Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ

this is so perfect as a phrasing

"AI asks that you buy into the idea that more data means being closer to The Truth." @mel_hogan

I also explain this and take pains to really hammer home this is NOT EVEN TRUE in science, more data is NOT a better theory or account!

https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/ends-of-ai/

The Ends of AI

Sycophancy and psychosis

Disjunctions
Mar 18 at 6:35amWeb
Show threadDieuMar 18
@olivia @mel_hogan One of the main tenets of Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, which a lot of lip service at least is paid to, is that there is no methodical way from data to theory at all. (Iterating Hume, of course.)
Show threadOlivia Guest · Ολίβια ΓκεστMar 18
@hllizi @mel_hogan cc @Iris
Show threadHazel-Quercus 🟡⚪🟣⚫Mar 18

@olivia

this essay by @mel_hogan is the best writing ive seen on this issue. this is the framework we need. ive been waiting to read a version of this for a couple years now and am ecstatic that i came across it tonight. its so incisive and i feel more politically grounded than i have in years having read it.

the fediverse community desperately needs to read this - and is trying to avoid doing so - because it places all of the localized commentary of constant AI news stories buzzing around us in a larger context of the failure of the promise of the digital world. it cuts at the heart of our relationship to tech in a way that most people aren't yet ready to process.

Show threadEric LawtonMar 18

@olivia

Thinking back to the origin of the word "datum"—something given—we have to ask "by what?"

By reality, through senses, challenged by reason for error.
By reality, through instruments , via senses, challenged by reason for error.

Or by corporations that have been filling the media for centuries with advertising and marketing, artfully designed to exploit emotion to persuade in the interests of corporations?
Backed by decades of research into how to exploit the kludged architecture of our social and personal systems

@mel_hogan

Show threadAnthonyMar 18
@[email protected] I consulted my wife, who has a bit of expertise on such things, and she confirmed for me that in Latin "data" can also be taken in the sense of "gift". Things that have been given as a gift. Interesting to consider this sense of it in the context of how/where "big data" is amassed and what's done with it thereafter.

@[email protected] @[email protected]
Show threadTheodora WardMar 18
@olivia @mel_hogan yes well said. kieran healy and marion fourcade's "the ordinal society" really hammered home for me that the like...Datamaxxing Mindset that says data (esp surveillance data) are always valuable without diminishing returns is an ideology above all else
Show thread‼️⁉️‼️Mar 18

This is a fantastic piece. It might be one of the best ones I've read.

I think it pairs well with https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toolmen regarding the relation of AI to eugenics.

Toolmen

Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool.

A Working Library
Show threadAnthonyMar 18
@[email protected] @[email protected] Compare and contrast:
Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
-- Chris Anderson (2008). The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, WIRED magazine (speaking of Cory Doctorow 🙄)

and:
Big Data opens up the prospect of absolute knowledge. Everything can be measured and quantified; the things of the world reveal correlations that were previously hidden. Even human behaviour is supposed to admit exact prediction. A new age of insight is being announced. Correlations are replacing causality. That’s-how-it-is stands where How so? once wavered.

Hegel, the philosopher of Spirit, would deem the omniscience (All-Wissen) that Big Data promises to be absolute ignorance (Un-Wissen). Knowledge becomes possible only at the level of the Concept: ‘The Concept dwells within the things themselves, it is that through which they become what they are, and to comprehend an object means therefore to become conscious of its concept.’ Only from the all-comprehending Concept C is complete comprehension (Begreifen) of the correlation between A and B possible. In contrast, Big Data affords only extremely rudimentary knowledge, that is, correlations in which nothing is comprehended. Big Data lacks comprehension – it lacks the Concept – and thus it lacks Spirit. The absolute knowledge intimated by Big Data coincides with absolute ignorance. (emphasis mine!)
-- Byung-Chul Han (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Verso Books


Not to mention Plato v. the Sophists and rhetoricians (Protagoras + Gorgias), which my wife, a classicist, evokes whenever I rant about this stuff.
Show threadOlivia Guest · Ολίβια ΓκεστMar 18
@abucci @mel_hogan sorry very boring question, how are you doing the fancy blockquotes?
Show threadAnthonyMar 18
@[email protected] My server has some amount of Markdown, so you prepend a > in front of whatever you want to quote. I'm not sure if that will work on all servers, though.

> This will render as a quote

turns into
This will render as a quote
Show threadOlivia Guest · Ολίβια ΓκεστMar 18
@abucci ah it's server specific!
Show threadSnoopJMar 18

@olivia @abucci yep. Turns out a lot of Mastodon is just… shuffling HTML around! This is pretty annoying if you talk to it via API because now you have tags to deal with, but it does make stuff like this possible.

I'm not sure to what extent it varies per-server and to what extent it varies per-client, though.

Show threadOlivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ5d ago
@SnoopJ @abucci it just never crossed my mind they would send html around instead of I guess raw text, but yeah, once I think about it it sadly as with a lot of stuff it makes sense to be a mess 🥲
Show threadHazel-Quercus 🟡⚪🟣⚫Mar 18

@abucci @olivia @mel_hogan

phenomenal comparison <3

the irony of this technology being that it was built on the 'sum total of thousands of years of written and mathematical human knowledge' (from an arrogant, western perspective) and by design immediately sought to dismantle the knowledge creation systems that birthed it.

this is why these models are only ever going to get worse: the data they were built on peaked 5+ years ago and its utility primarily as a means of destroying intellectualism means that all future data is corrupted by its own evil nature. it is only capable of reinforcing the past and has no concept or understanding of the present or the future.