gallopingcomp

Alas, I see that we (you and I and great-grandparent) are talking past each other.

(1) You speak as if by “we” (or “society”), grandparent was exclusively referring to men. We (non-men, for example women) are a part of society, and some of us can be quite awful to each other; this, I expect, is common sense.

The obvious reading is that GP simply meant any cultural pressure for women to (over)value appearance (or conversely the lack of cultural immunity to such pressures), regardless of whether it comes from men or women, because it has always come from both (historically, and today).

So I fail to see how they are taking away agency from women and attributing it to men.

(2) If you live in the English-speaking parts of the West, our cultural awareness absolutely has an equivalent of this for men and boys. It’s sometimes called “toxic masculinity” (we can debate whether it’s the appropriate choice of words, but the awareness exists).

If a boy or a man man spends too much time playing video games, because he is repressing his emotions, some would certainly ask whether it’s because society has never taught him to process emotions and display vulnerability. (I had a roommate like this.)

And conversely, if a girl or woman spends too much time on social media (but stripped away from context), you’d bet “poor self-discipline” is on the list of hypotheses too in people’s minds, rightly or wrongly.

I think this is trying too hard to conjure bias _ex nihilio_, or at least lumping GP’s reasoning with what you’ve seen elsewhere.

(3) Part of what people do is influenced, or inspired, or sometimes constrained by culture. Admitting this does not take away agency from people.

Not exactly a “generation”, but you are onto something here - men (broadly speaking) do appear to be more susceptible to radicalization.

No, it would mean not attributing innate value to maleness or femaleness, so to speak,, but to the relevant metrics.

One can still compute a mean afterward and potentially find that it differs, but that is no judgment of inherent value / not a causative factor for the value judgment being made.

And even then, there might sometimes be benefit to treating people more equally than they are on some metrics. Maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing resiliency, after all.

Exactly - it’s still there (and still has its own semantics), but it’s also inert.

And, to address your point directly, of course mathematics detached from context can be used in practice. One can certainly create-slash-discover an abstract algebra, derives theorems about it detached from outside context, and then later on discover a context in which the abstract structure is applicable, and apply the pre-derived theorems.

Not in SF (for better or worse).

But yes. I would further suggest that sometimes people get too invested in online spaces and calibrate their worldview based on it perhaps a bit too much. (And prior to this it was traditional mass media, or their IRL local community echo chambers, etc.) It takes effort to find and evaluate truly original research.

I actually agree with you - “the symbols mean something different now” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. But I was trying to point out (what I saw as) a big ambiguity in parent’s comment.

My program depends on glibc. Does glibc necessarily depend on my program?

Yup. You run into that all the time in abstract algebra. Although people usually don’t like to touch the equality sign; the usual practice (based on my limited exposure) is to invent equivalent operator notations.

1. I would object to the “similarly”, because they are not similar types of statements. And yes, the tautology aspect is the whole point of the axiomatic method (which has limitations that cannot be directly blamed on that premise).

2. You didn’t do the first two. But the symbols now mean different things than their conventional interpretations in number theory.

3. > It's derived from initial assumptions, which is how all math works

It’s exactly how _logic_ works, and is how all math works, but that would only qualify it as (il)logic, and not inherently math. Necessary but not sufficient condition.

(Sorry ;)

Wow, I guess my mental model (so to speak) is even more “radical” than yours. I don’t think mathematics is really part of the (empirical) universe, but that they are their own kind of abstract entity. They may happen to correspond to certain patterns in how things exist and interact in the “real world”, or to sentient beings’ reasoning and modeling faculties, but they are not tied to the real world either way.

For comparison: To me, for a number to exist in a “symbolic or algorithm sense” is to for it to exist, period - but in the sense of “creating”/“discovering” a new number system to contain them. The set of rational numbers isn’t really “special” to me. (Non-negative natural numbers are “special” for their association with cardinality, but I will refrain from going down that rabbit hole this time.) (I assume you meant “unbounded” in terms of expansion into elementary algebra; do correct me if I misunderstood you.)

(i.e. Existence=NaN because it’s a loaded word, Abstractness=Yes, Independence=I have some but limited sympathy for the neo-Fregean view on this, “creating” and “discovering” are the same thing to me)

(Which would make me a platonist to some people, an intuitionist to others, I guess)

It would seem that, when you try too hard at being creative, chatgpt usually just loses it completely - in my experience, it often starts falling back on even worse cliches, or it stops making sense altogether. (Or it might just time out.)

Absolutely agreeing that true “intelligence” would come from such a synthesis - it also loosely matches what we know from cognitive psychology. We won’t go anywhere without rigorously addressing knowledge representation and reasoning - unlike humans, language is the only faculty ChatGPT possesses (and the power of language has been oversold for a while).

The cynic in me would rather have the backlash (and a rude awakening for the industry), than the looming hyper-normalization of convincing-sounding bullshit/plagiarism/etc (and new, more convoluted forms of “saying the magic words to make the algorithm behave”) in the near future.

(Relatedly: Say what you will about the rationalist community, they appear to have really thought about a lot of this.)

> Creative writing

I tried to get it to write _1984_ erotic fanfiction, which it did - but everything it spewed out was a cliche. I imagine it had read all of FFN and AO3.

> gathering information

It will probably be like the Google infoboxes and “People Also Search” entries we’ve had for a while, only more superficially coherent.

It seems like the “fake it until you make it” craze has fully taken over the AI/ML scene.

As a (former) student of psychology, I personally subscribe to the view that both platonism and constructivism are true (edit: in that they both accurately depict different-but-interrelated aspects of mathematics).

It’s a false dilemma much like “is light a wave or a particle” or “free will or determinism”. (Yup, I am that “you can have it all” pollyanna type of person.)