Posts Tagged ‘civil discourse’
“Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower”*…
Dan Davies took a ride in a silver machine…
A while ago, I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on a Google DeepMind project called “The Habermas Machine”. It’s a really intriguing use of the LLM technology – basically, you take a lot of people who disagree with each other and ask them what they think about an issue. Then you feed their answers into a model, which tries to produce a statement of minimal agreement that all of them might sign up to. They score the extent to which they do agree with it (which trains the model), and explain what it is that they don’t like about the statement. This second round allows the model to come up with another, better version, which also clarifies to the participants what the other side’s reasons are for disagreeing with them.
It’s called “The Habermas Machine” because it’s meant to, loosely speaking, do a similar job to Jurgen Habermas’ “Ideal Speech Environment,” In tests, there seems to be decent evidence that not only is the machine better than a human moderator at coming up with consensus statements, but that the machine-moderated process leads to more convergence of opinions among the actual participants. (I think I might have predicted this; the model obviously has a “flat” affect, and unlike a human being, isn’t always leaking clues from its intonation and body language about what it really thinks of the participants. That might suggest that as LLMs get better at simulating human responses, they might be worse for this purpose!)
There’s really a lot to say and think about this. But it’s Friday [as he wrote this] and I’m a facetious person, so instead I’m going to share the notes I’ve been making ever since seeing the presentation on which other philosophers and social theorists might also benefit from having machines made out of them.
The Giddens Machine – in accordance with the principle of double hermeneutics, it’s the Habermas Machine, but only for reaching agreement on interpretations of Habermas.
The Goffman Machine – after your side lost on the Habermas Machine, it comes along and generates a set of reasons why you shouldn’t feel so bad about that and should come back for another go.
The Bourdieu Machine – you type your views into it, and then it repeats them with slight and subtle adjustments to make you sound more middle class
The Fourcade/Healy Machine – it gives you a score, then makes you do the work of finding out how to change your views so as to increase your score. Finding equilibrium for the machine is your job now.
The Gambetta Machine – instead of finding a consensus, it selects the most awful version of each conflicting view, and then everyone switches to that in order to show how committed they are.
The Austin Machine – instead of telling the machine “I agree with this statement”, you have to tick a box saying “I hereby agree with this statement”.
The Grice Machine – like the Habermas one, but via conversational implicature it aims to create consensus among all the views that you haven’t expressed rather than the ones you have.
The Derrida Machine – everyone keeps asserting the same statements, but the AI brings them into agreement by changing the meaning of the words themselves.
The Crenshaw Machine – in each round the machine finds a new issue to divide up the group in a different way. Equilibrium is reached when everyone realises they’re on their own and need to get along with each other anyway…
A wry exploration of the possibilities of AI: “Fully automated social theory,” from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social
(Image above: source)
* Alan Kay
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As we delegate discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the first production model of the DeLorean sports car rolled off the assembly line at the Dunmurry factory, located a few miles from Belfast City Centre in Northern Ireland.
“Two countries separated by the same language”*…
The contentious times in which we live are perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the language we use… or perhaps better said, in the way we use language. MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication is here to help…
In our highly polarized society, it’s not surprising that we see significant differences in how words are used by those with opposing political and cultural viewpoints. The Bridging Dictionary, an interactive web-based prototype developed by MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication, identifies the different way words and phrases are used by different constituencies and–similar to a traditional dictionary or thesaurus–gives meanings and also attempts to suggest less polarized (bridging) alternatives.
Utilizing natural language processing, the Bridging Dictionary compares how two media outlets on the opposite sides of the US political spectrum–foxnews.com on the right, and msnbc.com on the left–differ in the meanings assigned to the same words or phrases. This involved gathering approximately 18,000 articles from foxnews.com and 13,000 from msnbc.com published since 2021. The content was then split into millions of sentences for analysis. The first analysis measured the differences in usage frequency and sentiment. For those terms that show significant differences, a further qualitative comparison was done using a large language model (LLM) to describe the way the usage varies between the two outlets. The LLM was then prompted to provide evidence for its conclusions by citing specific references, as well as alternative “bridging” terms…
How words common in American political discourse are used differently across the political divide: “Bridging Dictionary.”
Learn more about its current challenges, and possible future potential at (CCC advisor and former CBS News head) Andrew Heyward’s post— then explore it.
* Bertrand Russell, speaking of the difference between England and America, though the observation is only too apt here. (Russell may well have been paraphrasing Oscar Wilde…)
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As we watch our tongues, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that The Disney Channel premiered Frenemies, an anthology TV film that follows three pairs of teenage friends who go from friends to enemies and back again. The ensemble cast featured Zendaya (who went on to win two Emmys for her leading role in the HBO series Euphoria, and then to success in features like Dune, Spiderman, and Challengers) and Bella Thorne (who has continued to work successfully in television and film, and has authored successful novels, but is perhaps best known these days as the first person to earn $1 million in the first 24 hours of joining the platform OnlyFans in 2020).
“The press is a blind old cat yelling on a treadmill”*…
Well, in any case, it’s been a trying time for journalism. What’s next? The estimable Nieman Lab polled 21 experts…
Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. At the end of a trying 2024, here’s what they had to say…
They’re all eminently worth reviewing, but your correspondent would call out a few:
Nick Petrie: “The year newsrooms tackle their structural issues“
Many publishers remain anchored to hierarchies born in the print era, with editorial at the center and product and technology bolted on as afterthoughts…
Ben Smith: “Back to the Bundle“
If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will…
Alice Marwick: “The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy“
The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world… 2024 was the year “disinformation” outlasted its usefulness. Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world…
And on a more positive (albeit, more distant) note, Adam Thomas: “Impact investment enters the chat“
Somewhere in the future, beyond 2025, a flourishing landscape of adequately financed, equitable media enterprises will deliver impactful content, serve diverse communities, and achieve financial independence…
These and the other provocative pieces at “Predictions for Journalism, 2025,” from @niemanlab.org.
(Image above: source)
* Ben Hecht (from Erik Dorn, his first novel, written while he was a journalist covering the aftermath of World War I in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News)
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As we contemplate civil discourse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1768 that the first volume of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published by its Edinburgh-based founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell. It relatively quickly attained a reputation for excellence in its summarization of knowledge. It prospered in print until the digital revolution and the advent of, first Encarta (which decimated print encyclopedia sales), then Wikipedia (which has much broader and often deeper coverage than a print encyclopedia can, and which has continued to improve its reliability to a level approaching that of EB).
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”*…
In times like these, it’s all too easy to resort to (or indeed, to relapse into) cynicism. In an excerpt from his recent book Hope for Cynics, the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, Jamil Zaki, offers an alternative…
… Over the last few years, I’ve met dozens of self-proclaimed cynics. Besides the obvious contempt for people, most have something else in common: a harsh pride. It may feel better to believe in people than to be cynical, they say. But we can’t go around thinking whatever we want, just like we can’t pretend tiramisu is a health food. Cynics might live hard lives, but that’s just the price of being right.
If cynicism is a sign of intelligence, then someone who wants to appear smart might put it on, like wearing a suit to a job interview. And indeed, when researchers ask people to appear as competent as possible, they respond by picking fights, criticizing people, and removing friendly language from emails—performing the gloomiest version of themselves to impress others.
Most of us valorize people who don’t like people. But it turns out cynicism is not a sign of wisdom, and more often it’s the opposite. In studies of over 200,000 individuals across thirty nations, cynics scored less well on tasks that measure cognitive ability, problem-solving, and mathematical skill. Cynics aren’t socially sharp, either, performing worse than non-cynics at identifying liars. This means 85 percent of us are also terrible at picking lie detectors. We choose Colleens to get to the bottom of things when we should join team Sue.
In other words, cynicism looks smart, but isn’t. Yet the stereotype of the happy, gullible simpleton and the wise, bitter misanthrope lives on, stubborn enough that scientists have named it “the cynical genius illusion.”
If cynicism is a pathogen, we can create resistance to it with skepticism: a reluctance to believe claims without evidence. Cynicism and skepticism are often confused for each other, but they couldn’t be more different. Cynicism is a lack of faith in people; skepticism is a lack of faith in our assumptions. Cynics imagine humanity is awful; skeptics gather information about who they can trust. They hold on to beliefs lightly and learn quickly…
Timely advice: “Instead of Being Cynical, Try Becoming Skeptical,” from @zakijam in @behscientist.
* Oscar Wilde
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As we reframe, we might recall that it was on this date (which is, by the way, Fibonacci Day) in 1644 that John Milton, best remembered, of course, for his epic poem Paradise Lost, published Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. A prose polemic opposing licensing and censorship, it is among history’s most influential and impassioned philosophical defenses of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression. The full text is here.
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”*…
From Chris Freeland the Internet Archive, an important new report…
In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.
• The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
• Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.
When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (download) aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future…
“Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record,” from @chrisfreeland and @internetarchive. Do read the full report.
* Marcus Garvey
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As we husband our heritage, we might recall that it was on this date in 1665 that the oldest continuously-published newspaper in English, the Oxford Gazette, was first published. The following year, its name was changed to (it’s current title) the London Gazette, currently shortened to just “the Gazette.”
No longer a conventional newspaper (covering general news), the Gazette is one of the official journals of record or government gazettes of the Government of the United Kingdom, and the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published. It has become a crucial British archive.
His Majesty’s Stationery Office took over the publication of the Gazette in 1889. Publication of the Gazette was transferred to the private sector in 2006, under government supervision, when HMSO was sold and renamed The Stationery Office. You can read the Gazette here.
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