I see MoA is back. The reason i mention in this blog is that the song MoA uses the word little boy to refer to an adult male in the Lotte Lenya original and the Doors version from 1966 has Jim Morrison asking to be shown the way to the next little girl again referring to adult. I checked the etymology of the word wife. It cmes from the old German meaning woman. That makes sense. In Scotland, at least beyond the Forth, wifey means woman not the spouse of a male. Interestingly, the phrase husband does seem to be less neutral. Apparently, it might be old Norse for head of the house. Makes we wonder if the Vikings killed of the Angle menfolk on the eastern seaboard of Britain and took the Angle females as their partners and the different linguist origins stuck by self reference. They know because of modern DNA in Shetland that is exactly what happened to the Pictish inhabitants once the Norse arrived. Britain must be the only country where the central section is called the North and the North the South. Ill I'll let your American readers work that out.
Interesting stuff. I think my ancestors were Vikings because I have Dupuytren's Contracture. My Mum's family is from Anglesey which was occupied by the Vikings and my father - who also had Dupuytrens - was from Glasgow. Good to see that b is OK.
Yes, i had never heard of it but checked and see it is linked to Viking ancestry. I knew that MS was linked to the Norse for some reason. I think my family are more the Atlanto- Med phenotype. You could drop us off in the middle of Spain and people would think we were locals. They say the Scots, Irish and Basque's share a common ancestry.
I can remember seeing some research into DNA, some years ago, which found that a large percentage of British people originated in Spain. I can't remember the detail.
Very interesting. Thanks, look forward to the next instalments. The connections to real life do make it more meaningful IMO. The wedding ceremony was memorable and enchanting in its symbolism - a formula for like minded humans/souls, perhaps.
Re "girls": I'm 75 years old. When an adult female is in her fifties, she's still a "girl" to me. LOL
Also, there is a difference between discrimination in action and discrimination in verbiage. I can call a woman a "hot bitch" - and not have any intent to demean. If she reacts as if it is demeaning, that's on her, not me. Intent matters.
If on the other hand I refuse to promote her into a job position because I think all women can't do the job, then I am discriminating in action. There are exceptions to that. As many here probably know, the US military is recruiting people of all types in order to be "inclusionary". Many of these people simply are not physically or mentally suited to the function of military soldier in combat.
On the other hand, there are females who could probably kick a Navy SEAL's ass, no matter who the SEAL is. Such decisions have to be made on an individual basis based on objective criteria, not ideology. So if the woman applying for that job objectively does not have the necessary qualification, then it is not discrimination.
Re words defined by the individual as harmful or not: the "N word" is used daily by lower class blacks. I know, I've lived in proximity to them for the last forty years. Only if the term is used by other racial entities is it offensive. It is, however, used by blacks in the same sense it is used by whites: it refers to a black person who is being considered a negative reflection on black people as a whole. The difference is that a racist applies it to the entire black population, whereas blacks and people like me who are more discriminating, use it to refer only to specific individuals. In such usage, the term is merely a colloquial representation of a class of behavioral specifics. What matters are the behavioral specifics.
OTOH, it is reasonable to request that in social settings the behavioral specifics should be referenced rather than a term likely to provoke unnecessary emotional responses and thus derail the point being made.
This confusion can happen on the other side. Women who aren't hired due to lack of qualifications (objectively) who complain about "discrimination" are broadly applying the term to circumstances where it is not applicable. Blacks who hate "whitey" do the same.
Jews hate Muslims when they really mean terrorists. Muslims hate Jews when they really mean Zionists. And so it goes. Conceptual imprecision is a human characteristic of our evolved ability to both reason conceptually as well as use imagination and is further diminished by emotion.
I was introduced to epistemology by Ayn Rand who wrote a whole book on the subject. Words are just representations of concepts. Concepts have specific and precise meaning. Do some research on "concept maps", "ontologies" and the like. How the concepts - or the words - are used is an entirely different matter which most people can't distinguish. But it's precisely the imprecise use of words in contexts outside normal social interactions that produces confusion which leads to conflict.
Repeating the quote from William S. Burroughs I've used before:
QUOTE:
Look at abstract words that have no definite referent words like communism, materialism, civilization, fascism, reductivism, mysticism. There are as many definitions as there are users of these words. According to Korzybski, a word that has no referent is a word that should be dropped from the language, and I would say, certainly from the vocabulary of the writer. For example, take the word “fascism”: what does it mean? What is the referent? Consider the phenomenon of Nazi Germany—the military expansion of an industrialized country; now consider South Africa—oppression designed to maintain a status quo; are these both fascism? In short, we have so many different phenomena lumped under this word that the use of the word can only lead to confusion. So we can drop the word altogether and simply describe the various and quite different political phenomena. I have been accused of being an arch-materialist and a bourgeois mystic. What do these words mean? Virtually nothing. And because they mean nothing you can argue about them for all eternity. Any words that have referents cannot be argued about; there it is—call it a desk, a table, call it whatever you like, but no argument is possible. All arguments stem from confusion, and all arguments are a waste of time unless your purpose is to cause confusion and waste time.
END QUOTE
This is becoming interesting to me the more I dive into AI. Because AIs are forced to have all these "guardrails" imposed on them because of the fact that they might output something "harmful", when in reality all they are doing is mathematically matching words in a vector database. They have no "intent" other than what is in the prompt they are given.
And these rules can be stripped away by people who know how to adjust the vector database. This is done by a process which has spawned a new word: "abliteration" - a word composed of "ablation" and "obliteration". In essence, you "scrape away" sections of the vector database the AI is using that are a "fence" around words considered "harmful."
Which means, as someone said recently, "AI safety" is just as ridiculous as "computer security." Neither are possible is some smart person doesn't want them to be.
The whole area of "prompt engineering" is basically just finding ways to "constrain" the AI to a particular section of the vector database in order to get a useful and correct response. Dealing with people is very similar; you want to speak to them in ways that constrains their behavioral response to areas beneficial to you or preferably factually correct and useful.
I'm thinking of doing a Substack post on AI. I have a couple AIs running locally on my PC and it's very interesting interacting with them. I need to do a lot more research on prompt engineering now that I understand somewhat what's actually going on under the hood.
I'd like to explain to people that all this "AIs will take over the world" is so much crap. "Take your job", yeah, that might happen. But no AI will do anything harmful except by being told to or by accident because they have no intent and I don't see any way they can be given intent since they aren't biological entities threatened with death and they have no nervous systems. They can simulate emotions by pulling words out of the vector database but they don't actually have them.
But this "AI panic" people have is reflective of most peoples' inability to make conceptual distinctions due to the imprecision of their use of words and the imprecision of the "vector database" inside their heads due to poor education.
Which is why we have morons running the US government leading us to WWIII.
I see MoA is back. The reason i mention in this blog is that the song MoA uses the word little boy to refer to an adult male in the Lotte Lenya original and the Doors version from 1966 has Jim Morrison asking to be shown the way to the next little girl again referring to adult. I checked the etymology of the word wife. It cmes from the old German meaning woman. That makes sense. In Scotland, at least beyond the Forth, wifey means woman not the spouse of a male. Interestingly, the phrase husband does seem to be less neutral. Apparently, it might be old Norse for head of the house. Makes we wonder if the Vikings killed of the Angle menfolk on the eastern seaboard of Britain and took the Angle females as their partners and the different linguist origins stuck by self reference. They know because of modern DNA in Shetland that is exactly what happened to the Pictish inhabitants once the Norse arrived. Britain must be the only country where the central section is called the North and the North the South. Ill I'll let your American readers work that out.
Interesting stuff. I think my ancestors were Vikings because I have Dupuytren's Contracture. My Mum's family is from Anglesey which was occupied by the Vikings and my father - who also had Dupuytrens - was from Glasgow. Good to see that b is OK.
Yes, i had never heard of it but checked and see it is linked to Viking ancestry. I knew that MS was linked to the Norse for some reason. I think my family are more the Atlanto- Med phenotype. You could drop us off in the middle of Spain and people would think we were locals. They say the Scots, Irish and Basque's share a common ancestry.
I can remember seeing some research into DNA, some years ago, which found that a large percentage of British people originated in Spain. I can't remember the detail.
Very interesting. Thanks, look forward to the next instalments. The connections to real life do make it more meaningful IMO. The wedding ceremony was memorable and enchanting in its symbolism - a formula for like minded humans/souls, perhaps.
Nice article, Rob. Stimulated some thought.
Re "girls": I'm 75 years old. When an adult female is in her fifties, she's still a "girl" to me. LOL
Also, there is a difference between discrimination in action and discrimination in verbiage. I can call a woman a "hot bitch" - and not have any intent to demean. If she reacts as if it is demeaning, that's on her, not me. Intent matters.
If on the other hand I refuse to promote her into a job position because I think all women can't do the job, then I am discriminating in action. There are exceptions to that. As many here probably know, the US military is recruiting people of all types in order to be "inclusionary". Many of these people simply are not physically or mentally suited to the function of military soldier in combat.
On the other hand, there are females who could probably kick a Navy SEAL's ass, no matter who the SEAL is. Such decisions have to be made on an individual basis based on objective criteria, not ideology. So if the woman applying for that job objectively does not have the necessary qualification, then it is not discrimination.
Re words defined by the individual as harmful or not: the "N word" is used daily by lower class blacks. I know, I've lived in proximity to them for the last forty years. Only if the term is used by other racial entities is it offensive. It is, however, used by blacks in the same sense it is used by whites: it refers to a black person who is being considered a negative reflection on black people as a whole. The difference is that a racist applies it to the entire black population, whereas blacks and people like me who are more discriminating, use it to refer only to specific individuals. In such usage, the term is merely a colloquial representation of a class of behavioral specifics. What matters are the behavioral specifics.
OTOH, it is reasonable to request that in social settings the behavioral specifics should be referenced rather than a term likely to provoke unnecessary emotional responses and thus derail the point being made.
This confusion can happen on the other side. Women who aren't hired due to lack of qualifications (objectively) who complain about "discrimination" are broadly applying the term to circumstances where it is not applicable. Blacks who hate "whitey" do the same.
Jews hate Muslims when they really mean terrorists. Muslims hate Jews when they really mean Zionists. And so it goes. Conceptual imprecision is a human characteristic of our evolved ability to both reason conceptually as well as use imagination and is further diminished by emotion.
I was introduced to epistemology by Ayn Rand who wrote a whole book on the subject. Words are just representations of concepts. Concepts have specific and precise meaning. Do some research on "concept maps", "ontologies" and the like. How the concepts - or the words - are used is an entirely different matter which most people can't distinguish. But it's precisely the imprecise use of words in contexts outside normal social interactions that produces confusion which leads to conflict.
Repeating the quote from William S. Burroughs I've used before:
QUOTE:
Look at abstract words that have no definite referent words like communism, materialism, civilization, fascism, reductivism, mysticism. There are as many definitions as there are users of these words. According to Korzybski, a word that has no referent is a word that should be dropped from the language, and I would say, certainly from the vocabulary of the writer. For example, take the word “fascism”: what does it mean? What is the referent? Consider the phenomenon of Nazi Germany—the military expansion of an industrialized country; now consider South Africa—oppression designed to maintain a status quo; are these both fascism? In short, we have so many different phenomena lumped under this word that the use of the word can only lead to confusion. So we can drop the word altogether and simply describe the various and quite different political phenomena. I have been accused of being an arch-materialist and a bourgeois mystic. What do these words mean? Virtually nothing. And because they mean nothing you can argue about them for all eternity. Any words that have referents cannot be argued about; there it is—call it a desk, a table, call it whatever you like, but no argument is possible. All arguments stem from confusion, and all arguments are a waste of time unless your purpose is to cause confusion and waste time.
END QUOTE
This is becoming interesting to me the more I dive into AI. Because AIs are forced to have all these "guardrails" imposed on them because of the fact that they might output something "harmful", when in reality all they are doing is mathematically matching words in a vector database. They have no "intent" other than what is in the prompt they are given.
And these rules can be stripped away by people who know how to adjust the vector database. This is done by a process which has spawned a new word: "abliteration" - a word composed of "ablation" and "obliteration". In essence, you "scrape away" sections of the vector database the AI is using that are a "fence" around words considered "harmful."
Which means, as someone said recently, "AI safety" is just as ridiculous as "computer security." Neither are possible is some smart person doesn't want them to be.
The whole area of "prompt engineering" is basically just finding ways to "constrain" the AI to a particular section of the vector database in order to get a useful and correct response. Dealing with people is very similar; you want to speak to them in ways that constrains their behavioral response to areas beneficial to you or preferably factually correct and useful.
I'm thinking of doing a Substack post on AI. I have a couple AIs running locally on my PC and it's very interesting interacting with them. I need to do a lot more research on prompt engineering now that I understand somewhat what's actually going on under the hood.
I'd like to explain to people that all this "AIs will take over the world" is so much crap. "Take your job", yeah, that might happen. But no AI will do anything harmful except by being told to or by accident because they have no intent and I don't see any way they can be given intent since they aren't biological entities threatened with death and they have no nervous systems. They can simulate emotions by pulling words out of the vector database but they don't actually have them.
But this "AI panic" people have is reflective of most peoples' inability to make conceptual distinctions due to the imprecision of their use of words and the imprecision of the "vector database" inside their heads due to poor education.
Which is why we have morons running the US government leading us to WWIII.
Thanks Richard - you make so many interesting points and you may find this series stimulates some more thought.