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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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I didn't text her, but it was close. Maybe if I'd opted to have more than two drinks.

We just wouldn't have worked out. In some ways we were picture perfect, in others, we found ourselves at each other's throats. The picture I'd used was one of the last few of us together, and happy. LLMs might be very good at modeling the world, but alas, even they can't decide that the next step function would likely be a divorce and the two of us arguing over custody of the kids.

Thank you, and I'll take a look at Chiang's work.

Maybe (I saw you posted this after my last comment), but we sometimes know ourselves less well than we think, are good at talking ourselves out of happiness.

If you've seen Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, it was adapted from one of his other novellas.

I've read quite a bit of his work, though I didn't like Arrival or the story it was adapted from I'm afraid. I have a dim opinion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and even its most ardent believers probably don't think it makes you into a mentat.

I've seen the film twice and I am not sure characterizing it as selling Sapir-Whorf (soft or hard) is entirely accurate--is at least not what I'd get out of it, or did get out of it. Admittedly I did not read the novella, so maybe there's something more obvious there that was removed or de-emphasized by Villaneuve. I dislike at least the hard version of Sapir-Whorf as well (to say I dislike it means I simply don't buy it--the hard version of course the suggestion that language determines thought, that some thoughts simply cannot be held in the mind in certain languages--one of the common weapons in the arsenal against the supposed linguistic imperialism of, say, English) but the soft version (e.g. that a language one speaks/reads/thinks in at least influences their thoughts or their thought patterns) is to me self-evident. You, as a multilingual, must have some thoughts on this as well?

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