Define Wokeness Or how you shall know a word by the company it keeps
davidrozado.substack.com
davidrozado.substack.com
This has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the term "woke" - this only serves to say that the term is currently viewed as a pejorative term, a negative term.
The left and the right don't "understand" it differently, as the article concludes. No, they aren't speaking different languages. The term is understood well enough, and is deliberately used so.
> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them
So maybe the left and right do agree on its meaning! But much of the lizard-brained shrieking about it doesn’t usually seem all that related to the definition above.
Let's see.
https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desan...
Yup. Let's see what he goes on to say:
"To me, it means someone who believes that there are systemic injustices in the criminal justice system, and on that basis they can decline to fully enforce and uphold the law,"
And all this was in the context, specifically, of a legal battle around a suspension, so very much tailored to that situation.
All in all, the meme that "woke is a made up term" is tiring, and no, it certainly doesn't just mean "there are systemic injustices".
"You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try.
If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one. You can’t just bitch on Twitter every time someone tries to describe your political cohort, which again you yourself say intends to change the world. Name yourself or you will be named."
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tel...
Your follow up examples, I think, corroborate this point. It's basically word-salad with no clear definition. Is it political correctness? Identity politics? CRT? Defund the police? (all things conservatives also tend to be unable to define). Is it an incitement to revolution? To shake (destroy?) the foundation of society? This deliberate obtuseness is by design, and you see it in this rant: to paint people who'd like to make society slightly better as radical reactionaries wanting to level society. It's obviously ridiculous and would be funny if it weren't so frighteningly effective at scaring the shit out of otherwise intelligent people.
(Edited to add: another major problem I've noticed when talking about these things is conservatives tend to treat random Twitter users as representing some monolithic "the left", rather than some random dipshits on Twitter, whereas progressives tend to treat elected conservative politicians in-power as "the right" when criticizing them (e.g., referencing Ron Desantis instead of "they" or "these people", talking about people on Twitter).
Weird. It's all over the place. For example: "Now, he was preparing his constituents for the existential battle posed by their newest imaginary adversary: wokeness."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/20/anti-woke-ra...
> Your follow up examples, I think, corroborate this point.
Nope. It (it's a single quote) makes it clear that those on the woke far left are playing silly word games.
> It's obviously ridiculous
True, the word games are ridiculous and pretty transparent once you see how they work (usually a simple variant of the Motte-and-Bailey fallacy).
Anyway, good chat.
This in no way suggests "wokeness" is a made-up term. It's no different than the right's use of "Socialism" as a imaginary adversary. Socialism exists. But it's been applied as a boogeyman for the better part of a century by conservatives. Harry Truman made this very argument in the '50s. [1] In that same spirit, "Woke" is a term often hurled at any idea that criticizes the status-quo. That these are similar scare words is not an original idea [2]
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/truman-socialism-scare-wor...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/wokeness-s...
Many in the ruling class have a huge incentive to make sure the masses stay asleep. The original definition of wokeness was too destabilizing to the established order thus, like any threat, money printers are working overtime to put this one down.
>If Firth’s hypothesis is correct, and it probably is, red and blue America have very different ideas in mind when they use the terms woke/wokeness.
Close observers can clearly see the counterwoke movement is astroturfing with a top down structure and the corruption of the definition isnt a mistake.
Some of the most woke people I know fall on the right side of the spectrum but have been sufficiently convinced to distance themselves from the term.
Deus ex machina, then?
If humans can't decide truth for each other, why would machines be better at it?
ChatGPT's working memory seems to be less than a human's, as does its ability to perform correct calculations (although it is fast about it).
To suggest that AI will be better at something without evidence just because it runs on a computer would be contrary to available evidence.
What sources of observations do AIs have that human senses don't?
I mean, you could talk about something like the Webb Telescope, which can see things that humans can't. But humans can see what Webb sends back just as well as an AI can.
If you mean that AIs can spot things in, say, medical images that humans can't, even when looking at the same image, that's true, but I'm not sure that it's all that relevant to the current question.
Humans can’t. Often don’t want to.
They learn to recognize patters.
Any algorithm that captured anything useful from exposure to data is learning.
Machines most definitely learn.
Watch a plot of generalization accuracy over training iterations (by testing with non-training data).
You will see periods of slow improvement, alternating with periods of very fast improvement, as important relationships are discovered.
Machines earn.
That "understanding" is what allows the model to capture the same information, plus implications not explicit in the data, in far fewer parameters than the raw data. It is compression by understanding.
The test of how much "understanding" a model has learned, is the quality of its responses to new examples and new combinations of patterns, beyond its training experiences.
--
Deep learning models are in a mathematical class called "universal approximators".
They don't just learn simple associations, correlations, or conditional probabilities. Deep learning models can learn arbitrarily complex functional relationships.
They provably can learn to do anything you can do. Anything any information processing device can do.
To be a "universal approximator", a neural network type model needs at least two layers of learning units, with enough units and parameters in the first layer, and enough training data and computation.
The problem is that simple two layer models may require an impractical quantity of units, parameters, data and computation.
Thus the reason the use of many (more than 2) "deep" layers, convolutions layers, and recurrent connections, all of which can radically reduce the model sizes, data and computation needed.
--
Successful language models understand most things at a level similar to how a blind person understands color - not directly, but by lots of indirect exposure to other people's experiences.
But multimodal models, give multiple data modalities, can understand color, images, spacial relationship, dynamical movement, etc., directly.
That is where things are quickly heading.
A google search says NYT categorizes them as leaning conservative, which given the climate is like asking Russia if they think Ukraine is the bad guy.
This just further displays what the author was probably getting at, that were in different realities based on the assumptions made. To be a classic moderate of the early 2000’s is unheard of in mainstream “discussions”, yet I’d bet many adult Americans hold a moderate view.
As a society we don’t know how to handle the insane communication technology we have, and not many know how to effectively filter stuff out (I sure don’t fully know)
[0] https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-med...
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opi...
But let’s cut to the chase: The WSJ is a Murdoch-owned paper. It’s not as egregious as his other brands, but it’s hardly without bias.
[0] https://www.allsides.com/blog/fox-news-bias-rated-right-alls...
[0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides
It's been a really fascinating shift to watch which is also not completely surprising.
For example, colocation as a predictor of similarity would imply the two words "bank" and "statement" are semantically related.
This is not how word embeddings are trained.
Distributional semantics states that words which appear in the same contexts have similar meanings.
For example, consider these two sentences:
The desert is hot
The desert is dry
"hot" and "dry" both appear in the same contexts, they both appear after "the desert is", this is what gives them semantic similarity.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/03/how-to-define-woken...
I'd rather see more arguments on the quality of the process (this comment seems to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287984) and whether or not it works as a satisfactory means. Whether or not you agree with the answer is secondary.
It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.
As another poster said:
> When pressed to define the term, Ron Desantis’s general counsel provided this definition:
>> the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them
So to people who understand the term this way, which apparently includes a conservative political front runner's legal counsel, what you're saying when you are using "woke" as a pejorative is that there are no such injustices and it is silly to believe otherwise. Which is why people with that understanding of the word would rightly think all sorts of ungenerous things about you for saying that.
Which is just fine, as far as the people pushing your definition are concerned, since further divide and unreasonable discourse helps cement their base.
But I think we would say that such behavior is not actually that common and is very much exaggerated by the loud "anti-woke" crowd, who seem to equate any steps taken to address the issue or even draw attention to it as some kind of assault. See: "go woke go broke" nonsense, anti-CRT education legislation, etc.
From the other side, I could say that a lot of the "anti-woke" rhetoric is just bigotry in disguise, but I know that is only a relatively small minority of very loud assholes who, naturally, draw the most attention. Unfortunately many of them are also elected officials.
Whichever side (or both) then have poisoned the word as it can now never be used without being divisive — intentionally or otherwise. I'm not sure there is any other recourse but to abandon the word.
I don't think that would necessarily be a horrible thing to do — the idea can still exist (although Orwell might have believed otherwise).
It is unfortunate though that forces exist that would try and poison any discussion. Perhaps going after a specific word though is an easy means to do that?
Its definition varies wildly as a function of the listener.
And, as demonstrated by both of the graphs, it is strongly associated with negative concepts.
But that’s just my experience, in my context.
Take "inherent white racism", for example. (That idea is out there. Whether it should properly be considered part of "woke" is not the point.) I mean, if I'm white, there's no way I can engage with that. If I disagree, someone holding the idea regards my disagreement as proving the correctness of their view. And if I agree, then I just categorized myself as the one having the flawed worldview, and therefore someone not to be listened to going forward.
So that idea completely poisons the discussion. I don't think that just "woke" poisoned the discussion. I think it reflects that some of the ideas that people lump into "woke" are themselves poisonous to real discussion.
You used the phrase "forces exist". It's a bit unclear whether you mean sociological dynamics, or whether you mean people. My own two cents: I think there are people on both sides who want to shut down discussion, for at least two reasons: because they think that they'll win more that way, and/or because it's easier to try to win by default than to actually win peoples' hearts and minds in an honest discussion. ("By default" meaning "the other side's position is completely unreasonable, therefore my position is the only one standing, therefore I win".) When too many people on both sides are engaged in such tactics (or too many who have the microphone), it becomes impossible to have a reasonable conversation on those topics. Reasonable people just tune out the shouting and shake their heads. All you can do is wait for the shouters to shut up and go away.
Except they never will, because this has become part of electoral politics, and elections are every two years, and campaigns are nearly two years long, so it never really goes away.
Which brings us to sociological dynamics. And I'm going to stop here, because I don't know what to say...
I think it has long since been abandoned by the left. It was never really in wide use. It started as African-American slang, got a tiny bit of usage in popular music (by black artists) a decade ago, and never really got a lot of attention.
I'm not certain I've ever heard the word as a live usage, only ever as a term of opprobrium. There's really nothing to abandon.
The right will abandon it when they're done with it. But that won't have anything to do with whether or not progressives use it. They'll find some new word that a few progressives use and pretend that's Democratic policy.
I've been working on a related idea from a different direction about ascertaining whether a belief is the product of an underlying ideology, and in particular, whether there is a difference between ideas formulated by the filter of ideology - and direct experiences. It's a similar error prone aesthetic judgment. The rationale is that I think LLM's can illuminate how these cultural differences are not just political opinions or religious pieties, but divides in entire theories of mind. The basic idea is that a belief that is the effect of interpreting an experience through ideology is equivalent to a text produced by a LLM. They aren't the real, they are just artifacts of language.
What I think happened is that some early 20th century intellectuals codified an older theory of mind that reduced the self-itself to the artifacts of language. Without either spiritual belief or physical competence or experience to anchor an identity to and resist it, they figured out how to install entirely new ontologies into vulnerable minds, which subordinated people to their 'enlightened' critics.
Think of it as inventing "self-as-a-service," where you place your identity and sense of self and worth in the hands of a priest, a mentor, an officer, a pimp, a professor, a leader, a therapist, or lately, an activist, and in exchange for subordination to them, you get Pavlovian drips of approval and rewards, in a theoretical Skinner box. The techniques are ancient, but transmitting them through texts is modern.
In the philosophy of mind, (I'm trying to source it, probably Dennet) there was an idea that the self-itself reduces to how it expresses itself through language and that language was consciousness.
What i think LLM's are demonstrating today is, given we can simulate all the consistent artifacts of language with some code and a computer, language has an arbitrary substrate. Therefore it is not the real, even if your experiences are affected by it. Your identity and self-itself is not the artifact of language or symbols, because experiences that are the internally consistent artifacts of language are easily simulated. Unless you can also be easily simulated, either you aren't real, or they aren't. The message of the medium here is that the existence of LLM's means the end of subjectivity, but also I hope the beginning of a common theory of mind that has some innoculation against being subordinated through indoctrination.