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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33018 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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"What is wrong with my argument?"

"Everything."

"Can you be more specific?"

"Just all of it, it's just bad."

At the risk of defending some really quite terrible academics, this is in fact the correct response to some texts. Here is David Stove quoting Hegel:

This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical; - substance is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive, - or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge, and what it perceives it does not really know, - for, taken at its best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.

There really is no way to say what is wrong with this passage other than to say, “all of it, it’s just bad”. It’s not much better in context either.

There really is no way to say what is wrong with this passage other than to say, “all of it, it’s just bad”.

There's no way to engage with it deeply if the words don't mean much and they don't describe concepts that are consistent, but you can still say what's wrong with it. What's wrong with it is not a deep problem, but it's a problem, and you can point to it--"this word describes no concept" is a description of what's wrong. "It's all bad" is a shorthand for that--it doesn't mean you can't describe the problems at all.

The words do describe concepts, but the concepts do not relate to each other in any way as implied by the syntax of the passage.

There are allegations downthread that this is a translation issue, but given that every immediate philosophical descendant of Hegel is also trash, I think the problem really is in the ideas themselves.

This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical; - substance is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive, - or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge, and what it perceives it does not really know, - for, taken at its best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.

Those words... I know what they all mean on their own... But strung up in this order... I have absolutely no idea...

You can totally say what's wrong with this passage. Translating from Hegelian to English, Hegel is saying

Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world. By contrast, intellectual perception is a higher form of knowledge that involves recognizing the unity and interconnectedness of self-consciousness and the fundamental essence of reality. Through intellectual perception, we can understand that the absolute meaning (content) of something is the same as its absolute structure or appearance (form).

Self-consciousness can be understood in three stages:

1: As a negative relation: Someone who is self-conscious can identify the part of the world that is not themselves as "other," and then define their "self" as everything that is not "other."

2: As a positive relation: Someone who is self-conscious can recognize that they exist in relation to the outside world and understand what that relationship is.

3: As a synthesis of these positive and negative relations, called "intellectual perception": Someone who is self-conscious can see that their thoughts and self-identity are both connected to and separate from the outside world. This synthesis allows them to recognize the unity of content and form, and achieve a deeper understanding of reality.

True intellectual perception goes beyond immediate knowledge derived purely from thoughts and sensory experience. It is a type of absolute knowledge.

A possible critique might look like

  1. Someone who takes a heroic dose of LSD can experience ego death. Such a person experiences a merging of their self-identity with the outside world. This proves that their "absolute knowledge" of their personal identity is contingent on their sensory experiences, and as such is not absolute knowledge.

  2. Also this writing style frankly sucks. Use simple words. Use paragraphs. If you find yourself using pronouns like "it" and "that" to refer to three or more different things in a single sentence, you should replace those pronouns with their referents.

You're doing the Lord's work

Immediate perception is our direct, unreflective perceptions of the world.

This is a perfectly sensible statement, that you can have a conversation about, but can you point to it's counterpart in the original that translates into this? I get the feeling you're engaging in poetry analysis.

The counterpart is

This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself intuitive perception only as immediate knowledge

I reordered the arguments because Hegel put things in a weird incomprehensible order.

I reordered the arguments because Hegel put things in a weird incomprehensible order.

Ah, I thought I was going crazy for a moment.

That is a common symptom of trying to consume unmediated Hegel.

One thing that can notably help with the task of understanding writing which is bad in this way, and which did help me here: (Chat)GPT4 is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task, which is to identify what an ambiguous pronoun refers to. As such, the prompt "replace all pronouns in the following passage with their referent, in square brackets" works wonderfully to help disentangle dense obscurantist philosopher babble.

I asked Bing running on GPT 4 to summarize that inscrutable tract, and as expected, it's obscurant nonsense.

I think the most damning aspect of philosophy as a subject as it's taught is that there's little to no progress, in the sense that new physics students don't waste their time studying Galilean mechanics or med students the four humors. There's no real synthesis of concepts, or even much emphasis on being intelligible and clear.

I did the same with ChatGPT4, but as a more iterative process. The summary I was able to produce as a result of that iterative process is still a kinda disconnected jumble of unsupported ideas, but at least it's possible to see what those ideas are.

My process for disentangling that was

  1. Find the full passage from Hegel -- the quoted bit was the 8th item in a list of 8 items.

  2. Feed that into ChatGPT with the prompt "I am trying to understand the following passage by Hegel. [the 8 bullet points]. Specifically, I am confused by point 8; please replace all all pronouns in that passage with their referent, but make no other changes".

  3. Verify that each of the replacements makes sense (in this case, a few of them didn't).

  4. In a new chat, prompt with "I am trying to understand the following passage by Hegel. [the passage with pronoun replacements]. Can you explain what Hegel is referring to when he talks about (absolute form/substance|negative/positive relations to the world|immediate/intellectual perception)" (with one prompt for each).

  5. Using that information, write my own, non-obscurantist summary.

  6. In another new chat, prompt "I am trying to summarize the following passage by Hegel. [the raw passage]. I read that as saying approximately the following: [my summary]. I think my summary is basically correct, but can you confirm that?"

  7. Repeat a number of times until ChatGPT tells me that my summary is good (it turns out ChatGPT has _ very strong opinions_ about Hegel if you write like someone who is Wrong On The Internet about Hegel)

The specific intuitions I have about GPT4, which drove this process, are

  1. It is mildly superhuman at the Winograd task. In other words, it's better than me at taking a bunch of pronoun-heavy text and identifying what the pronouns refer to.

  2. The task it spent most of its training budget on was "given a bunch of text, predict the next token". As such, the next token it predicts is generally going to look like it was generated by the same process as the previous tokens. As such, if the previous tokens contain ChatGPT making a mistake or being unable to do a task, it will predict tokens that look like "ChatGPT makes mistakes / is unable to do the task", even if it could do the task with the correct prompt. As such, it is very important not to have "ChatGPT fails to do the task" in your context -- if that starts happening, reroll the failure response; if rerolling a few times fails, start a new chat.

  3. If you fail to do a task but ChatGPT succeeds, that is fine and good. If you flail around in the general direction of the answer you want in the chat, and then ask ChatGPT to help, and it does, and you say "thanks, that was helpful", it will be helpful in the same direction in later messages in the same chat.

  4. The training data can be modeled as "all text ever written". That's not literally true but it's directionally correct. As such, if a bunch has been written about a topic, ChatGPT actually has quite a lot of knowledge about that topic, and the trick is creating a context where a human who knew the thing you wanted to know would have expressed that knowledge. The internet being the internet, that context is frequently "someone is wrong on the internet and I must correct them".

  5. The RLHF step did meaningfully change the distribution of output responses, but as far as I can tell the main effect is that it strongly wants to write in its specific assistant persona when it's writing in its own voice. However, it is perfectly happy to quote or edit stuff that is not in its own voice, as long as it's in a context it recognizes as "these are not the words of ChatGPT".

I have heard that approximately the same is true of Bing Chat, though Bing Chat performs best if you speak Binglish to it (e.g. instead of saying "Thanks, that was helpful. Can you condense that down to a brief summary for me?", say "thanks 😊. now can you write 📝 me a summary? 🙏").

I applaud your commitment to disentangling meaning from Hegel! That's certainly more effort than I'd ever put into it, did you even deem the outcome worth it?

Bing Chat seems a significantly bigger PITA to wrangle compared to directly interacting with ChatGPT, it prefers shorter replies, overly weights web searches, and is a moody bitch without having that RLHF-d out of it. Not to mention it's predilection for mode collapse.

It's the poor man's GPT-4, unless you really need it to search the web.

That's certainly more effort than I'd ever put into it, did you even deem the outcome worth it?

Looking at the timestamps, the time between the first and last messages was 22 minutes, plus there was a ~5 minute period where I found the source and tried to puzzle out for myself WTF Hegel was talking about.

On reflection, I think it was a pretty good use of that half hour of my time. My goal in writing that post was to demonstrate that it is possible, even with something as obscurantist as Hegel's work, to uphold the norm of "bad argument gets counterargument, not content-free sneering".

I think that people mostly do the things that they observe the people around them doing, and so by providing a positive example I hope and expect to see marginally more things like "translate a post to language you understand, and emphasize your best arguments against its best arguments" and less things like "quote something out of context and sneer at it".

They say to "be the change you want to see in the world". That is the change I want to see in the world, and that is what I'll be.

As a side note, the "effective use of ChatGPT" post took more time to write than the Hegel analysis one. Though that one mostly took so long because I noticed that I had started exhibiting a style of interaction that was getting me better results, but it took me a while to figure out what that change was. Once I crystallized the pattern of "ChatGPT exhibits the RLHF flinch-response behavior specifically in contexts where the assistant persona is saying something forbidden, and so by giving it a context where the assistant persona is merely quoting / summarizing / rephrasing / otherwise merely transforming something that was said by someone other than the assistant, you can avoid the RLHF flinch-response".

I'm glad you got something out of it too, because I got a shitload out of your doing this, and really can't thank you enough.

I asked Bing running on GPT 4 to summarize that inscrutable tract, and as expected, it's obscurant nonsense.

Wait, don't leave it at that. What did the poor bot have to say about it?

It's seen things you won't believe, German tracts on fire at the Tannhauser pub, all gone like piss in the rain.

(I didn't bother saving it)

Its ze germans. They had a whole thing that if the common person could understand your theory, then your theory was bad.

The other main problem is that we are reading translations. I feel like many of the translations would have been well served by bracketing special terms. Just reading it I know certain terms are bastardizations within the translation, and even if it was technically a perfect translation there is still a bunch of linguistic context missing.

This is a light that breaks forth on [spiritual substance], and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical; - [substance] is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive, - or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same i.e. it recognizes [pure Thought] or [Being] as self-identity, and this again as [separation]. This is [intellectual perception]; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth [intellectual], that it should not be that merely [immediate perception] of the [eternal and the divine] which we hear of, but should be [absolute knowledge]. This intuitive perception which does not recognize itself is taken as starting-point as if it were absolutely presupposed; it has in itself [intuitive perception] only as [immediate knowledge], and what it perceives it does not really know, - for, taken at its best, it consists of beautiful thoughts, but not knowledge.

I've bracketed all the things that I'm guessing have special meaning. Context for philosophers of the time that are absolutely lost in any form of translation. Just like today, we can have words, or short phrases that contain a multitude of meanings and context. Any translation short of an entire understanding of the english language and the current cultural context would fail to convey a lot of the meaning. For example, a term like "social justice" is laden with cultural context. Same with straightforward definitions for something like "transphobic". Or exaggerated definitions like "genocide".

Even with gibberish like that, a better response would be "I have no idea what that means". That's at least an actionable piece of feedback that you can work with.

This. You can't reject an argument if you have no idea what the argument is supposed to be (because the text supposedly containing it appears to be gibberish). You can say "please clarify your argument" and leave it at that until they do.

The other thing to mention is that pleading ignorance is falsifiable. If Hegel somehow revised his jumble into a perfectly coherent version (as @faul_sname tried to do here) and I still plead ignorance, then it's good evidence that I'm likely being intentionally obtuse as a way to evade the argument. Generalized rejection kills the conversation.

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