Category: link dump

Ignoratio elenchi, of sorts

Via ABC news:

In a sworn declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

The fact that ICE knows nothing about them proves that they are dangerous criminals?!? Although the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, neither is it evidence of dire terrorism.

Death by a thousand cuts

It is clear that the federal layoffs and budget cuts are indiscriminate, made without regard to the content of the jobs and programs being eliminated. Some of it is made at targets of opportunity, firing people hired in the last year because they are nominally in a probationary period. Some of it is illegal, done on the assumption that the courts can’t stop all the malfeasance— if courts can stop any of it.

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And 1000 screaming Argonauts

My exchange with Brandon Polite, from last summer’s author meets critic session, has now been publised in Contemporary Aesthetics.

I’ve posted a draft of a paper about They Might Be Giants (in particular) and art interpretation (in general). Is context infinite, like the Longines Symphonette? If you happen to take a look, feedback is welcome.

Assorted hogwash

If I post here, I can close the tabs:

Via Gizmodo: The contract between OpenAI and Microsoft specifies a change in their relationship if OpenAI manages to develop Artificial General Intelligence. In subsequent contract negotiations, “the two companies came to agree in 2023 that AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.”

Via Retraction Watch: Most of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution has resigned in response to malfeasance by the publisher. Among the infractions: “In fall of 2023… without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production… These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.”

Doctor gpt

At Daily Nous, there’s discussion of Rebecca Lowe’s post about how great it is to talk philosophy with the latest version of Chat GPT.

There’s pushback in the comments. Others reply that the critics haven’t used the latest version (which is only available behind a paywall). Discussion of LLMs will always allow this: Complaints about their shortcomings are answered by pointing to the next version that’s supposed to resolve all the issues.

Lowe and other commenters reveal that lots of philosophers are using LLMs in the regular day-to-day of their research. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about that. For now, let’s deflect Lowe’s ridiculous offhand claim that “Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic.” I say ridiculous for a few reasons—

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The bureaucrat/poet axis

Years ago, Liam Kofi Bright proposed that philosophy can ultimately be boiled down to the opposition between two tendencies. From his socials, here’s a recent statement of it:

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.

On his blog, Fintan Mallory uses a simple language model to digest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and situate every philosopher on the bureaucrat/poet axis. For me, the fact that Dewey comes out more poet than Freud and Kuhn more bureaucrat than Millikan calls the whole thing into question.

It’s still rapacious capitalism

From Cory Doctorow:

The fact that AI can’t do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can’t do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market.

I’m not sure that it’s the central fact of contemporary labor, what with the resurgence of fascism, the retheming of jobs as gigs, and the casual evasion of hard-fought safeguards. But, as I’ve noted before, it is a thing.

Labour-squandering technology

Australian regulators sponsored a test using generative AI to summarize documents. The soft-spoken conclusion was that “AI outputs could potentially create more work… due to the need to fact check outputs, or because the original source material actually presented information better.”

Coverage of the study leads with the headline: AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information

AV Undercover lives!

On YouTube, I stumbled across “We’re just GWAR” a campy parody of “I’m just Ken.” The video mentions, just at the beginning, that it’s the return of A.V. Undercover.

The show was on what I can now call a 7 year hiatus, but which looked during that interval like an ignominious demise. A handful of the videos were posted to YouTube by other people, but most of them were gone.

As part of the reboot, they’ve reposted the archives. So the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s awesome cover of “Debra”, which seemed like it was lost to time, is also back.