> There is plenty of pseudoscience, snake oil and magical thinking in the west
This is it exaclty. These folks always forget that it's not the only idea we've heard today. It's basic cost/benefit. This takes 45 minutes to an hour to try out. If it works you "feel better" where "better" is hard to define. Cost = 45 minutes. Benefit = Meh.
Since there are about 1 billion things in the world that claim to make me "feel better" at a cost of 45 minutes each I have to really narrow my focus. I can't spend 45 billion minutes for "Meh."
In my case this made enough sense that I tried it when I was young and liked it. A lot of folks spent those 45 minutes on something else that seemed more likely to succeed. It's perfectly rational.
John Locke called rhetoric “that powerful instrument of error and deceit.” I agree.
Rhetoric is to persuasion what the greasy used car salesman is to advertising. The rhetoricians only care enough about logos to use it as a cudgel against their foes.
The folks that portray it in a positive light overlook the fact that it is ALWAYS used to persuade, by definition.
They convince themselves that this manipulation is a noble thing to do because THEIR truth is the ONE truth and that by manipulating others they serve some higher ideal. Meanwhile their opponents attempts at manipulation are still held in disdain. Humbug.
Again, you're failing to distinguish between rhetoric and sophistry. If someone is doing what you describe, it's by definition not rhetoric, no matter what someone calls it.
Rhetoric in modernity is literally defined as persuasive speech. A nodern rhetorician does not give up when they are wrong, they think of clever new ways to persuade.
Plato and Aristotle argued they were different things in antiquity, but even then some/most of their peers disagreed.
OED literally defines it as "the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques."
Figures of speech and compositional techniques do NOT bring one closer to truth, they obscure it.
That said, I appreciate that when YOU use the term it's not what you mean. I would be careful with that though. Your definition is not what it means to anyone else now outside of academia.
He's trying to hide the impact his failed economic policies are having. He can't let the 16 Nobel Prize winning economists who warned him that he'd crash the economy "win."
I touched on it elsewhere in this post, but many scholars believe that there are things you literally can not think if you don't have the language for the concept. This is called the strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity[0]. The weaker version is the same, but carves out space for things like spacial reasoning to exist independently.
I believe that some people don't think in words at all, and instead think in maths, images, or vague concepts, but I think the result is the same. Regardless of which type of token you use, if you don't have a token for a concept you can only express it as a relationship between other related concepts. This is a less efficient way to think, and is very limited when it comes to processing. It also makes it impossible to think about truly 'unique" concepts which can't be expressed by relationships to something else.
Elegance is NOT bullshit. Elegance is efficiency. Although you do need to be very literate to see why. To elaborate, lets use LLM's as an example.
In LLM's we have tokens and tokens represent concepts or partial concepts. Some LLM's use relatively few tokens, while others use more. GPT 4 used about 100k tokens, while GPT-4o got much better performance by using 200k tokens. LLM's that use the most tokens are typically the most efficient.
They're more efficient because they can represent more concepts with single tokens when compared to smaller models. The same is true of human language.
People with larger vocabularies (of words, or maths, or images, or whatever) can more efficiently express, and therefore process the relationships between, concepts. In fact more words, means there are literally more thoughts they are capable of having. Language constrains thought, but it also enables it. You can't think of a thing, if you can't conceptualize it and whether your vocabulary is words, maths, or images we all have a vocabulary of concepts.
Most relevantly here: The WAYS in which those tokens/words/thoughts are arranged matters. The difference between a model that's been "fine tuned" to a task, and one that hasn't is the efficiency with which it represents the relationships between the most relevant tokens. Again, human language (and human thought) is the same. Elegant language is language that is arranged to express complicated concepts using the fewest tokens possible. Every poet and every teacher know this instinctively. Good authors often learn it the hard way.
Modern readers often miss subtext and other more subtle forms of communication because they're bad readers. That's a different problem, and not the fault of the authors.
Yes I agree elegance is not directly bullshit. But putting elegance to hide the bullshit, is bullshit.
Many authors often don't even realize that they are saying nothing and are only writing flowery sentences that don't mean much.
I feel like the poetry of the 21st century is a great victim of this.
Poetry now sucks... Too little that convey with too many words.
I do agree that faux elegance is bullshit. Its important to distinguish between the two types though rather than generalizing.
Poetry has ALWAYS been mostly bullshit. It's only survivorship bias that makes it look any other way. The same is true of prose, music, art, and even science. There is more bad than good, but the good makes up for it and is what will be remembered.
Good poetry though exemplifies the real elegance I'm talking about.
I agree with everything thundergolfer says, but I would further like to add that even when the goal actually is truth it is often better expressed by allegory or analogy. All of the greatest teachers in human history have understood and used this to their advantage.
However, we have a growing problem in the world now. Our declining attention spans are killing reading, and with it reading comprehension. I regularly see otherwise intelligent people struggle to understand even high school level writing. Everything has to be explicitly stated now, and even then it's often not understood.
Fifty three percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level now, and for those TikTok people subtext does not exist. That does not mean that subtext isn't real or valuable.
If 53% of the world gave themselves intentional color-blindness we wouldn't talk about how little value color adds to painting, we would worry about those who'd forgotten how to perceive it and think of ways we might grant them the ability to perceive the world they'd gone blind to.
Yeah, its truly saddening to see the declining literacy rates. I feel like lots of social media, today, is creating a stupidification effect on people.
(Permalink, since it's on the second page of the live thread now.)
This live format is kind of irritating. Here's another one:
> He claims the oil business in Venezuela has been a "bust", and that large US companies are going to go into the country to fix the infrastructure and "start making money for the country"
You made the mistake of believing that Trump is more than a zero step thinker. Many do.
The fact is, his tactics and plans end where his nose does.
Many of his advisors are capable of planning, but there are times he just doesnt listen to them and lets whatever heavy metals are in the spray tan do all the thinking. See January Sixth for one example that got people killed. See USAID for another.
On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, I don't think this administration would have bothered to talk to China at all. I don't think they need to.
China isn't giving up any barrels of oil. It's a global market. If Venezuela is selling 5 million bbl per day to China, and it stops selling to China, someone else will start buying it. Since they are now buying 5 million bbl per day from Venezuela, that means they are buying 5 million bbl / day less from their existing suppliers. China will buy that oil.
I have the clicks keyboard for the iPhone 16. I haven't used the older one, but I can say its a very solid product as well.
The only annoyance is rememberimg to hold the magic key combo before plugging it in for car play. Regardless, this is a real company that delivers real products of solid quality.
This is it exaclty. These folks always forget that it's not the only idea we've heard today. It's basic cost/benefit. This takes 45 minutes to an hour to try out. If it works you "feel better" where "better" is hard to define. Cost = 45 minutes. Benefit = Meh.
Since there are about 1 billion things in the world that claim to make me "feel better" at a cost of 45 minutes each I have to really narrow my focus. I can't spend 45 billion minutes for "Meh."
In my case this made enough sense that I tried it when I was young and liked it. A lot of folks spent those 45 minutes on something else that seemed more likely to succeed. It's perfectly rational.
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