Tag: language games

Rise, Teleonomatons!

Mark Davis2 Comments

My essay for the Berggruen Prize this year. Of course, the organization missed an opportunity to drop down a staggering rabbit hole and lean into a whole new regime of neologistic energetics, but I do like the prize-winning essays!

Rise, Teleonomatons

Meaning entanglements

I can’t figure out what some statements about science mean, though I have a fair background in a range of scientific areas. Now, I can peruse highly technical papers, browse abstracts, interpret graphs, study conclusions, and typically do just fine. The professional stuff is a procession of arid facts and assumes the reader knows the basic definitions for things. It’s the popular versions of scientific insights that befuddle me—especially the definitions that try mightily to bridge meanings for learners. So do introductory texts. Light is a wave? Not exactly. Atoms are particles? Well, not quite, but they are small. Electrons orbit the nucleus? No, really, no. A force is an influence tending to change the motion of a body? OK, but what is an influence? People are influenced, aren’t they? Or under the influence.

And then there are texts like those of existential philosophers that leave me completely befuddled. What is this “Being” that they write about and how did it get so enlarged in significance, capitalized, and shoehorned by the translator into incomprehensible juxtapositions with other bulbous words?

It may be low pedantry to expect clarity from words and writing. We generally just roll with it and use the terms according to conventions inferred from reading and learning. We rush over the imperfect metaphorical bridges, the analogies, the similes. For physics, definitions are bound to the equations and measurement properties that accompany the words of description, and they become a semantic pier that is constantly informing our relationship with the ideas.… Read the rest

Death, Healing, and Language Games

Mark Davis1 Comment

A phone call came in the early afternoon in late August: she was reclined on her day bed and she was dead. She had lain down for a nap and didn’t wake up. In the subsequent weeks there has been a rallying of the families, grief, tremendous effort, flights before dawn, and scripted expressions of condolences. In my youth I had necessarily been a rules deconstructor, going in bare feet to a wedding, challenging expectations, trying to find novel ways to intervene—sometimes boorishly, I’m certain. But now I prize cheerful clarity and just volunteer to do whatever is needed to reach our collective goals. Remember: freedom and coordination.

In moments like this there are somewhat scripted conventions for discussing the hard matters of duties and feelings. These language games have organically arisen from contending forces, from Anglo-American sentimentality to the influence of organized religion, and they serve to facilitate life transitions. And now they have been summarized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that have trained on the masses of written content on the web to the point that they have reliable consistency. An emergency room doctor reports in the New York Times that ChatGPT does a better job than he does at the hard job of best-practices for bedside manner when conveying bad news. He also notes that LLMs are remarkably reliable for refining the scripted discussion of symptoms and medical diagnoses.

So a counter to the “slop economy” at least that provides some guidance for harried professionals trying to do a good job at the delicate threshold of personal pain and fear. The stochastic parroting is suddenly desirable insofar as it is parroting best practices and conventions.… Read the rest