Posts by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #ATEZPxk57Aisl2YXuy by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-03-02T20:50:06Z
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The bottom line - there is a clear political economy explanation behind both the performative aspects of conservative campus activism (they aren't interested in change so much as provoking an external reaction; there are jobs in the outrage machine) and the frustrations of left-leaning activists (they can get universities to listen to their complaints but DEI policies and trainings are a pisspoor substitute for wide reaching social change, and they don't have much access to political careers)
(DIR) Post #ATEZPzRimPE02fyuZs by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-03-02T20:50:48Z
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The "conservative channel" and the "liberal channel" provide very different resources, incentives, and machineries of self-identification, resulting in very different outcomes. Finis.
(DIR) Post #ATLl5ozYf2GeVtsRJQ by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-03-06T13:46:01Z
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https://crookedtimber.org/2023/03/06/conservatives-on-campus/ "If your political economy is all about stirring up media attention and reaction to the problem of illiberalism on campus, then getting op-eds into major national newspapers is a win. ...the op-ed isn’t an explanation of the causal relationship underlying the shift. It is an example of it." A longer essay on the Hoffman NYT op-ed, and Binder and Kidder's explanation of the organizational economy of conservatism that underlies it.
(DIR) Post #AXReK22I3BY4hTkzOy by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:51:56Z
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1. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/06/21/artificial-intelligence-is-a-familiar-looking-monster-say-henry-farrell-and-cosma-shalizi So Cosma Shalizi and I have a piece in the Economist on shoggoths. The Large Language Models driving ChatGPT and Bing are indeed Lovecraftian monsters. But so too are markets, bureaucracies, and even democracy, if squinted at askance.
(DIR) Post #AXReK3vyzbgwaUoyqe by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:52:20Z
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2. The idea is straightforward. Like Alison Gopnik we don't see LLMs as analogous to individual human intelligences. Instead, they're "cultural technologies" - systems for summarizing human created knowledge and making it useful. This puts the shoggoth meme in a different context
(DIR) Post #AXReK5cYinLJopkUqm by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:52:34Z
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3. People like @kevinroose see the shoggoth as terrifying because it is a reinforcement-learning smiley face superimposed on a heaving, amorphous and fundamentally inhuman monstrosity. That's right. But the crawling chaos behind the mask is the product of human knowledge.
(DIR) Post #AXReK9rEy9SmxWeHI0 by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:52:46Z
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4. It is a set of weighted vectors which summarize and represent an enormous corpus of text that has been fed through a transformer. In other words, it is a seething mass of human intelligence, seen from an alien (what Lovecraft would call a "cosmic") perspective.
(DIR) Post #AXReKBXSiepaAlPVjs by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:53:01Z
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5. The point is that this is _nothing new._ Here, we're riffing on a fantastic piece that Cosma wrote a decade ago, arguing that markets and bureaucracies were vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing "the coldest of all cold monsters" http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html
(DIR) Post #AXReKDNxqwQDtsyxDE by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:53:37Z
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6. See also @cstross on corporations as "Slow AI." https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/llcs-are-slow-ais.html . The market too is an inchoate mass of complex human information, which is, simplified, represented and made tractable by the price mechanism. That's Hayek's argument for why markets beat bureaucracy.
(DIR) Post #AXReKF4BbRn177kBf6 by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:53:54Z
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7. And bureaucracies too are monsters of information, that devour complex, rich webs of local knowledge, and spit out the thin abstract categories which allow the state to "see" the society that it seeks to govern and control.
(DIR) Post #AXReKGjhOaaeIAAr0S by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:54:03Z
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8. Both Hayek and Scott recognize that markets and bureaucracies are inhuman systems - they do not and _cannot_ care about human values like justice. Hayek proclaims this, and Scott condemns it. The same is even true of democracies. We talk about the democratic "public."
(DIR) Post #AXReKILfOuYTICwgpE by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:54:32Z
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9. But we cannot see the true vast, inchoate system of quasi-amorphous beliefs and values that the mass of citizens hold. All we can see is the thinly sketched outlines of opinion polls, voting results and the like. t the democratic "public."
(DIR) Post #AXReKJwZTBfYExDfzE by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:54:55Z
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10. As we put it, "we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”." Now, we have a new shoggoth - the Large Language Model.
(DIR) Post #AXReKLjWoeQNn58Hw0 by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:55:05Z
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11. In other words, we have a new vast distributed system that represents and simplifies the enormous chaos of human knowledge, and turns it into a source of power. That gets us away from the silly debates about whether LLMs or other kinds of machine learning are intelligent.
(DIR) Post #AXReKNTILyczBJYLuS by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:55:16Z
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12. They are intelligent in precisely the same way as markets and bureaucracies are intelligent - that is, they are systems for processing human intelligence and making it more useful. So too, their consequences for human society are not those of an utterly alien power ...
(DIR) Post #AXReKPKrQJ4Mxjce2a by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:55:28Z
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13. but of all of us, collectively, passed through a distorting prism. The fundamental problem of the last two centuries has been one of figuring out space for human agency and freedom in the spaces between the great shoggoths of the industrial revolution.
(DIR) Post #AXReKSi0sgN7QPTg2q by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:55:41Z
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14. Those shoggoths have been put to enormous tasks. We could not live without markets and bureaucracy, or have collective agency without some kind of democracy. Equally, these vast systems are uncaring and brutal if you find yourself on the wrong end of them.
(DIR) Post #AXReKUkZI9bVkugkIy by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:55:53Z
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15. And their weight crushes some groups, while resting feather light on others. We need to understand LLMs not as a gate to the Singularity, or better, as Cosma puts it, we need to understand that the Singularity already happened centuries ago, when these systems first emerged.
(DIR) Post #AXReKWeGEZkNdvkjke by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-06-21T15:56:09Z
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16. Just as we fight over markets, bureaucracy and democracy, and set one to limit the encroachments of the others, we need to understand how LLMs change the balance, how they might be deployed, and what ought be deployed against them. Finis.
(DIR) Post #AXUXRmR1p1GMQUxIUi by henryfarrell@mastodon.social
2023-07-08T17:38:10Z
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@tarkowski thank you - a lot is anticipated in Cosma's http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html