Just a reminder [white iris]

Stray thoughts about Girard: Mimesis, Being, Parsons, Scapegoating +

Being

Girard’s interest in mimesis goes beyond the obvious fact of imitation. It’s not simply that we imitate others, but that mimesis is about Being, a desire for Being. What is that, being? A tricky word, concept. Consider that a number of people admire some particular (potential) object of mimetic desire. Could it be that, though imitation of some object, we also desire the attention that others give to that object?

Note that this is different from conceiving a romantic attraction to Mary because you see that John is attracted to Mary. In this case you are imitating John. Whose Being are you chasing now?

Scapegoating and Parsons

From my post, 3 Manifestations of America’s vulture of violence, a speculation:

... early in my undergraduate career I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World” (reprinted in Essays in Sociological Theory), which has influenced me a great deal. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy.

There’s that word, “scapegoating.” But this is the first time I’ve connected Girard’s concept with Parsons. Does it work?

They are very different thinkers. I have no idea whether or not Girard was aware of Parsons, or of that particular essay. Parsons calls on Freud to make his argument. Girard was certainly aware of Freud (and, I believe, argued against him), but that’s no reason to think he knew of Parsons.

Russ Roberts: EconTalk

René Girard, Mimesis, and Conflict (with Cynthia Haven) 6/24/24

Shakespeare on the wane? What does that portend?

Drew Lichtenberg, Who’s Afraid of William Shakespeare? NYTimes, Oct. 21, 2024.

How real is this Shakespeare shrinkage? American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19. Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare? [...]

Over the past 10 years, as American politics and culture have grown more contentious, Shakespeare has become increasingly politicized. In 2017, the Public Theater’s Delacorte production of “Julius Caesar” depicted the assassination of a Donald Trump-like Caesar. The production elicited protests from Trump supporters, and corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Shakespeare is also under assault from the progressive left. In July 2020, the theater activist collective “We See You, White American Theater” turned the industry upside down with demands for a “bare minimum of 50 percent BIPOC representation in programming and personnel,” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color. Though Shakespeare’s name went unmentioned, his work remained the white, male, European elephant in the room. [...]

Given contemporary political divisions, when issues such as a woman’s right to control her own body, the legacy of colonialism and anti-Black racism dominate headlines, theater producers may well be repeating historical patterns. There have been notably few productions in recent years of plays such as, “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” or “Othello.” They may well hit too close to home.

Hmmmm.... Shakespeare has long served as something of a focal point or Schelling point in the (Western) literary system, a common point of reference. Is his work being displaced from that role? Note that Lichtenberg points out, “There is a long history of theaters running from Shakespeare during times of political division or uncertainty.” Still, where does this process go? What if there is no restoration to the center? Will Shakespeare be replaced? By whom? Or is the system transforming or even dissolving? 

I note that Lichtenberg's article is simply about professional performances in America. What about performances in secondary schools, colleges and universities? What about performances in England, all of Britain, Western Europe, the world?

Out of my window

What hath woke wrought?

Tyler Cowen interviews Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

AL-GHARBI: I have published an essay where I argue that the Great Awokening does seem to be winding down.

In the book, looking at a lot of different empirical measures, and in some of my other published research before the book, I argue that it seems like starting after 2011 with race, gender, and sexuality and stuff — but starting a year before that with Occupy Wall Street and things like this — but basically, starting after around 2010, there was this significant shift among knowledge economy professionals in how we talk and think about social justice issues. That does seem to have peaked around 2021.

Looking at the measures that I was looking at in the book, it seems like a lot of those are on the decline now, yes.

COWEN: Do we have a single coherent theory that explains both the rise of the Great Awokening and its apparent fragility? I can see that it’s easy to explain either of those, but how do we do both?

AL-GHARBI: One of the things that I argue in the book, that I think is really important for contextualizing the current moment, is that this current period of rapid change in how knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice and the ways we engage in politics and all of this — this moment is actually a case of something. As I show in the book, looking at the same kinds of empirical measurements, we can see that actually there were three previous episodes of great awokenings. By comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get insight into questions like, Why did they come about? Why do they end? Do they influence? Do they change anything long-term? and so on.

To that question — why did they come about, why did they end — what I argue in the book is, there seems to be two elements that are important predictors for when an awokening might come about. One of them is that they tend to happen during moments of elite overproduction, when it becomes particularly acute. This is a term drawn from Jack Goldsmith and Peter Turchin, for people who are not already familiar with it, which is basically when society starts producing more people who think that they should be elites than we have capacity to actually give those people the lives they feel like they deserve.

We have growing numbers of people who did everything right: They did all the extracurriculars, they got good grades in school, they graduated from college — even from the right college in the right majors — but they’re having a hard time getting the kinds of six-figure jobs they expected. They can’t buy a house. They’re not being able to get married and live the kind of standard of living their parents had and so on.

When you have growing numbers of elites and elite aspirants that find themselves in that position, then what they tend to do is grow really dissatisfied.

There's much more at the link.

Nicholas Confessore, The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? NYTimes, Oct. 16, 2024. The article opens:

Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

And yet:

D.E.I. programs have grown, in part, to fulfill the increasingly grand institutional promises behind them: to not only enroll diverse students but also to push them to engage with one another’s differences; to not merely educate students but also repair the world outside. Under the banner of D.E.I., universities like Michigan have pledged to tackle society-wide problems: The vast disparities in private wealth, the unequal distribution of public services, the poor quality of many urban schools.

In practice, though, such ambitions can exceed the reach of even a wealthy university. Most people I spoke to at Michigan, including people who criticized other aspects of D.E.I. there, praised Wolverine Pathways, the school’s premier pipeline for underserved Michigan public-school students. Yet this year, after substantial growth, Pathways supplied just 480 undergraduates out of the 34,000 on campus. In explaining why it was so challenging to boost Black enrollment, Chavous and other school officials argued that rapidly declining high school enrollment in Detroit — a trend that was itself the product of social and economic forces beyond the university’s control — had drained Michigan’s traditional pool of Black applicants even as the school’s overall enrollment was rising.

D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion. The strategic plan for Michigan’s renowned arboretum and botanical gardens calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names, which “actively erased” other “ways of knowing,” and adopt “a ‘polycentric’ paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”

Only one sentence in the 37-page plan is devoted to the biggest impediment to making the gardens accessible to a more diverse array of visitors: It is hard to get there without a car. (While the arboretum is adjacent to campus, the gardens are some miles away.) “The No. 1 issue across the board was always transportation,” said Bob Grese, who led the arboretum and gardens until 2020. “We were never able to get funding for that.” [...]

But even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”

There's much more at the link.

Domesticated stars, with flag

Have political parties become quasi-religious organizations?

While I don't read Brooks regularly, I do read him. Here's a passage from a recent op-ed, Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This? NYTimes (Oct. 17. 2024):

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again. Kamala Harris refuses to break with Biden on any significant issue and is running as a paint-by-numbers orthodox Democrat. Neither party tolerates much ideological diversity. Neither party has a plausible strategy to build a durable majority coalition. Why?

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to. In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

Many important tasks solved by transformers can't be done in subquadratic time

New paper proving that many important tasks solved by transformers can't be done in subquadratic time.

Sorry Linear Transformers, Mamba and all the others.

https://t.co/OGUEASmL23
By @firebat03 and @HantaoYu_Theory. pic.twitter.com/XlEmmtDn58

— Thomas Ahle (@thomasahle) October 14, 2024

Mechazilla chopstick catch (SpaceX)

Watch it again.

On the 5th integrated flight test of Starship the Super Heavy tower catch (better know as Mechazilla chopstick catch) SUCCEEDED AT THE FIRST TEST.

Congratulations @elonmusk and all the @SpaceX team! pic.twitter.com/Th2zzSDyv5

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 13, 2024

Once again, LLMs are shown to have difficulty with formal reasoning

1/ Can Large Language Models (LLMs) truly reason? Or are they just sophisticated pattern matchers? In our latest preprint, we explore this key question through a large-scale study of both open-source like Llama, Phi, Gemma, and Mistral and leading closed models, including the… pic.twitter.com/yli5q3fKIT

— Mehrdad Farajtabar (@MFarajtabar) October 10, 2024

The thread continues on for a total of 13 tweets. Gary Marcus discusses this study: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem.

Here Come the Sun

How to Say “No” to Our A.I. Overlords

The NYTimes has a useful article about how to avoid the AI that Google, Microsoft and Meta are foisting on us:

Big tech brands like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta have all unleashed tech that they describe as artificial intelligence. Soon, the companies say, we’ll all be using A.I. to write emails, generate images and summarize articles.

But who asked for any of this in the first place?

Judging from the feedback I get from readers of this column, lots of people outside the tech industry remain uninterested in A.I. — and are increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has become to ignore. The companies rely on user activity to train and improve their A.I. systems, so they are testing this tech inside products we use every day.

I'm particularly worried about having these things in word-processing and email programs. I think it's particularly important that AI-generated text be clearly marked as such. This is going to make that impossible.

Nobel House [Media Notes 139]

I’m talking about the miniseries from 1988, not the James Clavell novel on which it is based. Yikes! Not sure why I sat through all four episodes, but it did.

It stars Pierce Brosnan as Ian Dunross, Tai-pan (head) of Struan & Company, a Hong Kong trading company with roots dating back to whenever. Struan’s is stretched thin financially and vulnerable for take-over. So an American corporate raider comes along and teams up with a Hong Kong rival. The game is joined by an opium dealer hoping to cash in on a compact made when Struan’s was created way back when, and the China Great Wall International Trust Corporation (in the PRC). Alongside this we have a horse race, a Chinese mole in the Hong Kong police department, a mid-level Hong Kong bank, a disloyal son, and of course, pretty women, three of them.

It's all very complicated. Intrigue abounds. Some bed-hopping. Frequent reference to “face,” “joss,” and “the way things are done in Hong Kong” (which seems to be deeply mysterious). Halfway through there’s a big fire in floating restaurant which provides a lot of spectacle, but doesn’t seem to have much effect on the plot, though many of the principle were in the restaurant at the time. But then, toward the end an apartment building collapses, killing two of the more or less bad guys, making it much easier to resolve things in favor Struan & Company. Yipee!

The whole thing was slathered in corporate intrigue and hijinks, with a couple of dashes of Orientalism and a bit of sexism on the side. Quite a piece of work.

Hossenfelder: The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics Did Not Go To Physics -- This Physicist is very surprised

Hossenfelder comments: "A quick comment on the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics which was awarded for the basis of neural networks and artificial intelligence. Well deserved, but is it physics?" She also wonders if this does't reflect (what she regards as) the dismal state of current work in the foundations of physics and points out that physicists have been using neural networks for years as tools.

Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations." The Nobel Committee did not mention his work in Artificial Intelligence. But would he have gotten the prize without that work? 

* * * * *

Gary Marcus has an interesting post on the physics Nobel, for AI, and the chemistry as well: Two Nobel Prizes for AI, and Two Paths Forward:

Let’s start with Hinton’s award, which has led a bunch of people to scratch their head. He has absolutely been a leading figure in the machine learning field for decades, original, and, to his credit, persistent even when his line of research was out of favor. Nobody could doubt that he has made major contributions. But the citation seems to indicate that he won it for inventing back-propagation, but, well, he didn’t.

He goes on spell out a more detailed history of early work in neural nets, citing remarks by Steven Grossberg and Jürgen Schmidhuber.

Do LLMs memorize? 25% of "memorized" tokens are actually predicted using general language modeling features

Turns out LLMs don't simply memorize verbatim; 25% of "memorized" tokens are actually predicted using general language modeling features

YouTube: https://t.co/A7eMAxFLVA@arxiv: https://t.co/9KQ1Gi0VML@Bytez: https://t.co/PdSVPTz7RB@askalphaxiv: https://t.co/UK43dX1DeT pic.twitter.com/OXhW8KU6fM

— Tunadorable (@tunadorable) September 26, 2024

Abstract of the linked article:

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently memorize long sequences verbatim, often with serious legal and privacy implications. Much prior work has studied such verbatim memorization using observational data. To complement such work, we develop a framework to study verbatim memorization in a controlled setting by continuing pre-training from Pythia checkpoints with injected sequences. We find that (1) non-trivial amounts of repetition are necessary for verbatim memorization to happen; (2) later (and presumably better) checkpoints are more likely to verbatim memorize sequences, even for out-of-distribution sequences; (3) the generation of memorized sequences is triggered by distributed model states that encode high-level features and makes important use of general language modeling capabilities. Guided by these insights, we develop stress tests to evaluate unlearning methods and find they often fail to remove the verbatim memorized information, while also degrading the LM. Overall, these findings challenge the hypothesis that verbatim memorization stems from specific model weights or mechanisms. Rather, verbatim memorization is intertwined with the LM's general capabilities and thus will be very difficult to isolate and suppress without degrading model quality.

I have a paper that deals with so-called memorization: Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 2: Memory for Texts, Version 3.

Music and the Origins of Language: Neil deGrasse Tyson talks with Daniel Levitin

From the YouTube page:

Did early humans sing before they could talk? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice discover how music helps us recall memories, the singing Neanderthal theory. the default mode network, and how music can be used as medicine with neuroscientist and bestselling author, Daniel Levitin.

Would we have been able to communicate with aliens using music like in Close Encounters of a Third Kind? We explore Levitin’s new book I Heard There Was A Secret Chord which explores how music not only enriches our lives but also impacts our brains, behavior, and health.

We discuss how music can be a source of pleasure and how it captivates us—ever wonder why certain songs get stuck in your head? We explore how music has been a critical form of communication for thousands of years, predating written language, and how it helps encode knowledge and transmit information across generations. From ancient bone flutes to modern-day symphonies, why does music hold such a powerful place in human history?

We also dig into music's therapeutic powers—how it can boost cognitive reserves, help Parkinson's patients walk, relieve pain, and even enhance memory. Did you know that music has the power to activate every part of your brain? Whether you're soothing a baby with a lullaby or summoning old memories through a favorite song, the impact of music is profound. Levitin explains how music therapy is being explored as a potential solution to alleviate neurological afflictions like multiple sclerosis and Tourette syndrome.

Learn about the relationship between music and the brain’s "default mode network"—the state your brain enters when it’s at rest or wandering. We explore memory retrieval and how it’s tied to music’s ability to trigger unique, specific memories.

Discover why certain songs can transport us back to vivid moments in our past, acting as powerful cues for recalling experiences. We discuss how music persists beyond memory-related conditions like Alzheimer's, as seen in the case of Tony Bennett, who, despite the progression of the disease, retained the ability to perform his beloved songs. This connection between music, memory, and neural activation offers exciting possibilities for therapeutic applications in the future.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction: Daniel Levitin
2:55 - Communicating to Aliens Using Music
6:12 - The Evolution of Music & Singing Neanderthal Theory
11:55 - Music v. Communication
15:45 - Neuroscience of Music & Memory Retrieval
24:34 - The Default Mode Network
28:24 - Music as Medicine
42:13 - How Does Memory Work?