This is one of many factors that precipitated the Soviet collapse.
Turn on the news and you know the language being spewed has no relation to reality. A society full of liars where people say the exact opposite of the truth. Now that LLMs can produce infinitely many words for free, trust in language is falling to all-time lows.
Eventually people just stop believing in words, the fundamental unit of human communication.
I can't recommend Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation more than ever.
> What emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real.
> Everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation."
Apologies for the naive question (because I haven't read the book). I grew up with the Evil Empire waiting to nuke me until Gorbachev provided a brief respite before the KGB returned. As I recall, they were presented as an enemy with almost but just barely not quite unlimited capacities. I still don't understand what happened in terms of global geopolitics in the last forty years.
Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?
Almost 10 years ago, I used to have materials delivered from the Builders of the Adytum to my door in Little Portugal. They were bulky letters with a rather striking sender address.
Torontonians obliged themselves by opening these letters, multiple times, out of a communal mailbox, to see what they were all about. This is an indictable offence in Canada, but neither common decency nor the rule of law actually exist in this country so that's ok.
... Unless, of course, you are Portugese - then the law is fully on your side, as a Canadian white.
As if I needed another reason to despise this continent. Who actually wants to uphold, work for, and build these systems in our society? This is seriously the kind of nation you want to inhabit?
Bitcoin "increased" over multiple five year horizons. That doesn't mean it solves a problem or actually has a concrete use case beyond gambling, which is precisely the point of the article - that you appear to have missed.
You're absolutely right it's volatile. But people are happy to kick some money into that asset and let it bounce up and down. Something is better than nothing for this use case. If they ever want to cash out under non-rushed circumstances, well it's volatile so just wait 6-12mo for a reasonable high.
Lots of economies and industries are volatile too, or subject to volatile politics.
Parking somme $$ in bitcoin in case you have government problems is no different than shoving money into land or gold in case you have stock market problems. The return is beside the point, it could be crap for all you care. The point is at least all your assets won't go to shit at the same time. It's damn near the opposite of gambling.
The stupidity of people sinks to new lows every day. It's astonishing just how ignorant people are of table stakes, basic technological concepts.
You just gave an AI destructive write access to your production environment? Your production DB got dropped? Good. That's not the AI's fault, that's yours, for not having sensible access control policies and not observing principle of least privilege.
Firstly, Twitter has an upper bound on the complexity of thoughts it can carry due to its character limit (historically 180, now somewhat longer but still too short).
Secondly, a biased or partial platform constrains and filters the messages that are allowed to be carried on it. This was Chomsky's basic observation in Manufacturing Consent where he discussed his propaganda model and the four "filters" in front of the mass media.
Finally, social media has turned "show business [into] an ordinary daily way of survival. It's called role-playing." [0] The content and messages disseminated by online personas and influencers are not authentic; they do not even originate from a real person, but a "hyperreal" identity (to take language from Baudrillard) [0]:
You are just an image on the air. When you don't have a physical body, you're a
_discarnate being_ [...] and this has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It
has deprived people of their public identity.
Emphasis mine. Influencers have been sepia-tinted by the profit orientation of the medium and their messages do not correspond to a position authentically held. You must now look and act a certain way to appease the algorithm, and by extension the audience.
If nothing else, one should at least recognize that people primarily identify through audiovisual media now, when historically due to lack of bandwidth, lack of computing and technology, etc. it was far more common for one to represent themselves through literate media - even as recently as IRC. You can come to your own conclusions on the relative merits and differences between textual vs. audiovisual media, I will not waffle on about this at length here.
The medium itself is reshaping the ways people represent, think about, and negotiate their own self-concept and identity. This is beyond whatever banal tweets (messages) about what McSandwich™ your favourite influencer ate for lunch, and it's this phenomena that is important and worth examining - not the sandwich.
> Meaning is abstract. We can't express meaning: we can only signify it. An expression (sign) may contain the latent structure of meaning (the writer's intention), but that structure can only be felt through a relevant interpretation.
I'm reminded immediately of the Enochian language which purportedly had the remarkable property of having a direct, unambiguous, 1-to-1 correspondence with the things being signified. To utter, and hear, any expression in Enochian is to directly transfer the author's intent into the listener's mind, wholly intact and unmodified:
Every Letter signifieth the member of the substance whereof it speaketh.
Every word signifieth the quiddity of the substance.
- John Dee, "A true & faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee ... and some spirits," 1659 [0].
The Tower of Babel is an allegory for the weak correspondence between human natural language and the things it attempts to signify (as opposed to the supposedly strong 1-to-1 correspondence of Enochian). The tongues are confused, people use the same words to signify different referents entirely, or cannot agree on which term should be used to signify a single concept, and the society collapses. This is similar to what Orwell wrote about, and we have already implemented Orwell's vision, sociopolitically, in the early 21st century, through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).
LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier. In some ways they are maximally Babelian, in that they maximize confusion by increasing the quantity of signifiers produced while minimizing the amount of time spent ensuring that the things we want signified are being accurately represented.
Speaking more broadly, I think there is much confusion in the spheres of both psychology and religion/spirituality/mysticism in their mutual inability to "come to terms" and agree upon which words should be used to refer to particular phenomenological experiences, or come to a mutual understanding of what those words even mean (try, for instance, to faithfully recreate, in your own mind, someone's written recollection of a psychedelic experience on erowid).
That's always been a fun idea. Even a thousand years ago, when most people couldn't read or write, we yearned for more. Even without a description of the problem and its domain, it's immediately obvious that perfect communication would be magic.
The problem is that it's impossible. Even if you could directly copy experience from one mind to the other, that experience would be ungrounded. Experience is just as subjective as any expression: that's why we need science.
> through the culture war (nobody can define "man" or "woman" any more, sometimes the word "man" is used to refer to a "woman," etc).
That's a pretty mean rejection of empathy you've got going on there. People are doing their best to describe their genuine experiences, yet the only interpretations you have bothered to subject their expression to are completely irrelevant to them. Maybe this is a good opportunity to explore a different perspective.
> LLMs just accelerate this process of severing any connection whatsoever between signified and signifier.
That's my entire point. There was never any connection to begin with. The sign can only point to the signified. The signified does not actually interact with any semantics. True objectivity can only apply to the signified: never the sign. Even mathematics leverage an arbitrary canonical grammar to model the reality of abstractions. The semantics are grounded in objectively true axioms, but the aesthetics are grounded in an arbitrary choice of symbols and grammar.
The words aren't our problem. The problem is relevance. If we want to communicate effectively, we must find common ground, so that our intentions can be relevant to each others' interpretations. In other words, we must leverage empathy. My goal is to partially automate empathy with computation.
Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response in the hopes that by parroting the language the associated psychological changes will follow. Language is a means of programming other humans.
Hypocrisy is the shadow aspect of this in which the language is parroted while the language's opposite is practiced in actuality. This kind of practice is usually regarded as "demonic," whereas aligning representations with reality is usually ascribed to "divinity," its opposite.
It's not really clear to me to what extent merely manipulating language actuates reality, but it is important to note that the "Logos" is one of the central concepts of Christian and Western thought.
> Catholic mass is arguably a form of programming in which people are hypnotized into hymnal verse/response
Nobody can really blame you for the impression you got/get from the Novus Ordo Missae.
However, that’s not really what Mass was like for the laity for most of the past 1,000 years (much longer actually, but the history of Western Catholic liturgy is complex so I’ll leave it at that). It was mostly a context for silent mental prayer that, ideally, (1) is informed by the sanctoral/seasonal calendar, (2) prepares the worshippers to join themselves spiritually to the sacrifice offered on the altar by the priest, (3) prepares them to receive Jesus in Holy Communion.
You can experience the same today at the Traditional Latin Mass. The difference in atmosphere can be rather shocking if all you’ve ever experienced is the N.O. A lot of newcomers, who are also lifelong Catholics, relate a feeling of not knowing what to do with themselves throughout the liturgy — well, you’re supposed to cultivate your interior life, spend the 60-90 minutes actually praying instead of just rattling off verbal responses and warbling out bad hymns.
Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.
It’s not so much a matter of Latin versus vernacular, more the way it goes as a whole.
Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes.
In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has become the universal norm. In between the responses of the laity and for a stretch of time surrounding the consecration, there is time for interior/silent prayer by the laity. The laity’s posture changes from sitting, to standing, to kneeling many times throughout. On the whole, the flow of the liturgy is marked by outward verbal and postural activity of the laity punctuating the span of 45 minutes. That is by design, and is supposed to be conducive to so called “active participation”. Now, and this is important, if that N.O. Mass was offered entirely in Latin and the laity in attendance knew and spoke all the responses in Latin, it really wouldn’t change “the way it goes”.
At TLM Low Mass for the same ferial day, the laity would kneel after the priest begins the prayers at the foot of the altar, and some might
change their posture to/from sitting a couple of times over the next 45 minutes, while others would kneel the entire time per their preference. No responses are offered by the laity, only by the altar server/s assisting the priest. The priest faces the same direction as the people the entire time, except when distributing Holy Communion to them, that is toward the altar, a.k.a. ad orientem because classically that would be eastward. Much of the text of the Mass is prayed sotto voce by the priest, i.e. it’s inaudible or barely audible by those in attendance. On the whole, the liturgy is marked by near silence and the laity in attendance joining their silent prayers to the quiet actions of the priest at the altar.
Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.
My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.
EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.
I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avout that eschew technology in favor of the development of the natural (vs. artificial) mind. It's not clear to me how to carve up the varying cognitive responsibilities between man and machine.
> He warned against mistaking command of words for possession of the solid things those words are meant to disclose. He joined language to substance, sequence to maturation, and study to direct contact with reality — principles that four centuries have not made less urgent.
There are maps that accurately represent a territory, and purely fictitious maps with no relation to any territory whatsoever. This is the spectrum of representation, and LLMs are pushing us towards creating maps that overwhelmingly occupy the latter extremity.
> More writing done in class. More oral defense of arguments. More seminars organized around live questions rather than passive downloads of information.
It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come. There are now many pantheons to worship at in the 2026 ecosystem of ~digital gods~ AI models, and the question becomes whose version of reasoning you choose to accept as authoritative. Unfortunately, no single model can itself answer this question for you, for obvious reasons.
> I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware
I’ve never been an arts person and I’ve been a very, very logical person, so it’s very odd to me to realize that my answer to this is: poetry.
More and more these days I look for ways to both reason with and frame the world and current events. I’ve followed years and years of people putting forth logic and reason as explanations. But my moments of peace are when I find those perfect words written in some distant past, making me feel connected with others by a timeless dimension
As a slight tangent here, it's not just poetry. When you read something like 'The Republic', especially with regards to Plato's views on the cyclical nature of political systems and the end of democracy (and what it turns into), it reads a lot like an edgelord speaking with vaguely disguised metaphor with a rather large helping of hindsight bias. But the fact that it was written some 2400 years ago changes everything and emphasizes that history doesn't just repeat, it plagiarizes itself.
I've come to realize that the the past ~80 years since the first nuke, the only world nearly all of us have ever known, was a major outlier. Nukes prevented direct conflict between major powers and digital tech alone was more than enough to drive economic progress, regardless of how dumb our decisions may have been on relations or economics. Those times, on both accounts, are effectively over. And so the chaos and uncertainty of this brave new world we're now living in isn't, in fact, new. Rather it's the world that humanity has lived in for the overwhelming majority of its existence. And we're now simply returning to the world that these great works were written in and for, and they've become more relevant than ever.
Welcome to the aesthetic world! In the western philosophical and certainly scientific discourse there has since centuries been this drive for objectivity and universals. This has led to great discoveries and thinking. But it’s not the only world, the aesthetic is all about the senses and your place as a subject. It usually invites relativism, sometimes nihilism if you can’t find your ground as an individual in a larger universe.
The world of beauty, art, peace, feeling states is worthy of discovery and like you say, it has a timeless quality.
That’s one good welcome! Even I feel welcomed and I have been hanging out in the music section for ages. Other than the music though I can relate to being a logical/rational person.
Art in general, and things like massage, meaningful conversation, sex, etc. Quality human connection will be the last things that AI's will gain sufficient ability to replace.
I think Bladerunner 2049 explores what I think will be the key: for some reason authenticity matters to humans and even if the emulation is indistinguishable, people value the real thing.
Repetition of basic knowledge is actually a big part of a successful education, Even schoolkids in the earliest grades can actually learn surprisingly complex subjects by heart simply by blabbing everything back word-for-word. Problem solving skills can then be built up on these basics.
We used to have these questions about "What are the advantages and disadvantages of X?"
I used to think I was outsmarting "the system" by only learning a few key facts about X and then twisting them around to get advantages and disadvantages, but little did I know that was the whole point of the course — to see the same thing from different perspectives and realize there are both advantages and disadvantages to X.
I am not convinced by that. Kids tend to learn problem solving (and other) skills if given a chance. i do not think encourage huge amounts of rote learning is an optimal, or even, useful say of doing that.
My experience (with myself and my kids) has been the opposite.
Making music would suck if I hadn't spent years of (fought against every day) practice/rehearsal. We need to practice learning the tools, not just understanding we have them. So many rote things opened so many doors for me to explore later.
My creativity would be way less if I hadn't spent hours listening to others music. I think it applies to less fun/interesting things as well.
> It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance instead of actively fighting to defend one, do you really believe in what you are saying?
A person generally cannot effectively, fluently, convincingly regurgitate an argument without understanding it, and the act of memorizing a variety of different positions primes the brain to handle all of them with greater depth and adroitness. Mill greatly underestimates the power and benefits of memorization.
I think most people would agree that memorization and a standarized 'one-size-fits-all' approach are inferior to teaching methods that are (onstensibly) creative, 'active,' and individualized.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. It's a false dichotomy. All learning -- all -- starts from and depends upon memorization. Is that its only the goal? Obviously not, but memorization gets a bad rap because it's viewed, incorrectly, as contrary to or in competition with more active, creative intellectual enterprises.
I once heard a lecture by a (famous) college professor who talked about the large numbers of students who failed (college) Algebra 1.
His argument was: you cannot memorize algebra, you have to understand. Students who are failing in college do so because they do not understand the fundamentals, and try to memorize enough to succeed - not realizing that the effort needs to go somewhere else.
Rule 1 of memorization is "do not [memorize] if you do not understand". [1] (Note: that source uses the word "learn" instead of "memorize", but to me the word learn means come to understand.)
There is a role for memorization and rote repetition, but it is not the foundation of understanding.
As a teacher, I feel this is wrong. A lot of students fail by trying too hard to understand.
They listen in class, then read the text and notes you posted, then watch a Youtube explaination, then ask Chat, then ask you questions ... anything to avoid trying to do a few practice questions where they might make a mistake.
It's like watching people try to learn to play basketball when they are afraid of shooting hoops in case they miss a shot. So they watch videos or read books to really understand how to shoot hoops. And then fail miserably when they are tested.
OK, you could argue that exercises build a type of understanding, and listening to explanations builds a different type of understanding, and the former is more useful, but people don't understand that.
I can't argue with this professor's argument because I don't know it, but I can only say that, intuitively, this sounds like an example of the false dichotomy I described in my previous comment.
I've never met a math student who tried to pass algebra by memorizing anything. I'm not even sure what a students would memorize in an effort to pass the class.
Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use.
Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.
Chess Grand Masters have large repertoires of memorised openings. They do not play rote games with no understanding.
They run variations, twists and traps, on recalled openings and duel and fool by creating and breaking expectations.
In line with a number of other activities rote core skills and reflexes are foundational but not all, they're essential to practice and to dealing with situations where they don't fit but can be bent to purpose.
Chess960 was invented to shatter this disgusting debasement of chess. That's not just my opinion, that's Bobby Fischers! Opening books, endgame tablebases, piece square tables, etc heuristic hacks that both grand masters and chess engines use is evidence that Chess needs to be replaced with variants that are resistant to letting "strong memorizers" beat actually good tacticians and strategists.
This is why Stratego, or various grand/large chess variants, or Chess960 needs to have replaced standard chess yesterday.
There's that show "The 1% Club" that is reasoning-based, but trivia is a lot faster to come up with, lends itself to showing lots of pretty pictures and can make for good, but subtle product placement opportunities. Additionally, everyone knows at least a little trivia and can play along whereas some people will get stumped on the easiest of reasoning puzzles.
Daniel Dennett talked about this model of consciousness. Something similar could be replicated by AI's own self-play style reasoning. It could sharpen its own drafts. As new data points become available, the drafts could be extended, shelved, or reformulated. AI could make these notes on its own reasoning available for others for inspection and course-correction and avoiding local-minima. Common objections need not be raised by layman, AI can incorporate those by itselfs. The true feedback quality can only come from experts in their domain. Implications are what role do normal non-experts have when AI can do most of mid-to-expert level thinking on its own. Hopefully it could help students reach expert level faster.
> accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important
I personally perceive a decoupling all over the board. Not just in language. You hear terms like "wage stagnation" or "degree inflation". Just choose an area. They're all detachments from the true thing they represented.
> I think belief that words accurately represent a reality is going to become increasingly important in the years to come.
Confusion between words and reality has been an important aspect of all human cultures since there were words. It's one of two traditional forms of magic found everywhere. (The other being sympathetic magic.) Think about what it means to say "knock on wood".
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