Asbeêl: he imparted to the holy sons of God evil counsel, and led them astray so that they defiled their bodies with the daughters of men. </i></p><p><i>And the third was named Gâdreêl: he it is who showed the children of men all <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">the blows of death</span>, and he led astray Eve, and showed the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">weapons of death</span> to the sons of men the shield and the coat of mail, and the sword for battle, and all the weapons of death to the children of men. … </i></p><p><i>And the fourth was named Pênêmûe: he taught the children of men the bitter and the sweet, and he taught them all the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">secrets of their wisdom</span>. And he instructed mankind in <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">writing with ink and paper</span>, and thereby many sinned from eternity to eternity and until this day. <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">For men were not created for such a purpose, to give confirmation to their good faith with pen and ink</span>. For men were created exactly like the angels, to the intent that they should continue pure and righteous, and death, which destroys everything, could not have taken hold of them, but through this their knowledge they are perishing, and through this power it is consuming me. </i></p><p><i>And the fifth was named Kâsdejâ: this is he who showed the children of men all the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">wicked smitings of spirits and demons</span>, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away, and the smitings of the soul the bites of the serpent, and the smitings which befall through the noontide heat, the son of the serpent named Tabââ‘ĕt.</i></p><p><i>And this is the task of Kâsbeêl, the chief of <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">the oath which he showed</span> to the holy ones when he dwelt high above in glory, and its name is Bîqâ. This (angel) requested Michael to show him the hidden name, that he might enunciate it in the oath, so that those might quake before that name and oath who revealed all that was in secret to the children of men. And this is the power of this oath, for it is powerful and strong, and he placed this oath Akâe in the hand of Michael. 16 And these are the secrets of this oath . . . (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe072.htm" target="_blank">69</a>:2–16)</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Summary of technologies mentioned (here it includes knowledge)</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Warfare (“blows [and] weapons of death”)</li><li>Wisdom, including writing</li><li>Curses (“wicked smitings”; oaths)</li></ul><p></p><p>It’s interesting to see that writing is cited as an evil – links to Plato’s argument in the Phaedrus (the fable of Thamus and Theuth). As is wisdom, cf. eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=GENESIS%202%3A4-3%3A24&version=NIV" target="_blank">3:1–5</a>.</p><p>The idea that humankind was punished in the flood because it learned technologies was new to me. Enoch reflects the story in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206&version=NIV" target="_blank">Genesis 6</a>:1-7, though it’s clearer about the relationship between the fallen angels, the giants, and humankind—and Enoch links the flood to the fallen angels. {I’ve added my gloss in curly brackets.}</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God {the fallen angels in Enoch} saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with[a] humans forever, for they are mortal[b]; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim {there are scholarly debates about who they were, but often translated “giants”} were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.</i></p><p><i>The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth {no reference here to learning the secrets of the fallen angels; a later idea?}, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” {A different reason for the flood than in Enoch.} But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. (</i><a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206&version=NIV" target="_blank">Genesis 6</a>:1-7<i>)</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Egregores, biblical and occult</h4><p>I am puzzled that fallen angels came to be associated with egregores in the occult sense which (pace Valentin Tomberg as cited in Stavish) aren’t necessarily evil. Also, occult egregores are active, not passive watchers. It occurred to me that perhaps the terms Watchers applied to all angels as a class, and that the fallen angels were punished because they stopped watching and started interacting with humans.</p><p>In the Introduction, it sounds like watchers is a synonym for angels in general; some of them transgressed: “In this dream Enoch is asked to intercede for the watchers of heaven, i.e. the angels, who had left their heavenly home to commit iniquity with the daughters of men.”</p><p>Here are occurrences of Watcher(s) in the text:</p><p>Here, Watchers could be all angels:</p><blockquote><p><i>[Enoch:] Concerning the elect I said, and took up my parable concerning them:</i></p><p><i>The Holy Great One will come forth from His dwelling,</i></p><p><i>And the eternal God will tread upon the earth, (even) on Mount Sinai,</i></p><p><i>And appear from His camp</i></p><p><i>And appear in the strength of His might from the heaven of heavens.</i></p><p><i>And all shall be smitten with fear</i></p><p><i>And the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers </span>shall quake,</i></p><p><i>And great fear and trembling shall seize them unto the ends of the earth. </i></p><p><i>Etc. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe004.htm" target="_blank">1</a>:3 ff.)</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>In the next passage, they seem to be just the fallen angels (Note that the translation uses both “angels” and “Watcher”; I wonder if it’s the same word in the original, or whether the first is <i>aggelos </i>and the second <i>egregoros</i>.)</p><blockquote><p><i>Then said the Most High, the Holy and Great One spake, and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him: 'Go to Noah and tell him in my name "Hide thyself!" and reveal to him the end that is approaching: that the whole earth will be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and will destroy all that is on it. . . . </i></p><p><i>And again the Lord said to Raphael: 'Bind Azâzêl hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dûdâêl, and cast him therein. . . . And heal the earth <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">which the angels have corrupted</span>, and proclaim the healing of the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons</span>. . . . </i></p><p><i>And to Gabriel said the Lord: 'Proceed against the bastards and the reprobates, and against the children of fornication: and destroy the children of fornication and the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">children of the Watchers</span> from amongst men and cause them to go forth: send them one against the other that they may destroy each other in battle: for length of days shall they not have. And the Lord said unto Michael: 'Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. . . . </i></p><p><i>And destroy all the spirits of the reprobate and the children of the Watchers, because they have wronged mankind. Destroy all wrong from the face of the earth and let every evil work come to an end: and let the plant of righteousness and truth appear: and it shall prove a blessing; the works of righteousness and truth shall be planted in truth and joy for evermore. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe013.htm" target="_blank">10</a>:1–16)</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p><a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe015.htm" target="_blank">Chapter 12</a> concerns itself with Watchers who have left the high heavens—that is, just the fallen angels—even though they’re not always qualified that way…</p><blockquote><p><i>Before these things Enoch was hidden, and no one of the children of men knew where he was hidden, and where he abode, and what had become of him. And his activities had to do with the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers</span>, and his days were with the holy ones.</i></p><p><i>[Enoch:] And I, Enoch was blessing the Lord of majesty and the King of the ages, and lo! the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers</span> called me--Enoch the scribe--and said to me: </i></p><p><i>[Watchers, all the angels:] 'Enoch, thou scribe of righteousness, go, declare to the Watchers of the heaven who have left the high heaven, the holy eternal place, and have defiled themselves with women, and have done as the children of earth do, and have taken unto themselves wives: "Ye have wrought great destruction on the earth: And ye shall have no peace nor forgiveness of sin: and inasmuch as they delight themselves in their children, The murder of their beloved ones shall they see, and over the destruction of their children shall they lament, and shall make supplication unto eternity, but mercy and peace shall ye not attain."' (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe015.htm" target="_blank">12</a>)</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>In Chapter <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe017.htm" target="_blank">14</a>, <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe018.htm" target="_blank">15</a> and <a href="16" target="_blank">16</a>, again by implications the Watchers are just the fallen ones who will be reprimanded and punished.</p><blockquote><p><i>The book of the words of righteousness, and of the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">reprimand of the eternal Watchers</span> in accordance with the command of the Holy Great One in that vision. </i></p><p><i>[Enoch:] I saw in my sleep what I will now say with a tongue of flesh and with the breath of my mouth: which the Great One has given to men to converse therewith and understand with the heart. As He has created and given to man the power of understanding the word of wisdom, so hath He created me also and given me the power of reprimanding the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers</span>, the children of heaven. (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe017.htm" target="_blank">14</a>:1–3)</i></p><p><i>[Enoch:] And He answered and said to me, and I heard His voice: </i></p><p><i>[The Lord:] 'Fear not, Enoch, thou righteous man and scribe of righteousness: approach hither and hear my voice. And go, say to the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers of heaven</span>, who have sent thee to intercede for them: "You should intercede" for men, and not men for you: Wherefore have ye left the high, holy, and eternal heaven, and lain with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men and taken to yourselves wives, and done like the children of earth, and begotten giants (as your) sons? (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe018.htm" target="_blank">15</a>:1–3)</i></p><p><i>And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. 9. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men, and from the holy <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers</span> is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called. (1 Enoch </i><i><a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe018.htm" target="_blank">15</a></i><i>:8–9)</i></p><p><i>From the days of the slaughter and destruction and death of the giants, from the souls of whose flesh the spirits, having gone forth, shall destroy without incurring judgement--thus shall they destroy until the day of the consummation, the great judgement in which the age shall be consummated, over the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">Watchers</span> and the godless, yea, shall be wholly consummated." And now as to the Watchers who have sent thee to intercede for them, who had been aforetime in heaven, say to: "You have been in heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have made known to the women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth." (1 Enoch <a href="https://sacred-texts.com/bib/boe/boe019.htm" target="_blank">16</a>:1–3)</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>There is an intriguing implication that the mysteries came to humankind through women—an echo of Eve in the Genesis story?</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></div></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-14411123507366268982023-08-27T18:42:00.005-07:002023-08-27T18:43:16.705-07:00Do ogregores give a damn?<p>Philosopher <a href="https://news.uchicago.edu/story/john-haugeland-scholar-and-former-philosophy-department-chair-1945-2010" target="_blank">John Haugeland</a> says that one of the most fundamental differences between human beings and machines is that machines, and AIs in particular, don't give a damn. Things matter to us but not to machines. It’s quite plausible that AIs don’t give a damn, at least not yet. But is that just something that humans can do?</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Here’s Haugeland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, speaking in Tao Ruspoli’s documentary about Martin Heidegger at <a href="https://youtu.be/fcCRmf_tHW8?t=1173" target="_blank">time code 19:33</a>:<p></p><p></p><blockquote>Perhaps I can reach to the one of the most fundamental aspects about the difference between human beings and machines by adverting to something about each of us with which we are all deeply familiar. And that is that it matters to us what happens in the world, what matters; <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">it matters to us</span> what happens to us; it matters to us what happens to our friends; it matters to us the progress of science and philosophy. All of those are desiderata. Those are things to build a life on that one can summarize in the phrase “giving a damn.” And if you have that phrase then you can say in a word, What AI has so far failed to come up with, by saying, “<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">The trouble with computers is that they don't give a damn</span>.”</blockquote><p></p><p>A few minutes further on, at <a href="https://youtu.be/fcCRmf_tHW8?t=1228" target="_blank">time code 20:28</a>, <a href="https://philosophy.columbia.edu/content/taylor-carman" target="_blank">Taylor Carman</a>, Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College and Columbia echoed the sentiment:</p><p></p><blockquote>What we are at bottom, much more fundamental than our being thinking subjects, is that <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">we care about something; something matters to us</span>.</blockquote><p></p><p>First, I’m not sure about AIs. To the extent they have a goal and the means to achieve it, something (that goal) matters to them. We’re probably not at the point where they have enough power in the world, but the existential risk of <a href="https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-paperclip-maximizer-problem-how-related-to-ai/" target="_blank">paperclip maximizers</a> is that they do give a damn.</p><p>Second, I think anything that has agency – defined as acting on the world to achieve some states and avoid others – by definition gives a damn. One can debate what kinds of things have agency. We certainly believe humans do, and most people believe animals do, even down to bacteria for <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1059712309343819" target="_blank">some scholars</a>.</p><p>Third, one can treat social institutions (aka ogregores) as machines. I believe at least some of them have agency, see the posts <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/11/defining-agency.html" target="_blank">Defining Agency</a> and <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/10/degrees-of-agency.html" target="_blank">Degrees of Agency</a>.</p><p>We should not equate “giving a damn” as “having the subjective state of giving a damn.” We can’t be sure of the subjective states of anyone other than ourselves. A more reliable test is that something gives a damn because it behaves as if it gives a damn. organizations pass the test. They act to survive and grow; their existence matters to them. Therefore, at least some machines give a damn: institutions now, and some AIs perhaps soon.</p><p>If one concedes that, questions arise about whether those entities bear responsibility for their actions; see, e.g., Christian List’s <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-021-00454-7" target="_blank">Group Agency and Artificial Intelligence</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-13337927505329396072023-08-07T13:59:00.004-07:002023-08-07T13:59:23.241-07:00Corpomorphism<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-wright-638887201/" target="_blank">Meg Wright</a> alerted me to the way brands are trying to build <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction" target="_blank">parasocial relationships</a> with customers using anthropomorphism. The way RyanAir's TikTok is putting googly eyes on photos of its planes is the most explicit corporate anthropomorphism I’ve seen.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>(Yes, I know “corpomorphism” doesn’t mean what I’d like it to mean, but “anthropocorps” isn’t much better, let alone “anthropocorpomorphism.”)<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgB-SJBPC3fbVaufIPVk2iFjiABaywypGTuFl3mKwlHUxttSjt6ly2XcN8S94iNyKsUBkuIBLdzZtZVOiIeQfXfZDeoimxhpuGvb2TqcV4SRxqqQpWMsj_-hajBV3lJFFTffBa4khV2R19c9Q_m8RyXbqzzqiz84tEa_X7w9kdr6AMR_uaR9OBs" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgB-SJBPC3fbVaufIPVk2iFjiABaywypGTuFl3mKwlHUxttSjt6ly2XcN8S94iNyKsUBkuIBLdzZtZVOiIeQfXfZDeoimxhpuGvb2TqcV4SRxqqQpWMsj_-hajBV3lJFFTffBa4khV2R19c9Q_m8RyXbqzzqiz84tEa_X7w9kdr6AMR_uaR9OBs" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhmeFdv-KpUnkrE_gOXdP5UqaRL0uX6aKbxoYytVGUeSk9YfMzXLAU-2qZrBF19uhFuaAImoO3Y0K2qgJwuQ0dBJc-U2KnoP0opwKVDEQkjVYITJQBTtEJvJ5jyehpRj38znmth8LQ-VvqChvepUL3QRpocRsZDg95xWrDHtb-9ELa60-RkCaCU" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="768" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhmeFdv-KpUnkrE_gOXdP5UqaRL0uX6aKbxoYytVGUeSk9YfMzXLAU-2qZrBF19uhFuaAImoO3Y0K2qgJwuQ0dBJc-U2KnoP0opwKVDEQkjVYITJQBTtEJvJ5jyehpRj38znmth8LQ-VvqChvepUL3QRpocRsZDg95xWrDHtb-9ELa60-RkCaCU" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><p>I can't get TikTok video embedding to work in Blogger, so click on <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanair/video/7216741173648493850" target="_blank">this</a> for an example. If that doesn't work, try <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanair" target="_blank">RyanAir's TikTok page</a>. Here's a compilation on YouTube:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R7qGqWdm9lc" width="320" youtube-src-id="R7qGqWdm9lc"></iframe></div><br /><p>Meg also pointed me to the snarky persona of Wendy’s Twitter feed: examples on <a href="https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-wendy-tweets-jokes/" target="_blank">BoredPanda</a> and <a href="https://wegotthiscovered.com/social-media/way-spicier-than-expected-the-best-of-wendys-twitter-roasts/" target="_blank">WGTC</a>.</p><p>Relatable corporate spokespeople, real and artificial, are of long-standing:</p><p>Jared/Subway</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IYtMeIgUKiU" width="320" youtube-src-id="IYtMeIgUKiU"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>Flo/Progressive<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aWK9AwpAqLM" width="320" youtube-src-id="aWK9AwpAqLM"></iframe></div><br /><p>GEICO/gecko</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mFIc-CfzYo0" width="320" youtube-src-id="mFIc-CfzYo0"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div><p><br /></p>
<p><br /></p><div><br /></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-70233247459993514412023-07-16T16:47:00.006-07:002023-07-28T14:02:40.990-07:00Heidegger's technicity is an agent<p>Heidegger’s essay “<i>Die Frage nach der Technik</i>” (usually translated as “The Question Concerning Technology”) posits <i>Ge-Stell</i> (variously translated at “enframing,” “pos-ure,” or “positionality”) as the essence of <i>Technik</i> (translated as “technology” or “technicity”; see endnote). Heidegger’s (or his translators’?) pervasive use the passive voice sidesteps the question of whether technicity has agency. I believe this text implies that he believes it does, and that he’s not just using figures of speech.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>My analysis is based on the William Lovitt translation published as “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger, <i>The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays</i>, Garland Publishing (1977) (<a href="https://philtech.michaelreno.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HeideggerTheQuestionConcerningTechnology.pdf" target="_blank">pdf</a>).<p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Enframing as agent</h3><p>A key concept in the essay—the essence of modern technology for Heidegger—is <i>Ge-Stell</i>, translated by Lovitt as “enframing.” The term is defined by a cluster of related concepts: “Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”</p><p>This definitional sentence contains several examples of action directed towards others, a requirement for agency: enframing <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">gathers</span> together; it <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">sets upon</span> “man”; it <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">challenges</span> “him” (scare quotes omitted in the sequel). In other passages, it orders in the sense of commanding, e.g., in “[What is it] is peculiar to that which results from this setting-upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">ordered</span> to stand by, . . . .”; and it reveals: “The revealing[-that-challenges, a paraphrase for enframing] <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">reveals</span> to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course.”</p><p>Enframing has goals, an important element of agency: “that expediting [referring to enframing] is always <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">itself directed</span> from the beginning <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">toward furthering something</span> else, . . . .” That sounds like intentionality to me.</p><p>For Heidegger, enframing certainly does work: “the way in which everything presences that <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">is wrought upon</span> by the revealing that challenges,” that is, by enframing. (Recall that <i>wrought</i> is the past participle of <i>to work</i>.) For example, “[enframing] <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">thrusts</span> man into a relation to . . . .”</p><p>In some cases Heidegger doesn’t name enframing as the agent, but it’s implied: “Everywhere everything is <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">ordered</span> to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” (Aside: Everything—everything!—is ordered by this thing. Quite a potent agent!)</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Other agents</h3><p>Enframing isn’t the only non-human entity that Heidegger portrays as taking action.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>Coal</b>: “it is on call, ready to <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">deliver</span> the sun's warmth that is stored in it. The sun's warmth is <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">challenged forth</span> for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam . . . .”</p><p><b>Land</b>: “The earth now <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">reveals itself</span> as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.”</p><p><b>Industries</b>: “[The Rhine today is a river] as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">vacation industry</span>.”</p><p><b>Machines</b>: “[An airliner on the runway] <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">conceals itself</span> as to what and how it is.”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Agency is attributed to technology in several passages:</p><p></p><blockquote>“What technology is, when represented as a means, <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">discloses itself</span> when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality.”<p>“Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">will open itself up to us</span>.”</p><p>“<i>Techne </i>. . . <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">reveals</span> whatever does not bring itself forth . . . .”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Physics seems to have not only agency but emotions:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>“Because physics . . . <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">sets nature up</span> to exhibit itself . . . ,<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"> it orders</span> its experiments precisely for the purpose . . . .”</p><p>“If modern physics must <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">resign itself</span> ever increasingly to the fact that . . . . Hence physics . . . , will never be able to <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">renounce</span> this one thing: . . . .”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>And even more esoteric stuff is active: </p><p></p><blockquote><p>“All coming to presence, not only modern technology, <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">keeps itself</span> everywhere <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">concealed</span> to the last. . . . That which is primally early <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">shows itself</span> only ultimately to men.” (I think this means that both <i>poiesis</i> and its <i>bête noire</i> technicity/enframing keep themselves concealed.)</p><p>“[T]he actual <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">reveals itself</span> as standing-reserve.”</p><p>“But that which frees—the mystery—is concealed and always <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">concealing itself</span>.”</p><p>“Revealing . . . <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">apportions itself</span> into . . . .”</p><p>“everything will <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">present itself</span> only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve”</p><p>“. . . the danger that in the technological age rather conceals than <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">shows itself</span>?”</p></blockquote><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Just a figure of speech?</h3><p>Heidegger attributes agency so promiscuously that perhaps we should shouldn't take him literally. Could it all just be figures of speech?</p><p>Nothing is “just” a figure of speech<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">—</span>least of all to Heidegger! Metaphors carry meaning from one place to another, and their implications must be taken seriously even if not literally.</p><p>In some cases, it may well just be circumlocution. For example, one could plausibly read “The fact that it has been showing itself in the light of Ideas” to simply mean “the fact that people have been aware of” something. One could read “physics, . . . , sets nature up to exhibit itself . . . , it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself . . .” to be referring to physicists by metonymy. </p><p>I would argue, of course, that one should often social metonymy literally. I believe that social groups can have agency—see e.g., List & Pettit <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/3619" target="_blank">on group agency</a>; Manuel DeLanda’s <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-philosophy-of-society-9780826491695/" target="_blank"><i>A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity</i></a>; and my blog <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/search/label/ogregores" target="_blank">posts about ogregores</a>). I don't know Heidegger's position on this matter but his language suggests that he agrees.</p><p>Most of the examples above are hard to explain away as metonymy. Even in the physics example, we have nature “report[ing] itself.” In all these cases the implication of agency is hard to avoid.</p><p>One could say that “Everest challenges us to climb it” should be understood as our human response to the mountain. It’s all in our mind, it’s not the mountain. The challenge is generates in and by us. However, Heidegger closes off this option by saying repeatedly that the action of technology/technicity—its essence, its “coming into presence”—is not just the result of human action:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>“Modern technology, as a revealing which orders, is thus <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">no mere human doing</span>.”</p><p>“In enframing that unconcealment comes to pass in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the real as standing-reserve. This work is therefore <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">neither only a human activity nor a mere means within such activity</span>.”</p><p>“Does such revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">neither does it happen exclusively in man, or definitively through man</span>.”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>To belabor the point: Heidegger uses action-words in this these three passages (“orders,” “work,” and “revealing,” respectively) to suggest the working of non-human agency.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Coda: A note on “Technik”</h3><p>The German title of the essay is “<i>Die Frage nach der Technik</i>.” William Lovitt translates <i>Technik </i>as “technology” but William Richardson uses the word “technicity” in his <a href="http://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html" target="_blank">translation</a> of Heidegger’s 1966 interview with <i>Der Spiegel</i>.</p><p>The Cambridge Dictionary <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/german-english/technik" target="_blank">translates <i>Technik</i></a><i> </i>as technology, engineering, technical equipment, or (importantly) technique. The sense of “technique” (connoting human abilities in action) links to the English word “technicity” which is defined as follows:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>The efficacy, functionality, or experience of a particular technology (<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technicity" target="_blank">Wiktionary</a>)</p><p>The prevalence of or reliance upon (a particular) technology by a specific group of people or by humanity as a whole (<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technicity" target="_blank">Wiktionary</a>)</p><p>Technical quality or character, technicality (<a href="https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/271683" target="_blank">OED</a>)</p><p>The extent to which a people, culture, etc., possesses technical skills or technology (<a href="https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/271683" target="_blank">OED</a>)</p></blockquote><p></p><p><i>Update 22 July, 2023</i></p><p></p><blockquote>Changed title from “Is technicity an agent?” to “Heidegger's technicity is an agent.”</blockquote><p></p><p> </p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-12593994430224391672023-07-14T15:03:00.001-07:002023-07-17T16:15:48.453-07:00Myth definitionsThis post is a rolling inventory of definitions and descriptions of myth – mine, and those of others. The date on which an item is added to the list is given in italics, in parentheses. I’ll move it to the top of the blog every time I update it.<span><a name='more'></a></span><div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>a set of propositions, </b><b>often stated in narrative form, that is accepted uncritically by a culture or </b><b>speech-community and that serves to found or affirm its self-conception</b></div></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div>--- Peter Heehs (1994), "Myth, History, and Theory"</div><div><br /></div><div><blockquote>"Basing ourselves on this philosophical and critical sense of "myth," we may define it as a set of propositions, often stated in narrative form, that is accepted uncritically by a culture or speech-community and that serves to found or affirm its self-conception. "Myth" in this sense includes most traditional narratives as well as some modern literature, but also "texts" such as performance wrestling, certain advertisements, and so on. More generally it consists of any set of related propositions whose "truth" is not demonstrated by the working of logos."</blockquote></div><div><i>(Oct 2021)</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b>narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future</b></div><div><br /></div><div>--- Neil Postman (1996: 7). The End of Education. </div><div><blockquote>“our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future” </blockquote></div><div><div>(<i>Mar 2021</i>)</div><div><br /></div><div><b>stories </b><b>reflecting current social concerns that </b><b>we use to make sense of our world and confirm our views </b><div><b><br /></b><div>--- adapted from the Snopes.com entry "<a href="https://www.snopes.com/2011/03/10/what-are-urban-legends/" target="_blank">Urban Legend Definition</a>":</div><div><blockquote>The legends we tell reflect current societal concerns and fears as well as confirm the rightness of our views. It is through such stories that we attempt to make sense of our world, which at times can appear to be capricious and dangerous. As cautionary tales, urban legends warn us against engaging in risky behaviors by pointing out what has supposedly happened to others who did what we might be tempted try. Other legends confirm our belief that it’s a big, bad world out there, . . .</blockquote></div><div><div>(<i>July 2020</i>)</div><div><br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div>"<b>stories that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence</b>"</div><div><b>"a captivating fiction, a promise unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable"</b></div><div><br /></div><div>--- Vincent Mosco (2005). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace, p. 3</div><div><blockquote>Myths are <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">stories that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence</span> that lift people out of the banality of everyday life. </blockquote><p></p><blockquote>A simple but quite limited way to understand a myth is to see it as <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">a captivating fiction, a promise unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable</span> </blockquote><p></p></div><div>(<i>July 2020</i>)</div><div><br /></div><div>"<b>a widely-held belief in significant truth claims, presented as a story, that influences thought or behavior</b>"</div><div><br /></div><div>--- Yours truly, from <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2020/06/myth-in-tech-journalism.html" target="_blank">"Myth" in tech journalism</a>, June 2020</div><div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li> A widely held</li><li> belief</li><li> in significant or far-reaching truth claims</li><li> presented in narrative form</li><li> that influences thought or behavior</li></ul></div></div><div>(<i>July 2020</i>)</div><div><br /></div><div>"<b>culturally-important imaginal stories</b>"<div>"<b>narrative fictions whose plots read first at the level of their own stories, and then as projections of imminent transcendent meanings</b>"</div><div><br />--- William G. Doty (1980). "Mythophiles’ Dyscrasia: A Comprehensive Definition of Myth," <i>Journal of the American Academy of Religion</i>, XLVIII(4), 531–562. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/XLVIII.4.531" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/XLVIII.4.531</a><div><br /></div><div>From the abstract:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">A mythological corpus consists of a network of <span style="background-color: #fce8b2;">myths, which are culturally-important imaginal stories</span> conveying, by means of metaphor and symbol, graphic imagery, and emotional conviction and participation, the primal, foundational accounts of the real, experienced world, and humankind's roles and relative statuses within it. Mythologies may convey the political and moral values of a culture, and provide systems of interpreting individual experience within a universal perspective, which may include the intervention of suprahuman entities, as well aspects of the natural and cultural orders. Myths may be enacted or reflected in rituals, ceremonies, and dramas, or provide materials for secondary elaborations.</blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div>Doty devotes sections to each of the attributes listed. In the section on "stories" he notes: "Myths are the <span style="background-color: #fce8b2;">narrative fictions whose plots read first at the level of their own stories, and then as projections of imminent transcendent meanings</span>."</div><div><br /></div><div>In the section commenting on the "culturally important" criterion, he also says: "If ritual, in Victor Turner's phrase, is 'quintessential custom,' myth is quintessential story."</div><div><br /></div>(<i>May 2020</i>)<br /><div><b>"A story about something significant [that] must have a powerful hold on its adherents [but] can be either true or false."</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
--- Robert Alan Segal, from M<i>yth: A Very Short Introduction</i>, Oxford University Press, 2004. More:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I propose defining myth as a story (p. 3)</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If, then, myth is to be taken here as a story, what is the
story about? For folklorists, whose position is the narrowest, myth is about
the creation of the world. . . . Outside the Bible the Oedipus ‘myth’, for
example, would actually be a legend. I do not propose being so rigid and will
instead define myth as simply a story about something significant. (p. 4)</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I propose that, to qualify as a myth, a story, which can of course express a conviction, must have a powerful hold on its adherents. But the story can be either true or false. (p.5)</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
(<i>March 2020</i>)<br /><b>“Myths are compost.”</b></div><div><b><br /></b>--- Neil Gaiman, from Reflections on Myth, <i>Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art</i>, No. 31 (WINTER 1999), pp. 75-84 (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41807920" target="_blank">https://www.jstor.org/stable/41807920</a>)<br />
<br />
He says, “They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the stories that accrete to religions as they grow. . . . And then, as the religions fall into disuse, or the stories cease to be seen as the literal truth, they become myths.” Further on: “But retelling myths is important. . . . . Instead we have to understand that even lost and forgotten myths are compost, in which stories grow.”<br />
<br />
<i>(January 2020)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“… the ways that [a country] explains itself to itself.”</b></div><div><b><br /></b>--- Neil Gaiman, Reflections on Myth, <i>Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art</i>, No. 31 (WINTER 1999), pp. 75-84 (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41807920" target="_blank">https://www.jstor.org/stable/41807920</a>):<br />
<br />
Excerpt: “I have lived here for six years, and I still do not understand it: a strange collection of home-grown myths and beliefs, the ways that America explains itself to itself.”<br />
<br />
<i>(January 2020)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“Typically, myths provide symbolic representations of cultural priorities, beliefs, and prejudices.”</b><br />
<br />
--- William G Doty, <i>Myth: A Handbook</i>, Greenwood Folklore Handbooks, 2004<br />
<br />
Excerpt:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">
Typically, myths provide symbolic representations of cultural priorities, beliefs, and prejudices</span>. They dramatize and make abstractions concrete (Girling 1993: 14); perhaps we might say that they embody important sociocultural notions in such ways that they produce charters (Bronislaw Malinowski's term) for social formation and development. They can be referred to not as equivalent to fairy tales and fantasy literature, but as enacted (performantial) narratives, that is to say, as language that does something, namely legitimizing and establishing the social realities that form real life.</blockquote>
<i>(December 2019)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“myths are the stories other people believe”</b><br />
<br />
--- Yours truly. Put another way: We have truth, other people have myth, or, We have religion, they have myths.<br />
<br />
<i>(December 2019)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“a set of narratives that acquire through specifiable historical action a significant ideological charge”</b><br />
<br />
--- Slotkin, Richard (1985). <i>The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890</i>. New York: Antheneum. p. 19; cited in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_myth" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_myth</a>.<br />
<br />
<i>(November 2019)</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>“a symbolic narrative about a series events driven, and/or suffered, by larger-than-life characters”</b><br />
<br />
--- Yours truly. In other words, I’m excluding myth in the sense of a popular belief, tradition, argument, theory or model (often portrayed as an unfounded or false notion) that has grown up around something or someone. For my purposes, myth includes those elements, but primarily tells stories through characters.<br />
<br />
<i>(November 2019)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone – especially : one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society”</b><br />
<br />
--- Merriam-Webster, definition 2(a) of myth (<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth" target="_blank">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth</a>)<br />
<br />
<i>(November 2019)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“widely shared stories that we use to make sense of the world”</b><br />
<br />
--- Yours truly<br />
<br />
<i>(November 2019)</i><br />
<br />
<b>“myth—an uncritically accepted story that provides a model to interpret current experience, disclosing the meaning of the self, the community, and the universe”</b><br />
<br />
--- Robert Jewett & John Shelton Lawrence, <i>The American Monomyth</i>, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977; from the glossary<br />
<br />
<i>(November 2019)</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>"The function of a myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short, a perceptible absence."</b></div><div><br /></div><div>--- Roland Barthes, "Myth Today" in <i>Mythologies</i> (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (1972), p. 255<br />
<br /><i>(July 2023)</i></div><div><br />
<br />
<br /></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-42389416869541626402023-06-30T15:27:00.001-07:002023-08-17T10:57:18.155-07:00Cargregores<p> I read Dan Neil's columns because I love his writing not because I'm interested in cars. This week's review of the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/2024-dodge-hornet-r-t-review-an-italian-stallion-made-for-america-ecd3ff48?st=yft0v8ppurt6b3j&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" target="_blank">2024 Dodge Hornet R/T: An Italian Stallion, Made for America</a> (WSJ, 29 Jun 2023) has a lovely passage that suggests that car companies have distinct characters<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">—evidence, perhaps, that they're <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/11/crypto-orgregore.html" target="_blank">ogregores</a>.</span></p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Here's Dan:<p></p><blockquote><p>What the R/T lacks in urbanized refinement—a lot, so so much—it makes up
for with a racy disposition, deep braking, taut-and-toned suspension,
darty steering (2.5 turns lock-to-lock) and, overall, a curiously edgy
state of tune. Oh I get it: It’s Italian.</p><p>Year to year, I drive most new models on the U.S. market. I have observed that <span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">each of the sprawling multinationals that populate the new-car cosmos</span>—VW Group, GM, Stellantis—<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">has an ineffable thing, a constancy that transcends the branding</span>. Call it the human factor. In the case of Stellantis—with products branded as Dodge, Alfa Romeo or Maserati—everything is tuned as if the product development people were nerveless 18-year-olds.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>"Transcends the branding" means, I think, that it's deeper, more ingrained, and more inherent than a marque slapped on a hood.</p><p>It's an emergent property rather than an expression of employee character since the product development people who work for Stellantis are not, in fact, "nerveless 18-year-olds," even though their cars express the daring nonchalance of indestructible teens.</p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-69737559480968579502023-06-17T16:08:00.003-07:002023-08-17T10:45:03.864-07:00Gripen's doctrine, Conway’s Law, and Ogregores<p>A recent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEX8JJ0eXL4" target="_blank">YouTube video</a> discussed what NATO could learn from Sweden's use of the Saab Gripen fighter. The aircraft was specifically designed for austere and dispersed operations, reflecting Sweden's country-specific military doctrine of highly decentralized defensive operations. However, due to this inherent association with Sweden's doctrine, it is unlikely that the Gripen could be easily adapted for NATO operations. This is an example of an organization developing a character and repertoire that is a synthesis of its individual members, tools, and protocols.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4pV4likU-L6r3lRAxfg_kc2uLStlzRCBCNMX_6WDAJ1omoYK-K6jj4vSWhXkWC7jISDPTeBF8VlIGtfps2EYH44DeqGAfdIBrYqeEZN6wUalbFsu7BcO4hBNSPJ8UzCB86jPXMPYW_vK5lXvTU9uo_JuASqr2758J2U-4INNRK2Pp9P10IA/s1024/_2cc93b9c-63e1-4efe-8fee-e0e3544337f0.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4pV4likU-L6r3lRAxfg_kc2uLStlzRCBCNMX_6WDAJ1omoYK-K6jj4vSWhXkWC7jISDPTeBF8VlIGtfps2EYH44DeqGAfdIBrYqeEZN6wUalbFsu7BcO4hBNSPJ8UzCB86jPXMPYW_vK5lXvTU9uo_JuASqr2758J2U-4INNRK2Pp9P10IA/s320/_2cc93b9c-63e1-4efe-8fee-e0e3544337f0.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCut-H-qb6JOa1eK445-iydA" target="_blank">commenter</a> pointed out that American units strongly adhere to the concept of operating from fixed facilities. While there have been some experiments with operating from highways and unprepared airstrips, the commenter observed a lack of effort in fostering a culture of decentralized operation.<p></p><p>I thought of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law" target="_blank">Conway’s Law</a>, which states that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure (h/t John Helm). These situations are circular: the systems reflect the org structure, which has itself been shaped by previous versions of the system. As a result, doctrine becomes deeply ingrained in both protocols and artifacts, thereby limiting potential changes to the doctrine itself. This is ogregore as organism.</p><p>There is a connection to <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2023/06/buds-ogregore-antagonists.html" target="_blank">Bud Light's Ogregore Antagonists</a>. Political movements typically possess fewer protocols and artifacts compared to more formal organizations. This diminishes their functioning as ogregores.</p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-28780414556652128212023-06-13T11:31:00.010-07:002023-08-17T10:57:31.369-07:00Bud Light's Ogregore Antagonists<p>My recent post, <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2023/06/budlight-ogregore-story.html" target="_blank">Bud Light Blunders: An Ogregore Story</a>, delved into a controversy surrounding personalized cans of beer sent to a transgender influencer. Bud Light's behavior resembled that of an ogregore. But was its antagonist also an ogregore?</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>Gender politics, much like the actions of Anheuser-Busch, is a collective social phenomenon. It cannot be attributed to a single charismatic leader, although that may sometimes be true for political movements. Republican-majority states have introduced legislation on gender-related healthcare, transgender athletes, and book bans. On the Left, laws have been enacted to protect transgender people from discrimination, ensure access to gender-affirming care, and challenge gender stereotypes.<p></p><p>However, I'm unsure whether these political movements can be classified as ogregores. I proposed four minimal conditions for an ogregore in a November 2022 <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/11/crypto-orgregore.html" target="_blank">blog post</a>: (1) the constituent people share a characteristic, (2) there are reciprocal social ties between members, (3) it demonstrates agency, and (4) there are observable actions and outcomes. Today, I might add a fifth condition: it demonstrates intelligence, as defined by <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289697900118?via%3Dihub" target="_blank">Gottfredson et al. (1997)</a> [endnote 1].</p><p>Let's evaluate transgender activism against these criteria:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="text-align: left;">(1) <b>Yes</b>, the constituents share a characteristic: aligned, passionate beliefs regarding the place of transgender people in society and discourse.</p><p style="text-align: left;">(2) <b>Perhaps </b>not entirely. While there may be members with one-way ties to others (e.g., following them on Twitter without being followed back), I would assume that reciprocal friendships or familial ties exist for most individuals. So, this condition is weakly met.</p><p style="text-align: left;">(3) I'm <b>uncertain</b> if all my criteria for agency (differentiated, autonomous, interactive, adaptive) are met. Movement boundaries are quite diffuse, making it difficult to determine who is included and who is not, unlike in corporations. Hence, the differentiation criterion may not be met. However, they are relatively autonomous and undoubtedly interactive and adaptive [2]. At best, this condition is weakly met.</p><p style="text-align: left;">(4) <b>Yes</b>, there are discernible actions (e.g., orchestrated outrage, boycotts) and outcomes (e.g., legislation, changes in corporate behavior [endnote 3]).</p><p style="text-align: left;">(5) <b>Yes</b>, they exhibit most, if perhaps not all, elements of intelligence provided we extend the Gottfredson definition beyond a singular processor (like a brain or an algorithm) and focus on behavior rather than assumed internal states. Political movements successfully navigate complex environments, learn from experience, solve problems, and plan. It is harder to determine if they reason or think abstractly, as those are subjective, internal states.</p></blockquote><p>Based on this analysis, I conclude that Bud's political antagonists exhibit behavior similar to ogregores, although perhaps not as explicitly as the company itself.</p><p><i>Update 15 June 2023</i></p><p>A placeholder for a more thoughtful treatment: Political movements are weak on at least two agency tests, differentiation and autonomy, and on the reciprocal social ties criterion. However, social resonance might make up for it. By that I mean that all the people in the ogregore tend to react in the same way to the same stimuli, and they reinforce each other's responses. (I was reminded of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_string" target="_blank">sympathetic strings</a> like those in the sitar.) This means that the ogregore behaves with more coherence than one might expect based on the weak explicit communication between members.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Endnotes</h4><p>[1] Intelligence, as defined by Gottfredson et al., was paraphrased by <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712" target="_blank">Bubeck et al. (2023)</a> as "a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience."</p><p>[2] As I mentioned in a previous <a href="https://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2022/11/crypto-orgregore.html" target="_blank">blog post</a>, political or social movements have less internal coherence compared to formally organized groups like companies. They are even less coherent than paradigmatic <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/3619" target="_blank">List & Pettit group agents</a> such as courts or governing bodies like the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, which are the Federal Reserve's <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomc.htm" target="_blank">interest rate-setting bodies</a>.</p><p>[3] In a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/executives-quiet-their-sustainability-talk-on-earnings-calls-amid-growing-culture-war-3a358c1f?st=s2wyg3fuotfg8vg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" target="_blank">recent article</a>, the WSJ noted a decline in mentions of social-impact initiatives during earnings calls.</p><div><br /></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-31821725266572483222023-06-02T15:16:00.004-07:002023-07-16T16:02:19.130-07:00Bud Light Blunders: An Ogregore Story<p>I’m trying to understand how ogregores (greater-than-human techno-social entities that affect our lives) behave. The recent controversy involving Bud Light and a transgender Instagram influencer clearly demonstrates a pattern: when companies perform well, their leaders take the credit, but when they falter, blame falls on lower-level employees and the overall corporate structure. Given that successes often garner more media attention than failures, the role of leadership in corporate actions tends to be overstated. To understand the collective roots of corporate action, one must delve deeper.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>The Wall Street Journal summarized <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/bud-light-boycott-sales-dylan-mulvaney-6c23bb86?st=2fsnvpxsxo7dxhe&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" target="_blank">its story</a> as follows: “The brewing giant behind the brand became a case study in how not to handle a culture-war storm.” For coverage from The New York Times, refer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/business/bud-light-dylan-mulvaney.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/us/politics/bud-light-boycott-politics-republicans.html" target="_blank">here</a>. The coverage focused on various executives and largely ignored the internal dynamics behind the beer company's behavior.<p></p><p>The plot goeth thusly: Bud Light marketers sent a personalized can of Bud Light to transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who promoted a Bud Light contest to her 1.8 million Instagram followers on April 1st. This led to a firestorm which Anheuser-Busch did not address for two weeks. It included calls for brand boycotts and buycotts; a more than 28% year-on-year drop in Bud Light sales; bomb threats at several Anheuser-Busch facilities and wholesale locations; confrontations of Anheuser-Busch employees by irate individuals; and protests by musicians Kid Rock and Travis Tritt. A belated Anheuser-Busch statement only aggravated the situation, leading to the replacement of the Bud Light marketing head and the elimination of her manager’s role. Senior leadership blamed the marketing team for the Mulvaney incident and denied any knowledge of the decision.</p><p>However, the Mulvaney promotion was in line with the company's long-standing corporate policy. Bud Light has sponsored LGBT rights groups and Pride events for decades. Its owner, Anheuser-Busch, has repeatedly stated its support for LGBT employee inclusion. Transgender track star Cecé Telfer even featured in a 2021 ad campaign for Michelob Ultra well before the June 2022 promotion of Alissa Heinerscheid, the ousted marketing head, to manage the Bud Light brand.</p><p>The Mulvaney incident was controversial due to the political, social, and economic context, not specific marketing decisions or organizational structures. Transgender issues have become a hot-button issue for social conservatives in recent years. The Bud Light brand has been in trouble for a while. Heiderscheid mentioned she was hired to reverse a long-term decline by targeting young consumers. Bud Light’s market share is particularly high in rural and conservative regions, particularly among men, while its market share in predominantly liberal urban areas has been shrinking. Anheuser-Busch's political contributions to Republican campaigns led some LGBTQ rights supporters to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anheuser-buschs-political-donations-has-stonewall-inn-banning-some-beers/" target="_blank">boycott</a> the company two years ago.</p><p>I'm fond of Manuel DeLanda's substitution test (a term I use, not his): an organization is the relevant actor in an explanation if replacing individuals in specific roles within its hierarchical structure does not alter the organization's policies or day-to-day routines (DeLanda, <i>A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity</i>, 2006:37) In this case, swapping any Anheuser-Busch employees wouldn't have changed the company's policies, nor would the unfolding of the story have been different.</p><p>I'm not implying that executive decisions are never crucial in actions. For instances like France under Napoleon, or Apple under Steve Jobs, the substitution test would fail. However, I am suggesting that the roles of executives are often overemphasized by news coverage, which is largely written by and for humans.</p><p>Observable egregore behaviors in this case include marketing, public and private communications, and tracking metrics:</p><p><b>Marketing strategy</b>: This can be inferred from actions. Prior to the controversy, Bud Light sponsored LGBT rights groups; afterward, it was included for the first time in Anheuser-Busch’s long-standing sponsorship of a veterans organization. Although marketing tactics are decided by specific employees, and different ones may choose different paths, I don't believe this undermines an egregore explanation. Organizations hire individuals and structure their hierarchy to align with their strategies and intended tactics. The strategy to target urban progressives preceded Alissa Heinerscheid's tenure. Anyone fitting her job description would have made similar decisions. She was just unlucky that Mulvaney was the butterfly whose fluttering brought down a storm on her head.</p><p><b>Crisis response</b>: Most large organizations have established protocols for crises, developed well in advance. The CEO may decide what to do on a particular day, but this is informed by a staff process. In this case, the public response was slow. It did happen, though, taking various forms such as company statements, CEO interviews, reorganization, HR action, and meetings with key stakeholders.</p><p><b>Commercial metrics</b>: These include sales, ad spending, stock price, and <a href="https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/tweet_viz/tweet_app/" target="_blank">social media sentiment</a>.</p><p><i>Update 7 June 2023: </i></p><p>A <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-new-cause-dodging-the-culture-wars-73e52cf3?st=xddjnjmbrt801jx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" target="_blank"><i>Wall Street Journal</i> article</a> about corporate responses to social media storms sheds light on how companies determine their reactions.</p><p>PPG Industries, a Pittsburgh-based paint maker, “uses an internal scoring system to determine if, and when, it is judicious for the company to comment on contentious issues that may upset some of its customers and employees, or impact its brands.” Executives, including legal and HR reps, meet regularly to weigh the merits and drawbacks of taking a stand. If the executives decide to comment, they deliberate on their messaging. In a similar vein, Upwork, which runs a freelancer marketplace, uses a series of questions developed by the leadership team over several years to help decide whether to weigh in. They include how central the topic is to the business and its customers, and whether customers would expect the company to have an opinion.</p><p>It’s clear that protocols are used to develop positions and decide actions. This is a group effort, not a decision made by a solitary leader.</p><div><i>Update 14 June 2023:</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/bud-light-modelo-best-selling-beer-6a4d6b27?st=pfuljg2w09kcngo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" target="_blank"><i>Wall Street Journal</i> reported</a> on June 14, 2023 that "Bud Light’s sales were down about 24% in the week ended June 3 compared with the same week last year, according to Bump Williams. Other Anheuser-Busch brands also have taken a hit, including Budweiser and Michelob Ultra." An Anheuser-Busch distributor who doesn’t carry Modelo is quoted as saying, “Our year is screwed.” The article includes a telling chart:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNR2Ep7WEhOI6tUn84jQR52QSPG6JCJG3ZoG5jbQJa-H9DZ4jbsVPo0kLDieGS_qYm9gdbr4sv4x3ZqeohYKqM5EQYjGa9pzW2T-hqObabui6zqOmCZQ5p3iUmL7z_3iGEEJMXEjN_UyxLCWe1UfLAX97QQwk8BUw2WwqouWc3nrA0zlLr7g" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="560" data-original-width="684" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjNR2Ep7WEhOI6tUn84jQR52QSPG6JCJG3ZoG5jbQJa-H9DZ4jbsVPo0kLDieGS_qYm9gdbr4sv4x3ZqeohYKqM5EQYjGa9pzW2T-hqObabui6zqOmCZQ5p3iUmL7z_3iGEEJMXEjN_UyxLCWe1UfLAX97QQwk8BUw2WwqouWc3nrA0zlLr7g=w400-h328" width="400" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-77847702608929673572023-05-28T16:32:00.009-07:002023-07-17T16:16:27.245-07:00TED Talks: What would Socrates say?<p>My colleague Paul Diduch recently shared the <a href="https://youtu.be/gMsQO5u7-NQ" target="_blank">video</a> of a TED Talk by Imran Chaudhri and asked “What Would Socrates Say?”</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a>The TED YouTube channel’s breathless blurb wasn’t a good start. It touts an “exclusive preview of groundbreaking, unreleased technology” and an explanation of “how it could change the way we interact with tech and the world around us.” This was a blatant company pitch that reminded me of the demo work I used to do for a software company. Marketing, sure; prophetic, not so much. (The reassuring and terrifying reality is that no predictions, especially about technology futures, are accurate.) It didn’t help that Chaudhri didn’t seem comfortable mouthing his speech, either.<p></p><p>A couple of months earlier, Paul had led a conversation about the <a href="https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/myths/phaedrus.htm" target="_blank">parable of Thamus and Theuth</a> in Plato’s dialogue <a href="https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1636" target="_blank"><i>Phaedrus</i></a> in our CU Boulder tech & mythology group. The exchange between Thamus and Theuth is often taken as a salutary example of dangerous overpromising by inventors and the need for government to control innovation. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think the dialogue addresses those points in any depth.)</p><p>TED Talks in general, and this one in particular, illustrate technoworriers’ worst fears. Reflecting on Chaudhri’s presentation, I imagine</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Socrates being contemptuous of a carefully crafted, tightly scripted speech;</li><li>Plato detesting the prospect of technology innovation he couldn’t control.</li></ul><p></p><p>As for myself, I’m deeply skeptical about calling something “good AI in action,” <a href="https://youtu.be/gMsQO5u7-NQ?t=492" target="_blank">as Chaudhri did</a>, suggesting we can easily distinguish between good and bad consequences, not to mention reach a consensus on the definitions of “good” and “bad.”</p><p>When it came to writing, Plato’s paradigmatic inventor Theuth claims that it would make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories—a claim that Thamus contests and Socrates debunks, arguing that dialogue is the path to wisdom not writing and speeches. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMsQO5u7-NQ&t=628s" target="_blank">Chaudhri channels</a> Theuth with slogans like “Your AI effectively becomes an ever-evolving, personalized form of memory.”</p><p>Similarly cringe-worthy, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMsQO5u7-NQ&t=673s" target="_blank">Chaudhri asserts</a>, “But what’s cool is my AI knows what's best for me, but I'm in total control.” Chaudhri is the caricature-Theuth of critiques of technophilia such as Neil Postman’s <a href="https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/FRL117/01_cours/Post1.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Technopoly</i></a> (1992).</p><p>Paul wondered how the average viewer or listener would receive this TED Talk. How critical are they? What does audience applause signify—agreement, hope, praise? Do they buy into such unreflective hype?</p><p>I can’t claim expertise on the demographics of TED attendees or TED Talk viewers. My guess is that the audience in the room at TED and the YouTube viewer are different. For both, however, the level of criticality is low. These experiences are not about critical analysis, so it’s not an appropriate requirement.</p><p>TED attendees, typically affluent executives paying <a href="https://conferences.ted.com/ted2023?ted-conf" target="_blank">$10,000 for a 5-day conference</a>, see themselves as philanthropic innovators. Many of them also value wealth but frame it as “doing well by doing good.” In short: New York Times meets Silicon Valley. For these people, TED is like going to church, or perhaps better, an annual religious revival. The talks are sermons that provide affirmation, hope, celebration, encouragement, community. Their applause endorses and expresses those feelings. </p><p>Those who watch the videos are like mid-level managers reading self-help business books. They aren’t as engaged with the material as conference attendees, but they’re also looking for encouragement and validation. For them, TED Talk videos are like scrolling through inspirational social media.</p><p>I suspect that while the general audience may feel some affinity with the ideas presented, it’s not a deep-seated conviction, any more than someone who goes to midnight mass once a year on Christmas Eve buys into Catholic dogma. There is probably a weak affiliation with the ideas expressed. They’d be open to criticism without feeling personally attacked, the way elites attending TED might.</p><p>The live TED attendees, however, probably align more strongly with the ideologies presented, given that these align with their identity and self-image. They subscribe to “Doing well by doing good tech.” I suspect that many of them are aware of the risks and downsides of new tech and are bothered by it in their quieter moments. However, they probably feel that the risk can be managed, especially if conscientious people like them are involved. (Something like Sam Altman supposedly said about managing AI.) </p><p>I’ll go back to the religious analogy. Ordinary churchgoers don't constantly grapple with their faith; they attend services without much introspection. Pastors and religious leaders, on the other hand, often struggle with doubt, like Mother Theresa’s <a href="https://time.com/4126238/mother-teresas-crisis-of-faith/" target="_blank">crisis of faith</a> and <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-13321-001" target="_blank">CG Jung’s father</a>. It’s not just religion, though. </p><p>This phenomenon occurs in most, if not all, fields. The best informed are most aware of the feet of clay. One can see it in cynicism about the scientific method—e.g., the <a href="https://www.econtalk.org/adam-mastroianni-on-peer-review-and-the-academic-kitchen/" target="_blank">flaws of peer review</a>—among scientists, and about democracy among politicians.</p><p><br /></p>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5688599.post-90721500650823861452023-04-16T19:22:00.002-07:002023-04-16T19:22:38.652-07:00Heptapod Notes<p>I was adding text to notes I had taken about a podcast recently. I ended up inserting text rather than appending it. I realized that I wanted a note that did not have a beginning and an end. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>I wanted a note that was circular, without a top or bottom. I had been listening to the soundtrack of the movie Arrival, and I realized that i wanted a note-taking app designed by Heptapods.</p><p>Heptapod writing is circular without a beginning and an end. I wanted a note taking app where the writing surface was a circular ribbon. This would allow me to add information anywhere on the loop, without having to scroll up and down through a traditional document. A quirk of the heptapod writing system is that one must know how a sentence will end before one begins to write it. I can’t do that, but I do want to think about a piece of writing as a whole, without a beginning or end.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh08oHLI5bV0Z2gOxk1GuJi46RTQ86GuuVEsrrjrEdEhU3XxaYI8Sv7e3c2n2EgN74k9U2-6ZLnoRv3gqfrUVV8GniQDMurLeqZq9CeEmBzBNDpd8d39qZtjsD_f1V0W6vg40B2SypEtuyEJ336mQUYrmBnphDKTUZsCUOGRN9mTxxyOVnbwQ/s640/squid-ink-letter.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="640" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh08oHLI5bV0Z2gOxk1GuJi46RTQ86GuuVEsrrjrEdEhU3XxaYI8Sv7e3c2n2EgN74k9U2-6ZLnoRv3gqfrUVV8GniQDMurLeqZq9CeEmBzBNDpd8d39qZtjsD_f1V0W6vg40B2SypEtuyEJ336mQUYrmBnphDKTUZsCUOGRN9mTxxyOVnbwQ/w400-h166/squid-ink-letter.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from <a href="https://fsmedia.imgix.net/00/78/c3/25/a44a/42a1/9551/cd62c57419f0/squid-ink-letter.gif">fsmedia.imgix.net</a></td></tr></tbody></table><p>By the “If I can think it, somebody's done it” rule, something like this already exists. It shouldn’t be hard, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming" target="_blank">small matter of programming</a>. Word processing documents already give us an infinitely extensible sheet of paper, but it has a top and bottom. I want a circular note-taking app, so just connect the bottom of the data structure to the top.</p><div><br /></div>JP (Pierre) de Vrieshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02311009024575927588noreply@blogger.com0