13 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. Moloch is a coordination failure where rational choices of individuals produce positive short-term effects for themselves at the expense of producing negative long-term effects for everyone, i.e. self-termination of humanity. Thus, Moloch is a system dynamics that is a cumulation of all the n-th order side effects that result from the totality of all self-interested "intelligent" action of all humans.
    1. reductionism can be good okay I would not be here if it weren't for reductionism neither would any of you it's how we build things it's how we learn things 00:19:32 but for so long we've pulled things out of context to study them and not put them back so we have an idea of information that is constantly decontextualized 00:19:46 what happens if you put it back
      • for: reductionism, emptiness, Nora Bateson, complexity, reductionism - Nora Bateson, adjacency, adjacency - reductionism - emptiness
  2. Jul 2023
    1. Paul Kingsnorth
      • quote -“If you can’t read or understand the ‘peer-reviewed science’ then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people - drawn, as all green ‘thought leaders’ are, from the upper strata of society - will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”

      • comment

        • The problem can be extrapolated into language itself
        • Any word is just an abstraction and oversimplifies a complex reality
        • if we generalize this argument, it leads to the general claim that
          • abstraction leads to harmful conclusions as well
    2. Fixating on only the easily quantifiable at the expense of a planet full of things that are inherently resistant to reductionistic measurements is the same industrialized, monoculture thinking that got us into this climate crisis in the first place.
      • Fixating on only the easily quantifiable
      • at the expense of a planet full of things
      • that are inherently resistant to reductionistic measurements
      • is the same industrialized, monoculture thinking
      • that got us into this climate crisis in the first place.
      • Title
        • What gets measured, gets…manipulated.
      • Subtitle
        • The impossible business of quantifying a planet resistant to quantification.
      • Author
        • Meg Chatham
  3. May 2023
    1. Some of these people will become even more mediocre. They will try to outsource too much cognitive work to the language model and end up replacing their critical thinking and insights with boring, predictable work. Because that’s exactly the kind of writing language models are trained to do, by definition.

      If you use LLMs to improve your mediocre writing it will help. If you use it to outsource too much of your own cognitive work it will get you the bland SEO texts the LLMs were trained on and the result will be more mediocre. Greedy reductionism will get punished.

    2. A big part of this limitation is that these models only deal with language.And language is only one small part of how a human understands and processes the world.We perceive and reason and interact with the world via spatial reasoning, embodiment, sense of time, touch, taste, memory, vision, and sound. These are all pre-linguistic. And they live in an entirely separate part of the brain from language.Generating text strings is not the end-all be-all of what it means to be intelligent or human.

      Algogens are disconnected from reality. And, seems a key point, our own cognition and relation to reality is not just through language (and by extension not just through the language center in our brain): spatial awareness, embodiment, senses, time awareness are all not language. It is overly reductionist to treat intelligence or even humanity as language only.

  4. Feb 2020
    1. Reductionist

      Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of other simpler or more fundamental phenomena.[1]

      The Oxford Companion to Philosophy suggests that reductionism is "one of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon" and suggests a three part division:[2]

      Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts. Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide explanation in terms of ever smaller entities. Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three parts: translation, derivation and explanation.[3] Reductionism can be applied to any phenomenon, including objects, explanations, theories, and meanings.[3][4][5]

      For the sciences, application of methodological reductionism attempts explanation of entire systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts and their interactions. For example, the temperature of a gas is reduced to nothing beyond the average kinetic energy of its molecules in motion. Thomas Nagel speaks of 'psychophysical reductionism' (the attempted reduction of psychological phenomena to physics and chemistry), as do others and 'physico-chemical reductionism' (the attempted reduction of biology to physics and chemistry), again as do others.[6] In a very simplified and sometimes contested form, such reductionism is said to imply that a system is nothing but the sum of its parts.[4][7] However, a more nuanced opinion is that a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have (which, in essence is the basis of emergentism).[8] "The point of mechanistic explanations is usually showing how the higher level features arise from the parts."[7]

      Other definitions are used by other authors. For example, what John Polkinghorne terms 'conceptual' or 'epistemological' reductionism[4] is the definition provided by Simon Blackburn[9] and by Jaegwon Kim:[10] that form of reductionism concerning a program of replacing the facts or entities entering statements claimed to be true in one type of discourse with other facts or entities from another type, thereby providing a relationship between them. Such an association is provided where the same idea can be expressed by "levels" of explanation, with higher levels reducible if need be to lower levels. This use of levels of understanding in part expresses our human limitations in remembering detail. However, "most philosophers would insist that our role in conceptualizing reality [our need for a hierarchy of "levels" of understanding] does not change the fact that different levels of organization in reality do have different 'properties'."[8]

      Reductionism should be distinguished from eliminationism: reductionists do not deny the existence of phenomena, but explain them in terms of another reality; eliminationists deny the existence of the phenomena themselves. For example, eliminationists deny the existence of life by their explanation in terms of physical and chemical processes.

      Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be termed emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed. This reductionist understanding is very different from emergentism, which intends that what emerges in "emergence" is more than the sum of the processes from which it emerges.[11] Some physicists, however, claim that reductionism and emergentism are complementary: both are needed to explain natural processes [12].

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

  5. Feb 2019
    1. It is the augmentation means that serve to break down a large problem in such a way that the human being can walk through it with his little steps, and it is the structure or organization of these little steps or actions that we discuss as process hierarchies.

      As I begin to read this (as I did back in 2000 when I was introduced to Doug) I begin to think in terms of reductionism as a practice in the face of problems which are highly complex, nonlinear, and which do not submit to chunking.

  6. Aug 2017
    1. Ehrenfeld (2008) concurs with McDonough and Braungart, in his plea for a holistic approach towards sustainability: “Our society is addicted to reductionist ways of solving virtually all our problems. ... Over time, as we engage more and more in this practice, society’s (as well as individual’s) competence to address the complicated, messy problems we confront has diminished. Unsustainability is just such a messy problem. Reductionism will not make it go away.” (Ehrenfeld, 2008, p. 11-12)

      This reminds of the constant attempt of Complexity Theory to push for Systems analysis and Synthesis in contrast to Newtonian, reductionist analysis.

  7. Jul 2017
    1. He appreciated that there are certain things which are simply not knowable, and that to study them is a form of blasphemy in that to do so reduces the beautiful to the commonplace, usually by means of statistics.

      This is a poignant description of what happens when an academician attempts to reduce the ethereal to the mundane and somewhat visceral. Whether quantitative or qualitative it just doesn't matter - reduced to jetsam at the hands of statistics.

  8. Oct 2015
    1. became an inevitability

      There’s a lot in STS (Science & Technology Studies) to challenge linear thinking about inexorable series of outcomes. Given a technocentric tendency to extrapolate from perceived trends, this kind of foretold consequence is at the very core of much #transhumanism.

    2. Ideally, you should be using the smallest possible gadget to do as much as possible before going to the next largest gizmo in line.

      Pithy, but potentially misleading.