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Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence

https://karawynn.substack.com/p/language-is-a-poor-heuristic-for

With the emergence of LLM “AI”, everyone will have to learn what many disabled people have always understood

Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence

Crosspost from: https://lemmy.world/post/2776711

While the main focus of the article is actually human perceptions of AI, it also delves into the perception of the majority of people regarding those who cannot communicate in a socially accepted way.

8 comments

Deestan

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Yes. Let's look at R. Buckminster Fuller, certified brilliant architect and inventor who coined the term "tensegrity" among others:

Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983.

His relationship with language? He spent a year (some sources say two) without talking, because he felt language imposed and restricted his thinking. Some excerpts from his Wikipedia page.

Buckminster Fuller spoke and wrote in a unique style and said it was important to describe the world as accurately as possible. Fuller often created long run-on sentences and used unusual compound words (omniwell-informed, intertransformative, omni-interaccommodative, omniself-regenerative) as well as terms he himself invented.[94] His style of speech was characterized by progressively rapid and breathless delivery and rambling digressions of thought, which Fuller described as "thinking out loud". The effect, combined with Fuller's dry voice and non-rhotic New England accent, was varyingly considered "hypnotic" or "overwhelming".

and of course

Fuller's language posed problems for his credibility.

inspxtr

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“rambling digressions of thought”

I never felt so connected lol

maegul

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I'm not on top of this at all, but I'd figure there's a whole critique of the modern western culture of philosophy and thought from a simple sociological perspective that is premised pretty simply on the idea that ...

"those who were good at and (therefore) emphasised language were simultaneously biased in their estimation of its importance and disproportionately influential through the relative persuasiveness of their linguistic skills and predisposition to taking up philosophy and the humanities."

Or in meme terms ... western thought needs to move past its wordcel phase and bring some rotator balance/holistic-ness back.

SuddenDownpour

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Wordcel phase. I love it.

blur457

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I'm not even a big Star Wars fan and this is the first thing I thought of when I read the title:

metiulekm

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I'm super conflicted about this article. The portion on disabilities is great! But then, we see this:

It’s considered an ‘AI-complete’ problem, something that would require computers that are as fully complex as, and functionally equivalent to, human beings. (Which about five minutes ago was precisely what the term ‘artificial intelligence’ meant, but since tech companies managed to dumb down and rebrand ‘AI’ to mean “anything utilizing a machine-learning algorithm”, the resulting terminology vacuum necessitated a new coinage, so now we have to call machine cognition of human-level complexity ‘AGI’, for ‘artificial general intelligence’.)

This is honestly the first part that's outright objectively wrong. A quick look at the Wiki will tell us that the term AGI was already used in 1997, for example. You can't say that it was made up by tech companies about five minutes ago. And the author returns to this “rebranding” later in the article, so you can't just brush this away as a misguided aside; it's just clear that the author does not really know anything about AI, yet is willing to write an article about it. Mix this with the snarky tone, and it just gets very sad.

It's not like that I don't agree with what they say about AI either, and I definitely agree with the big conclusions; it's not like there are no people with a similar opinion that know more about AI (Gary Marcus, for instance), the comparision to disabilities is the novel (to me) part. But I just couldn't share this article with anyone. As I am writing, the top comment on !technology@lemmy.world is criticizing the same part of the article, except in less nice words. I don't think that the person who wrote that comment will learn anything helpful about disabilities from this article…

SgtAStrawberry

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Not the first time a "journalist" has written about something without understanding it. One of my favourites was one that hevely criticised a MMO after just 8 hours of game play, where like 3 was spent in character creation.

TheGingerNut

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Ya freaking think?