Category: Politics

Linguistics and prosociality

It is commonly said that linguistics as a discipline has enormous prosocial potential. What I actually suspect is that this potential is smaller than some linguists imagine. Linguistics is of course essential to the deep question of “what is human nature”, but we are up against our own epistemic bounds in answering these questions and the social impact of answering this question is not at all clear to me. Linguistics is also essential to the design of speech and language processing technologies (despite what you may have heard: don’t believe the hype), and while I find these technologies exciting, it remains to be seen whether they will be as societically transformative as investors think. And language documentation is transformative to some of society’s most marginalized. But I am generally skeptical of linguistics’ and linguists’ ability to combat societal biases more generally. While I don’t think any member of society should be considered well-educated until they’ve thought about the logical problems of language acquisition, considered the idea of language as something that exists in the mind rather than just in the ether, or confronted standard language ideologies, I have to question whether the broader discipline has been very effective here getting these messages out.

Large LMs and disinformation

I have never understood the idea that large LMs are uniquely positioned to enable the propagation of disinformation. Let us stipulate, for sake of argument, that large LMs can generate high-quality disinformation and that its artificial quality (i.e., not generated by human writers) cannot be reliably detected either by human readers nor by computational means. At the same time, I know of no reason to suppose that large LMs can generate better (less detectable, more plausible) disinformation than can human writers. Then, it is hard to see what advantage there is to using large LMs for disinformation generation beyond a possible economic benefit realized by firing PR writers and replacing them with “prompt engineers”. Ignoring the dubious economics—copywriters are cheap, engineers are expensive—there is a presupposition that disinformation needs to scale, i.e., be generated in bulk, but I see no reason to suppose this either. Disinformation, it seems to me, comes to us either in the form of “big lies” from sources deemed reputable by journalists and lay audiences (think WMDs), or increasingly, from the crowds (think Qanon).

e- and i-France

It will probably not surprise the reader to see me claim that France and French are both sociopolitical abstractions. France is, like all states, an abstraction, and it is hard to point to physical manifestations of France the state. But we understand that states are a bundle of related institutions with (mostly) shared goals. These institutions give rise to our impression of the Fifth Republic, though at other times in history conflict between these institutions gave rise to revolution. But currently the defining institutions share a sufficient alignment that we can usefully talk as if they are one. This is not so different from the i-language perspective on languages. Each individual “French” speaker has a grammar projected by their brain, and these are (generally speaking) sufficiently similar that we can maintain the fiction that they are the same. The only difference I see is that linguists can give a rather explicit account of any given instance of i-French whereas it’s difficult to describe political institutions in similarly detailed terms (though this may just reflect my own ignorance about modern political science). In some sense, this explicitness at the i-language level makes e-French seem even more artificial than e-France.

Generalized capitalist realism

One of the most memorable books I’ve read over the last decade or so is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). The book is a slim, 81-page pamphlet describing the feeling that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” As Fisher explains, a lot of ideological work is done to prevent us from imagining alternatives, including the increasingly capitalist sheen of anti-capitalism, and there are a few areas—the overall non-response to climate change and biosphere-scale threats, for example—where capitalist realism ideology has failed to co-opt dissent, suggesting at least the possibility of an alternative on the horizon, even if Fisher himself does not imagine or present one.

A very clear example of capitalist realism can be found in the ethical altruism (EA) movement, which focuses on getting charity to the less well-off via existing capitalist structures. Singer (2015), the moment’s resident philosopher, justifies this by setting the probability of a viable alternative to capitalism surfacing in any reasonable time frame to be zero. Therefore the most good one can do is to ruthlessly accumulate wealth in the metropole and then give it away where it is most needed. Any synergies between the wealth of the first world and the dire economic conditions in the third world simply have to set aside.

Fisher’s term capitalist realism is a sort of pun on socialist realism, a term for idealized, realistic, literal art from 20th century socialist countries. His use of the term realism is (deliberately, I think) ironic, since both capitalist and socialist realism apply firm ideological filters to the real world. The continental philosophy stuff that this ultimately gets down to is a bit above my pay grade, but I think we can generalize the basic idea: X realism is an ideology that posits and enforces the hypothesis that there is no alternative to X.

If one is willing to go along with this, we can easily talk about, for instance, neural realism, which posits that there is simply no alternative to neural networks for machine learning. You can see this for instance in the debate between “deep learning fundamentalists” like LeCun and the rigor police like Rahimi (see Sproat 2022 for an entertaining discussion): LeCun does seem believe there to be no alternative to employing methods we do not understand with the scientific rigor that Rahimi demands, when it seems obvious that these technologies remain a small part of the overall productive economy. An even clearer example is the term foundation model, which has the fairly obvious connotation that they are crucial to the future of AI. Foundation model realism would also necesarily posit that there is no alternative and discard any disconfirming observation.

References

Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Singer, P. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do. Yale University Press.
Sproat, R. 2022. Boring problems are sometimes the most interesting. Computational Linguistics 48(2): 483-490.

X moment

A Reddit moment is an expression used to refer to a certain type of cringe ‘cringeworthy behavior or content’ judged characteristic of Redditors, habitual users of the forum website reddit.com. It seems hard to pin down what makes cringe Redditor-like, but discussion on Urban Dictionary suggests that one salient feature is a belief in one’s superiority, or the superiority of Redditors in general; a related feature is irl behavior that takes Reddit too seriously. The normal usage is as an interjection of sorts; presented with cringeworthy internet content (a screenshot or URL), one might simply respond  “Reddit moment”.

However, Reddit isn’t the only community that can have a similar type of pejorative X moment. One can find many instances of crackhead moment, describing unpredictable or spazzy behavior. A more complicated example comes from a friend, who shared a link about a software developer who deliberately sabotaged a widely used JavaScript software library to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine. JavaScript, and the Node.js community in particular, has been extremely vulnerable to both deliberate sabotage and accidental bricking ‘irreversible destruction of technology’, and naturally my friend sent the link with the commentary “js moment”. The one thing that seems to unite all X moment snowclones is a shared negative evaluation of the community in the common ground.

Country (dead)naming

Current events reminded me of an ongoing Discourse about how we ought to refer to the country Ukraine in English. William Taylor, US ambassador to the country under George W. Bush, is quoted on the subject in this Time magazine piece (“Ukraine, Not the Ukraine: The Significance of Three Little Letters”, March 5th, 2014; emphasis mine), which is circulating again today:

The Ukraine is the way the Russians referred to that part of the country during Soviet times … Now that it is a country, a nation, and a recognized state, it is just Ukraine.

Apparently they don’t fact-check claims like this, because this is utter nonsense. Russian doesn’t have definite articles, i.e., words like the. There is simply no straightforward way to express the contrast between the Ukraine and Ukraine in Russian (or in Ukrainian for that matter).

Now, it’s true that the before Ukraine has long been proscribed in English, but this seems to be more a matter of style—the the variant sounds archaic to my ear—than ideology. And, in Russian, there is variation between в Украине and на Украине, both of which I would translate as ‘in Ukraine’. My understanding is that both have been attested for centuries, but one (на) was more widely used during the Soviet era and thus the other (в) is thought to emphasize the country’s sovereignty in the modern era. As I understand it, that one preposition is indexical of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment and another is indexical of Russian revanchist-nationalist sentiment is more or less linguistically arbitrary in the Saussurean sense. Or, more weakly, the connotative differences between the two prepositions are subtle and don’t map cleanly onto the relevant ideologies. But I am not a native (or even competent) speaker of Russian so you should not take my word for it.

Taylor, in the Time article, continues to argue that US media should use the Ukrainian-style transliteration Kyiv instead of the Russian-style transliteration Kiev. This is a more interesting prescription, at least in that the linguistic claim—that Kyiv is the standard Ukrainian transliteration and Kiev is the standard Russian transliteration—is certainly true. However, it probably should be noted that dozens of other cities and countries in non-Anglophone Europe are known by their English exonyms, and no one seems to be demanding that Americans start referring to Wien [viːn] ‘Vienna’ or Moskva ‘Moscow’. In other words Taylor’s prescription is a political exercise rather than a matter of grammatical correctness. (One can’t help but notice that Taylor is a retired neoconservative diplomat pleading for “political correctness”.)

Don’t take money from the John Templeton Foundation

Don’t take money from the John Templeton Foundation. They backed the murderous Chicago School economists, the genocidal architects of the war on Iraq, and are among the largest contributors to the climate change denial movement. That’s all.

Generative grammar and reaction

I entered college in fall 2003, planning to major in psychology, but quickly fell in love with an introductory linguistics class taken to fulfill a general education requirement. I didn’t realize it at time, but in retrospect I think that the early “aughts” represented a time of reaction, in the political sense, to generative grammar (GG). A huge portion of the discourse of that era (roughly 2003-2010, and becoming more pronounced later in the decade) was dominated by debates oriented around opposition to GG. This includes:

  • Pullum & Scholz’s (2002) critique of poverty of the stimulus arguments,
  • various attempts to revive the past tense debate (e.g, Pinker 2006),
  • Evans & Levinson (2009) on “the myth of language universals”,
  • Gibson & Fedorenko (2010) on “weak quantitative standards”, and
  • the Pirahã recursion affair.

And there are probably others I can’t recall at present. In my opinion, very little was learned from any of these studies. In particular the work of Pullum & Scholz, Gibson & Fedorenko, and Everett falls apart with careful empirical scrutiny; for which see Legate & Yang 2002, the work of Jon Sprouse and colleagues, and Nevins et al. 2009, respectively; few seem to have been convinced by Pinker or Evans & Levinson. It is something of a surprise to me that these highly-contentious debates, some of which was even covered in the popular press, are now rarely read by young scholars.

I don’t know why opposition to GG was so stiff at the time but I do have a theory. The aughts were essentially an apocalyptic era, culturally and materially, and the crucial event of the decade is the invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition. The invasion represented a failure of elites: it lacked a coherent political justification legible to the rest of the world, resulted in massive civilian casualties, and lead to institutional failures at home and nuclear proliferation abroad. And there are still-powerful voices in linguistics, intellectuals who have a responsibility “to speak the truth and to expose lies”, who were paid handsomely to manufacture consent for the Iraq war. In that context, it is not surprising that the received wisdom of GG, perceived as hegemonic and culturally associated with the anti-war left, came under heavy attack.

References

Evans, N., and Levinson, S.C. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 32: 429-492.
Gibson, E., and Fedorenko, E. 2010. Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science 14: P223-234.
Legate, J. A., and Yang, C. D. 2002. Empirical re-assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review 19: 151-162.
Nevins, A., Pesetsky, D., and Rodrigues, C. 2009. Pirahã exceptionality: a reassessment. Language 85: 355-4040.
Pinker, S. 2006. Whatever happened to the past tense debate? In Baković, E., Ito, J, and McCarthy, J. J. (ed.), Wondering at the Natural Fecundity of Things: Essays in Honor of Alan Prince, pages 221-238. BookSurge.
Pullum, G., and Scholz, B. 2002. Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review 19: 9-50.

Does GPT-3 have free speech rights?

I have some discomfort with this framing. It strikes me as unnecessarily frivolous about some serious questions. Here is an imagined dialogue.

Should GPT-3 have the right to free speech?

No. Software does not have rights nor should it.  Living things are the only agents in moral-ethical calculations. Free speech as it currently is construed should also be recognized as a civic myth of the United States, one not universally recognized. Furthermore it should be recognized that all rights, including the right to self-expression, can impinge upon the rights and dignity of others.

What if a court recognized a free-speech right for GPT-3?

Then that court would be illegitimate. However, it is very easy to imagine this happening in the States given that the US “civic myth” is commonly used to provide extraordinary legal protections to corporate entities.

What if that allowed it to spread disinformation?

Then the operator would be morally responsible for all consequences of that dissemination.