If half the electorate (let's say) are Republican, and if, as we know damned well, the Republican info silo delivers literally nothing but lies and propaganda to its recipients, then isn't it ill-advised, if not suicidal, for a Dem to "take into consideration what the other side thinks"? Why listen to, or factor into one's calculations, "popular opinions," when half of those opinions are based on outright lies? It's like going into an insane asylum and taking a poll about what should be the next Spring Entertainment Project. "Well, half the people want to put on a production of The Music Man, and half want a tournament of sword fights to the death. How can we reconcile those two and come up with a suitable compromise?"
Public opinion has been fatally polluted by Fox News, right-wing hate radio, and narrow internet channels of right-wing partisan influencers. Why bother asking?
Meanwhile there are 90 million people of voting age who didn't vote at all in 2024, a lot of whom would probably like to have access to no-fee health care, if a politician could make them believe it was a real plan and not just another empty politician promise.
My list of (should be) Free-at-the-point-of-entry services is long, and lustrous, with a faint glow of glimmer (or glimmer of glow, I forget) that gets longer in direct proportion to my age. My model example is libraries. My goals are personal, professional and also flush with pissedness (eg just get alla cars OUTTA here!). That we have abased ourselves at the wingtips of the corporatists, rather than enriching ourselves at the tennis shoes of the little old ladies therein says much about us as a species, suggesting we got way too far out over our skis when we climbed down outta the trees...
The poem points out, and I think we should remember - It rarely ever rains in dreams. Now when I first heard that, I scoffed. (Scoffed I say!) Then I thought about it. Long and hard. If you see me and I appear lost in thought, there's a good chance I'm remembering my way through all my dreams (that I can remember!) and checking them for rain. So far, I gotta agree with Hunter. I rarely ever have any rain in my dreams. I thought I remembered one, but the more I thought about it , the more it seemed like an actual memory rather than a memory of a dream. I was very young , 4 or 5, and was playing outside in a pouring rain. I had on a yellow raincoat and some modified for kids Glouster rain hat. I was splashing in deep puddles and soaking wet, wearing boots full of water. I looked like an ad in the Montgomery Ward Catalog. I was happy as hell.
What was I saying ? Oh yeah! Good article Yaz (Have you thought about by YAZ (all CAPS?)
That's a tag just waiting for a can of day-glo enamel. You could join the Words of the Prophets. The ones written on Subway walls. ) Someday , soon I think, AI will figure out how to run it's own polls and somebody else's AI will figure out how to answer them and that's when shit really hits the fan.
I thought it might be that Robert Hunter! Seems great at first taste but I'm going to isolate a good chunk of time for listening to it before I try doing that seriously.
Thanks for such a clear outline (since I agree with it) of the issues with polls in our current situation. I'm not remotely qualified to assert this, but I'll assert that Black's median voter/bell curve model fit like a glove in post-WWII America, a homogenous stable (by comparison, I guess) culture whose opinion mapped across that distribution. What propaganda was around focused on clear foreign threats, not stabs in the back by traitors at home. I've followed as best I could (just barely) all the discussion how polls are "accurate" because Science, and I can't disagree. But my take remains that what they claim they are measuring is not what they are measuring, as you imply. Measuring "direction" and "popularity" measures feelings in the vaguest way possible, which clearly matter, but extending that to conclusions on opinions on policy or support is one WAG.
Now there's a word we don't often encounter, and one, it occurs to me, that we could stand to see a whole lot more of (1).
A thought that I find recurring with distressing frequency is that most of my fellow citizens really have no idea how to know things (as opposed to merely having beliefs or opinions about them). Among the minority who *do* know how to justify their beliefs within some way of knowing, almost everyone is confused about how many ways of knowing that there are, and specifically the almost universal tendency is to accord supremacy to the kinds of knowledge that can be represented symbolically (2). There's a strong disposition to consider things that we know but cannot tell as not real knowledge worthy of the name. And that's among the minority who have ever given a single moment's thought to wondering what it means to know something.
Among the people more broadly, I believe that their not understanding how to decide if a belief is factual is central to understanding why so many of them would rather quaff Drain-O than vote for a Democrat, even though they claim to support precisely those policies that are the heart of the D program. It underlies their ignorance of the most basic facts about the polity, that they are supposed to have command of to be citizens.
In my ideal world, all 12-year-olds would be introduced to the word "epistemology" in school, and there would be some basic discussion over the next half-dozen years about ways of knowing, how the evidence-based way of knowing produces findings that work as "facts," and some attempt to communicate the scope of what the evidence-based way leaves out and excludes.
Alas, the US's education system is such that you look at a goal like that and conclude "you can't get from here to there."
(1) I do want to pick a Strunk&White-shaped nit: plain old "effable" would have been the better pick there.
(2) This explains some people's inability to understand why LLMs are never going to digest enough text to undergo some kind of phase transition where they acquire a model of the world from the knowledge encoded there, and lose their tendency to "hallucinate."
That's right, I'll vote for the candidate who promises to do something about the epistemological deficit crisis, which is a big part of why we got Trump.
On the grammar question, no; "knowable" is an adjective and "effably" modifies it—to refer to things that we know in a manner that we can verbalize (that we can "tell" in the language you use here).
On the LLMs, my position is that it would take embodied experience, something radically different from text, that the machine could use to set an elementary standard independent of text for reality. I have a belief that it specifically takes an animal, with survival instinct in addition to a certain brain capacity (dog, crow, maybe octopus), such that it *needs* to build a model of the world—for first-order consciousness, before it can go on to the second-order consciousness that manipulates symbols to reflect on reality.
> no; "knowable" is an adjective and "effably" modifies it—to refer to things that we know in a manner that we can verbalize (that we can "tell" in the language you use here).
But "effable" is itself *precisely the adjective you seek* in concise one-word form. It's basically a transliteration of the Latin for "utterable." It's just that we never see it except in the form of its antonym, which is often used in a way to make its referent appear dodgy or suspect or ridiculous. The world would be a better place if more people were able to routinely make distinctions between the effable and the ineffable: they're there to be made in daily life.
I will desist from further thread derailment, because this is all so very tangential to your OP. We broadly agree about what kind of development process it will take if strong AGI is ever realized.
i know what it means, that’s why I used it (it was a subject of controversy when I was in grad school, the “effability hypothesis” that any sentence can be translated into any other language, which I thought was obviously false). But I wanted both words, and “knowable” first, since it’s primarily epistemology.
Oh, and another thing, the over reliance on polling makes changing politics and political reality even harder than it needs to be. It also ensures that shifts in public thinking about issues are often missed because people have a tendency to give replies that they think matches what ‘other people think/expect. It’s so fucking lazy. Politics isn’t a matter of strawberry v chocolate ice cream. Unfortunately the carpet baggers who infest modern politics are generally drawn from the ranks of those who hire themselves out to ice cream makers, but who know that political outfits pay far more for less reliable results that the owners of capital.
If half the electorate (let's say) are Republican, and if, as we know damned well, the Republican info silo delivers literally nothing but lies and propaganda to its recipients, then isn't it ill-advised, if not suicidal, for a Dem to "take into consideration what the other side thinks"? Why listen to, or factor into one's calculations, "popular opinions," when half of those opinions are based on outright lies? It's like going into an insane asylum and taking a poll about what should be the next Spring Entertainment Project. "Well, half the people want to put on a production of The Music Man, and half want a tournament of sword fights to the death. How can we reconcile those two and come up with a suitable compromise?"
Public opinion has been fatally polluted by Fox News, right-wing hate radio, and narrow internet channels of right-wing partisan influencers. Why bother asking?
Meanwhile there are 90 million people of voting age who didn't vote at all in 2024, a lot of whom would probably like to have access to no-fee health care, if a politician could make them believe it was a real plan and not just another empty politician promise.
My list of (should be) Free-at-the-point-of-entry services is long, and lustrous, with a faint glow of glimmer (or glimmer of glow, I forget) that gets longer in direct proportion to my age. My model example is libraries. My goals are personal, professional and also flush with pissedness (eg just get alla cars OUTTA here!). That we have abased ourselves at the wingtips of the corporatists, rather than enriching ourselves at the tennis shoes of the little old ladies therein says much about us as a species, suggesting we got way too far out over our skis when we climbed down outta the trees...
I'd buy a ticket to Agincourt: The Musical!
We few, we happy few
Have stuck it to the French
We would be happier still
If it weren't for all the stench
Our friends back home are sad
They could not be here too
But they missed out , those layabouts
When we come back they'll all just pout
We few, we happy
(Coda's comin' – make it snappy!)
We few, we haaaappyy FEEEEEE----EWWWW!
I long to be in a goddamned boat on a random voyage to Goodland.
Would you be surprised to find out Robert Hunter wrote a very long poem about exactly that.
Maybe not exactly that, but that in spirit.
https://youtu.be/cLYDIcO0gqc?si=MkpxJtWMYaqN4ScO
The poem points out, and I think we should remember - It rarely ever rains in dreams. Now when I first heard that, I scoffed. (Scoffed I say!) Then I thought about it. Long and hard. If you see me and I appear lost in thought, there's a good chance I'm remembering my way through all my dreams (that I can remember!) and checking them for rain. So far, I gotta agree with Hunter. I rarely ever have any rain in my dreams. I thought I remembered one, but the more I thought about it , the more it seemed like an actual memory rather than a memory of a dream. I was very young , 4 or 5, and was playing outside in a pouring rain. I had on a yellow raincoat and some modified for kids Glouster rain hat. I was splashing in deep puddles and soaking wet, wearing boots full of water. I looked like an ad in the Montgomery Ward Catalog. I was happy as hell.
What was I saying ? Oh yeah! Good article Yaz (Have you thought about by YAZ (all CAPS?)
That's a tag just waiting for a can of day-glo enamel. You could join the Words of the Prophets. The ones written on Subway walls. ) Someday , soon I think, AI will figure out how to run it's own polls and somebody else's AI will figure out how to answer them and that's when shit really hits the fan.
I meant every word of it.
Eventually AI will do the voting for us too.
I thought it might be that Robert Hunter! Seems great at first taste but I'm going to isolate a good chunk of time for listening to it before I try doing that seriously.
Thanks for such a clear outline (since I agree with it) of the issues with polls in our current situation. I'm not remotely qualified to assert this, but I'll assert that Black's median voter/bell curve model fit like a glove in post-WWII America, a homogenous stable (by comparison, I guess) culture whose opinion mapped across that distribution. What propaganda was around focused on clear foreign threats, not stabs in the back by traitors at home. I've followed as best I could (just barely) all the discussion how polls are "accurate" because Science, and I can't disagree. But my take remains that what they claim they are measuring is not what they are measuring, as you imply. Measuring "direction" and "popularity" measures feelings in the vaguest way possible, which clearly matter, but extending that to conclusions on opinions on policy or support is one WAG.
Thank you! At last some reason applied to the idiocy of trying to poll your way to political relevance. Well done!
> effably knowable
Now there's a word we don't often encounter, and one, it occurs to me, that we could stand to see a whole lot more of (1).
A thought that I find recurring with distressing frequency is that most of my fellow citizens really have no idea how to know things (as opposed to merely having beliefs or opinions about them). Among the minority who *do* know how to justify their beliefs within some way of knowing, almost everyone is confused about how many ways of knowing that there are, and specifically the almost universal tendency is to accord supremacy to the kinds of knowledge that can be represented symbolically (2). There's a strong disposition to consider things that we know but cannot tell as not real knowledge worthy of the name. And that's among the minority who have ever given a single moment's thought to wondering what it means to know something.
Among the people more broadly, I believe that their not understanding how to decide if a belief is factual is central to understanding why so many of them would rather quaff Drain-O than vote for a Democrat, even though they claim to support precisely those policies that are the heart of the D program. It underlies their ignorance of the most basic facts about the polity, that they are supposed to have command of to be citizens.
In my ideal world, all 12-year-olds would be introduced to the word "epistemology" in school, and there would be some basic discussion over the next half-dozen years about ways of knowing, how the evidence-based way of knowing produces findings that work as "facts," and some attempt to communicate the scope of what the evidence-based way leaves out and excludes.
Alas, the US's education system is such that you look at a goal like that and conclude "you can't get from here to there."
(1) I do want to pick a Strunk&White-shaped nit: plain old "effable" would have been the better pick there.
(2) This explains some people's inability to understand why LLMs are never going to digest enough text to undergo some kind of phase transition where they acquire a model of the world from the knowledge encoded there, and lose their tendency to "hallucinate."
That's right, I'll vote for the candidate who promises to do something about the epistemological deficit crisis, which is a big part of why we got Trump.
On the grammar question, no; "knowable" is an adjective and "effably" modifies it—to refer to things that we know in a manner that we can verbalize (that we can "tell" in the language you use here).
On the LLMs, my position is that it would take embodied experience, something radically different from text, that the machine could use to set an elementary standard independent of text for reality. I have a belief that it specifically takes an animal, with survival instinct in addition to a certain brain capacity (dog, crow, maybe octopus), such that it *needs* to build a model of the world—for first-order consciousness, before it can go on to the second-order consciousness that manipulates symbols to reflect on reality.
> no; "knowable" is an adjective and "effably" modifies it—to refer to things that we know in a manner that we can verbalize (that we can "tell" in the language you use here).
But "effable" is itself *precisely the adjective you seek* in concise one-word form. It's basically a transliteration of the Latin for "utterable." It's just that we never see it except in the form of its antonym, which is often used in a way to make its referent appear dodgy or suspect or ridiculous. The world would be a better place if more people were able to routinely make distinctions between the effable and the ineffable: they're there to be made in daily life.
I will desist from further thread derailment, because this is all so very tangential to your OP. We broadly agree about what kind of development process it will take if strong AGI is ever realized.
i know what it means, that’s why I used it (it was a subject of controversy when I was in grad school, the “effability hypothesis” that any sentence can be translated into any other language, which I thought was obviously false). But I wanted both words, and “knowable” first, since it’s primarily epistemology.
Yaz, thanks so much for the reminder of your Left/Right/Enter post from 2023. Mighty fine work and a pleasure to re-read.
Cheers.
Thanks, it's definitely one that I still feel especially good about myself.
Oh, and another thing, the over reliance on polling makes changing politics and political reality even harder than it needs to be. It also ensures that shifts in public thinking about issues are often missed because people have a tendency to give replies that they think matches what ‘other people think/expect. It’s so fucking lazy. Politics isn’t a matter of strawberry v chocolate ice cream. Unfortunately the carpet baggers who infest modern politics are generally drawn from the ranks of those who hire themselves out to ice cream makers, but who know that political outfits pay far more for less reliable results that the owners of capital.
Mmhmm.
I always delete texts&calls from pollsters. Does that make me
1) a good person?
2) a bad person?
3) smart?
4) stupid?
5) unfit to vote?
6) Don't care
It makes you a busy person who has better things to do than answer stupid questions from bad people.
Sorry. That answer is not on our list. Good day.