• How to use AI effectively to do philosophy.
    I think we should also really emphasize the stuff on confabulation. People seem to be unaware how much LLMs literally just make things up.
  • How to use AI effectively to do philosophy.
    to summarise the thought of this or that philosopher — Banno

    The Research Assistant: Use an LLM to quickly summarize a philosophical concept, physical theory, or historical context to establish a common ground for discussion. Always verify its summaries, as they can be bland or contain errors. — Deepseek

    This is the thing I have a problem with. I dislike the reduction of philosophy to a set of arguments, with philosophers like puppets being made to fight each other. This kind of philosophy seems to always interpret the philosophers badly or controversially. Mere summaries won't do. Since there are a hundred ways of interpreting the Critique of Pure Reason, you cannot rely on Wikipedia, SEP, or LLMs. (I've seen it many times in philosophical discussions; the misuse of Kant and Nietzsche makes me despair.)

    The worry is that LLMs might make this sort of thing more prevalent. So the upshot is I'd want to amend that part of the suggested guidelines.

    EDIT: We might also want to say that legitimate secondary sources ought to be consulted before using LLMs. Arguably it's much better to quote from academic papers or the SEP than from an LLM.
  • How to use AI effectively to do philosophy.
    ↪Banno


    Thanks, this is the kind of discussion we need.

    It might be too willing to tell you what you want to hear, but if you pretend to be your opposite, you can have it tell you want you don't want to hear.

    I’ve used AI to be critical of my own writing. I do this by pretending it is not me. I’ll feed it a draft post attributing it to someone else, and ask for a critique. It’ll try to comment on the style, which I don’t much want, but the right sort of prompt will usually find quite interesting and novel angles.     — Banno

    I like this. I asked Deepseek to incorporate it into a set of guidelines based on the existing AI discussions on TPF. Below is the output. I think it's a useful starting point, and I encourage people here to suggest additions and amendments.

    Point 4 is the most relevant to the OP's question.

    Guidelines for Using LLMs on TPF

    1. Our Core Principle: Augmentation, Not Replacement

    The primary purpose of this forum is the human exchange of ideas. LLMs should be used as tools to enhance your own thinking and communication, not to replace them. The goal is to use the AI to "expand your brain," not to let it do the thinking for you.

    2. The Cardinal Rule: Transparency and Disclosure

    This is the most critical guideline for maintaining trust.

    [*] Substantial Use: If an LLM has contributed significantly to the substance of a post—for example, generating a core argument, providing a structured outline, or composing a lengthy explanation—you must disclose this. A simple note at the end like "I used ChatGPT to help brainstorm the structure of this argument" or "Claude assisted in refining my explanation of Kant's categorical imperative" is sufficient.
    [*] Minor Use: For minor assistance like grammar checking, rephrasing a single confusing sentence, or finding a synonym, disclosure is not mandatory but is still encouraged as a gesture of good faith.
    [*] Direct Quotation: If you directly quote an LLM's output (even a short phrase) to make a point, you should attribute it, just as you would any other source.

    3. Prohibited Uses: What We Consider "Cheating"

    The following uses undermine the community and are prohibited:

    [*] Ghostwriting: Posting content that is entirely or mostly generated by an LLM without significant human input and without disclosure.
    [*] Bypassing Engagement: Using an LLM to formulate responses in a debate that you do not genuinely understand. This turns a dialogue between people into a dialogue between AIs and destroys the "cut-and-thrust" of argument.
    [*] Sock-Puppeting: Using an LLM to fabricate multiple perspectives or fake expertise to support your own position.

    4. Encouraged Uses: How to Use LLMs Philosophically

    These uses align with the forum's goal of pursuing truth and improving thought.

    [*] The Research Assistant: Use an LLM to quickly summarize a philosophical concept, physical theory, or historical context to establish a common ground for discussion. Always verify its summaries, as they can be bland or contain errors.
    [*] The Sparring Partner: Use an LLM to critique your own argument. As Banno suggested, feed it your draft and ask for counter-arguments or weak points. This can help you strengthen your position before posting.
    [*] The Clarifier: Use an LLM to rephrase a dense paragraph from another post or a primary source into plainer language to aid your understanding. (The ultimate responsibility for understanding still lies with you).
    [*] The Stylistic Editor: Use an LLM to help clean up grammar, syntax, or clarity in a post you've already written, ensuring your human ideas are communicated effectively.

    5. A Guide to Good Practice: The "Over-Confident Assistant" Model

    As Simon Willison noted, treat the LLM as an "over-confident pair programming assistant." This mindset is crucial for philosophy:

    [*] You are the Director: You must provide the intellectual direction, the core ideas, and the critical scrutiny. The LLM is a tool to execute tasks within that framework.
    [*] Question Everything: LLMs are designed to be plausible, not correct. They are prone to confabulation (making things up) and averaging biases. Treat their output as a first draft to be rigorously evaluated, not as received wisdom.
    [*] The Final Product is Your Responsibility: You are ultimately accountable for the content you post. If an LLM introduces a factual error or a weak argument, it is your responsibility to have caught it.

    6. A Note on Detection and Trust

    As the conversation notes, it is becoming impossible to reliably detect LLM use. Therefore, these guidelines cannot be enforced primarily through punishment. Their purpose is to foster a culture of intellectual honesty and collective trust. We rely on members to act in good faith for the health of the community.


    Summary: A Proposed Forum Policy Statement

    LLMs like ChatGPT are powerful tools that are now part of the intellectual landscape. On this forum, we do not ban their use, but we insist it is done responsibly.

    [*] We encourage using LLMs as assistants for research, brainstorming, and editing.
    [*] We require the transparent disclosure of substantial AI assistance in your posts.
    [*] We prohibit using LLMs to ghostwrite posts or to avoid genuine intellectual engagement.

    The goal is to use these tools to augment human thought and discussion, not to replace it. The final responsibility for the content and quality of your posts always rests with you.     — Deepseek
  • Banning AI Altogether
    ↪Paine


    Despite what I said I actually tend to think of the automation of tasks as something you take advantage of after you've learned how to do it manually, which fits with Willison's thought that you have to know your way about before you can properly use the automation tools.

    So it's at the learning stage that how AI is used is most crucial, because used badly it probably can allow and encourage one to avoid the bit where you learn how to do it manually.

    I realize I've taken two sides of a debate here.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    Introduction: EXISTENTIALISM

    @Moliere I'm not jumping the gun here; I just want to look at something I'm particularly interested in, namely the role of examples or illustrations. It's far from being the focus of this section but it's the thing that caught my eye, and it's significant with respect to method.

    For a long time I've been trying to get my head around Adorno's antipathy to examples and I've explored it a few times in this reading group already. The passing mentions in this section shed some light on it. And although I don't know much about Sartre, I do know about his examples (the waiter, particularly).

    There are two passages in the section which are relevant:

    The schools which take derivatives of the Latin existere [Latin: to exist] as their device, would like to summon up the reality of corporeal experience against the alienated particular science. Out of fear of reification they shrink back from what has substantive content. It turns unwittingly into an example.

    The "schools" likely refers to the schools of existentialism and phenomenology (which are related). And as I've indicated, I take the "It" to refer back to "the reality of corporeal experience," so Adorno means to point out that the immediacy of experience which the existentialists want to get close to becomes in their hands a mere instantiation of their abstract concept. They "shrink back" from things for fear of treating them as fixed, i.e., as reified, but in doing so fall back on the formal and abstract. So content becomes formal.

    they universally-conceptually philosophize that which does not vanish into its concept, that which is contrary to it, instead of thinking it through. They illustrate existence [Existenz] in the existing [Existierenden].

    They illustrate instead of thinking through. They go from the concept to the particular instead of thinking through the particular to reach the universal.

    So it came to me that we can represent this aspect of the difference in method like this:

    SARTRE: Universal ---illustrated by---> Particular
    ADORNO: Particular ---reveals---> Universal (or contradictions therein)

    Worked up into a table:

    +---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
|   | Direction of Thought  | Role of Particular     | Role of Universal    |
+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| S | Universal → Particular| Serves as an example/  | Predefined, applied, |
|   |                       | illustration           | illustrated          |
+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| A | Particular → Universal| Engine of analysis,    | Revealed, mediated,  |
|   |                       | problem to be unfolded | contradictory        |
+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

    QUESTION: If Adorno goes from particular to universal, shouldn't we a bit suspicious that he always ends up in the same places: commodification, instrumental reason, bourgeois consciousness, capitalist exploitation, etc?
  • Banning AI Altogether
    It precludes you from becoming more skillful. The disengagement from the art limits your horizon. — Paine

    It can do, but not necessarily. Copernicus said "If AI helps me compose more correctly", so it's Copernicus who is doing the composing. Why believe that the use of AI constitutes a disengagement from the art rather than an efficient way to engage and learn that art? I understand the cynicism, but it's important to see that there are other ways of using LLMs.

    It's much easier to see this in computer programming. Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django web framework, has some interesting things to say that cut through the crap.

    Ignore the “AGI” hype—LLMs are still fancy autocomplete. All they do is predict a sequence of tokens—but it turns out writing code is mostly about stringing tokens together in the right order, so they can be extremely useful for this provided you point them in the right direction.

    If you assume that this technology will implement your project perfectly without you needing to exercise any of your own skill you’ll quickly be disappointed.

    Instead, use them to augment your abilities. My current favorite mental model is to think of them as an over-confident pair programming assistant who’s lightning fast at looking things up, can churn out relevant examples at a moment’s notice and can execute on tedious tasks without complaint.     — Simon Willison

    The fact is that if you don't know what you're doing, the result will be a mess. I've used AI for programming before and you really have to guide it and pay close attention to everything it does and constantly question its decisions. What makes this example useful in the debate is that in programming, good practice is enforced by the necessity for code to run without bugs, so we can clearly see what good practice looks like—and these are the strategies that will also work in situations where bad practice is not similarly punished, like creative writing or writing posts for TPF.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    I think it's like this: the score of a symphony is like what Adorno means by form. A particular production of the symphony, alive in time, is part of the content. The remainder he's talking about is the unique aspects of a particular performance, like the way the first violinist connected some notes and kept others separate, or the tempo the conductor set. Haven't you ever gone looking for the perfect performance if Mozart's Requiem? You're looking for details don't appear in the score. Yet every performance you come across is OF that one score. The score is like something holy and separate from the world. The content is made of sweat and tears. — frank

    Nice.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    Now "substance" is assigned to the societal totality, which from the theory perspective is the whole of "form". So substance correlates better with form here. Accordingly, "philosophical method" is a property of the individual subject and therefore ought to correlate with content. However, the demonstrated remainder denies the actual truth of this correlation. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Note that the term translated by Redmond as substantiality is Inhaltlichkeit. This is translated by Thorne and Menda as content. They also say the following:

    Adorno’s title for this section is Inhaltlichkeit und Methode, where the word we’ve translated as “content” is actually a higher abstraction, something like “contentuality,” if that were a word. You might think of the title as “Method and the Matter of Content.” — Content and Method

    Other ways of rendering it would be "the quality of having content" or "contentfulness" or "that which pertains to or constitutes content".

    In Kant it is contrasted with form. So form is the abstract, logical structure, and Inhaltlichkeit relates to judgements or perceptions that determine objects. I think this, rather than a classical metaphysics, is the conceptual toolkit to apply in interpreting this section.

    It might help to think of how Adorno uses Inhaltlichkeit in relation to art, arguably his favourite topic (if we include music). He means it to refer to art that embodies or reveals reality in some way, and opposes this to formalism, which has no meaning beyond its experimentation like postmodernist techniques in literature that are indulged for their own sake, i.e., where the form is empty.
  • Marxism - philosophy or hoax?
    ↪frank


    I think it's just about possible to argue that the popularity of Marx's philosophy might have been partly based on ressentiment—and that actions by some of his adherents were motivated by it, e.g., in the violence of revolutionary movements—but not that his philosophy is itself based on it, since ressentiment, at least in Nietzsche's use of the term, includes not only projecting blame on to the stronger party but also and obversely celebrating or affirming one's own state of weakness. This is something Marx's philosophy does not do: it seeks to abolish the conditions of weakness.

    It's also a bit perverse to claim that a philosophy that problematizes that which supporters of the status quo will tell you is unproblematic is providing any kind of comfort. Unless any kind of hope for change at all is an opium, in which case it's not much of an accusation.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    @Moliere I'm interested to see what you think of the next section, which seems to be mainly about Sartre. Me, I haven't read any Sartre, so I'm not really able to judge Adorno's critique.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    ↪Metaphysician Undercover


    I'm not convinced we disagree, but as @frank says, this kind of talk can get convoluted. It's at least partly a fractal kind of thing: you have this dialectical pair, form and content, but within the content this pair is repeated again. So for example, philosophy has its form and its content, where the latter might be a concept or a social relation, but that concept or social relation (the object) itself has both its own form, e.g., the principle of exchange, as well as its content, i.e., the object's specificity and non-identity. It's form/content all the way down.

    As @frank also said, form and content imply one another. This is not as much of a boring platitude as it might seem, because I think the importance of this issue for Adorno is that in actually existing society and science and philosophy, form tends to become divorced from content. An example is in the later section, "Detemporalization of Time," where he shows how in Kant, time becomes pure form without any content at all. Presumably this is emblematic of Enlightenment thinking.

    The significance I suppose is that dialectics is the only method which is properly aware of this and which refuses to allow form and content to be separated (although Adorno cricizes Hegel for doing it too) — and actually enacts this in its own practice and self-conception.

    And this is to say that negative dialectics resists reification, because the separation of form and content is the mechanism of reification.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    Introduction: SUBSTANTIALITY AND METHOD

    The idea here goes back to a concern of Adorno's that has come up before: the required unity of form and content. Here, form is philosophical method, and content or substantiality is what is being analyzed or philosophized about.

    That generation, also Simmel, Husserl, and Scheler, sought in vain for a philosophy which, receptive to the objects, would render itself substantive. What tradition dismissed is what tradition desired. This does not obviate the methodological consideration, of how substantive particular analysis stands in relation to the theory of dialectics. The idealistic-identity philosophical avowal that the latter dissolves itself in the former is unconvincing. Objectively, however, the whole which is expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed, not first through the cognizing subject. The mediation of both is itself substantive, that through the social totality.

    Adorno shares the famous goal of Husserl's:

    We can absolutely not rest content with “mere words” […]. Meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions—if by any intuitions at all—are not enough: we must go back to the “things themselves”. — Husserl, Logical Investigations

    Negative dialectics reflects this attitude in its scepticism towards conceptual overreach, and in its "priority of the object". But it also aims to show that phenomenology and related philosophies couldn't possibly achieve their goal, because they used the wrong methods (wrong because they relied on immediacy and thus did not appreciate mediation). Adorno is showing how his method is better than those of both (a) Bergson, Simmel, Husserl, and Scheler; and (b) Hegel. The former used flawed methods and the latter used a good method (dialectics) in a flawed manner (idealism).

    The crucial statement is...

    the whole which is expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed

    Dialectical theory is brought out of the particulars, because it is latent within them already — things and relations in reality are dialectical. This relationship between substance (particulars) and method (theory) is what this section is about, and in a way it's what dialectics is all about too.

    More concretely what he is saying here is that the only way to get to the things themselves, to really be receptive to objects, is to see them as nodes of the social whole.

    It is however also formal due to the abstract nomothetism [Gesetzmaessigkeit] of the totality itself, that of exchange. Idealism, which distilled its absolute Spirit out of this, encrypted something true at the same time, that this mediation encounters phenomena as a compulsory mechanism; this lurks behind the so-called constitution-problem. Philosophical experience does not have this universal immediately, as appearance, but as abstractly as it objectively is. It is constrained towards the exit of the particular, without forgetting what it does not have, but knows. Its path is doubled, similar to the Heraclitean one, the upwards and the downwards. While it assures itself of the real determination of the phenomena through its concept, it cannot profess this ontologically, as what is true in itself. It is fused with what is untrue, with the repressive principle, and this lessens even its epistemological dignity. It forms no positive telos in which cognition would halt. The negativity of the universal solidifies for its part the cognition into the particular as that which is to be rescued. “The only thoughts which are true are those which do not understand themselves” [Adorno quotes himself, from Minima Moralia].

    Adorno points out that the abstract character of the social whole is not an immediate given in philosophical experience. In starting with the particular, and moving out from there, one starts with the appearance and moves to the abstract conceptual form. Now, the latter is ideological — remember that we do not impose our own concepts from the outside but follow the meaningful concepts that exist — and only falsely describes the particular that we started with. Or more fundamentally, the concept that identifies the particular, e.g., as a worker or a commodity, actually contains the repressive principle, so there is an essential falsity in understanding owing to the provenance of the concepts we must use.

    This "negativity of the universal," which means formal, logical abstraction's denial of the particular's specificity, has the result (if we are critical and self-reflective in the way that Adorno says is necessary for philosophical experience) of fixing our thought and knowledge back onto the particular again, which is now seen as something that needs rescuing from its conceptual shackles.

    I see the meaning of the MM quotation as something like this: thoughts which do not understand themselves are thoughts which are not captured by higher-order concepts or systems thereof.

    On second thoughts, it's about arrogance vs. self-awareness and humility: thoughts which "understand themselves" are thoughts which are unaware of how insufficient they are.

    In their inalienably general elements, all philosophy, even those with the intention of freedom, carries along the unfreedom in which that of society is prolonged. It has the compulsion in itself; however this latter alone protects it from regression into caprice. Thinking is capable of critically cognizing the compulsory character immanent to it; its own inner compulsion is the medium of its emancipation.

    This follows naturally from what went before. All philosophy contains and tends to perpetuate the repression or domination at the heart of society, because its concepts are sociohistorical sedimentations of repressive social relations. To anticipate: this is why, since we must do philosophy, we have to do it critically, so as to minimize the perpetuation.

    Then Adorno says that this very feature, namely that it contains unfreedom, is what allows philosophy to be self-critical and prevent the perpetuation of unfreedom even though it remains within it.

    But how can it be both disease and cure at the same time? My vague and intuitive first attempt is: the other aspect to this compulsory character of thought is its compulsive pursuit of understanding. It doesn't surrender itself to "caprice," in other words, it has the strength to follow through to the end, to try to capture the particulars.

    To be slightly less vague: as I said before, social unfreedom is carried into philosophy in the form of abstraction, formalism, and logic. This logic is rigorous, and it is this compulsion of rigour that allows thought to push through to the truth. Philosophy doesn't find the truth in the fantasy that it can cast aside all restraints and do what it wants — this is mere "caprice" — but by knowingly working within the confines of the abstractions whose sources it aims to question.

    The freedom towards the object, which in Hegel resulted in the disempowerment of the subject, is first of all to be established. Until then, dialectics diverges as method and as one of the thing. Concept and reality are of the same contradictory essence. What tears society apart antagonistically, the dominating principle, is the same thing which, intellectualized, causes the difference between the concept and that which is subordinated under it.

    It follows from what has gone before that antagonistic reality and antagonistic method/theory are two sides of the same coin. Or rather, they are the same thing, the latter just being the "intellectualized" aspect of the former. Specifically, the antagonism in society finds its expression in theory in the antagonism and divergence "between the concept and that which is subordinated under it." And this latter appears as contradiction.

    So Adorno then repeats the central points he made earlier in the introduction:

    The logical form of the contradiction however achieves that difference, because every one which does not suborn itself to the unity of the dominating principle, according to the measure of the principle, does not appear as a polyvalence which is indifferent to this, but as an infraction against logic.

    The earlier statements to this effect were as follows:

    everything which does not conform to such, everything qualitatively divergent assumes the signature of the contradiction. The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics measures what is heterogenous in unitary thinking. By colliding against its own borders, it reaches beyond itself. — Dialectics Not a Standpoint

    Contradiction is non-identity under the bane of the law — Dialectics Not a Standpoint

    Moving on...

    On the other hand the remainder of the divergence between philosophic conception and follow-through also testifies to something of the non-identity, which neither permits the method to wholly absorb the contents, in which alone they are supposed to be, nor intellectualizes the contents. The pre-eminence of content reveals itself as the necessary insufficiency of the method.

    It feels like he is trying to turn the negative into a positive, in emphasizing that the divergence has critical potential and contains a path to truth.

    Between philosophical conception and follow-through (execution) there is a divergence because of the divergence between concept and object already described. But in the execution there is a remainder, which I think is either a receptivity to the non-identical, or is just the non-identical itself (which agrees with your interpretation @Metaphysician Undercover).

    Another way to put that is that Adorno is moving from a description of the divergence between concept and object to an emphasis that in philosophical experience, particularly the execution of dialectical method, this divergence has a substantive remainder, namely the non-identical itself. That is, this gap between concept and object isn't just empty.

    What as such, in the form of general reflection, must be said, in order not to be defenseless against the philosophy of the philosophers, legitimates itself solely in the follow-through, and is negated therein in turn as method. Its surplus is with respect to its content abstract, false; Hegel already had to accept this discrepancy in the preface to the Phenomenology. The philosophical ideal would be to render the accounting one would give for what one does superfluous, by doing it.

    Note that the surplus and the remainder are not the same thing. The surplus is that of method and theory; the remainder is non-identical content.

    The surplus is "the accounting one would give for what one does," i.e., the conceptual superstructure. It is in the methodological execution that thought moves to the particulars and leaves the methodology behind, whereupon you find the non-identical remainder, and (ideally) cast aside the theoretical baggage, i.e., the surplus.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    In this section, I think Adorno attributes substantiality to society. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Yes. Substantiality is the domain of social mediation:

    The mediation of both is itself substantive, that through the social totality.

    And the content of that substantiality is social particulars, i.e., "the particular to be analyzed", otherwise referred to by Adorno as "the object".

    The "totality" referred to in the first passage is described as formal, and "that of exchange". The second passage is more difficult but I take Adorno to be saying that the substantiality referred to is logical. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Yes. I would add that Adorno is describing the social totality dialectically: he is contrasting substantial and formal, saying that the mediating social totality is substantial, a domain of objective social relations and not merely concepts, but is also "formal due to the abstract nomothetism [lawfulness] of the totality itself, that of exchange." The substantive social totality of relations, processes, and qualities takes on, via reification, a fundamentally formal and abstract character due to the development of commodity exchange as the overarching social imperative — take for instance the flattening of diversity under the regime of universal fungibility (money isn't new but only under capitalism does it rule over almost everything). The "nomothetism" refers to things like the law of value, and the principle of exchange.

    I'll be doing an analysis of this section soon and I'll try to say something about the "remainder" that you mentioned.
  • Is sex/relationships entirely a selfish act?
    ↪Paine


    Yep. And since Darkneos is refusing to edit the OP, I'm closing this discussion.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    No actually. I'm going to reach out to some other moderators and request that you not. — Philosophim

    This is very childish. You actually chose to ignore these comments:

    (I) intend to stay out of it — Jamal

    I shall leave you to do your thing. — Jamal

    I suggest you carry on discussing your OP, because I won't be posting in this discussion again.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪Philosophim


    I'll post in this topic as much as I want. That said, since it became clear yesterday (or whenever it was) that you were, in an arrogant and ridiculous manner, refusing to think through or face up to some important challenges to your obviously fallacious OP, I have avoided the discussion and intend to stay out of it. My discussion with @frank was off-topic, and just a short diversion. I shall leave you to do your thing.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪frank


    My God frank, you are mightily obnoxious today. I am very well aware of the opinions of the moderator in question. But Hanover didn't deny that transwomen are women, not did his statement imply it.

    In any case, saying so on its own isn't grounds for a ban, but it can be a red flag, i.e., it might be an indication of bigotry so would warrant a closer look.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    Is it any wonder people are flocking to LLMs for good conversation?
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪frank


    It's not outrageous to ask someone on a philosophy forum to back up an eccentric and implausible statement.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪frank


    So I actually have to ask you to point me to where it was said, or to explain what was said? Because I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    we used to have a moderator who warned he would ban anyone who said what you just said — frank

    I don't think so.
  • Is sex/relationships entirely a selfish act?
    It's from this thread, there isn't much context it's pretty much the direct quote in all it's entirety. — Darkneos

    I don't want to know where it's from. I want you to edit the OP to properly identify the source of the quotation.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪Philosophim


    Plenty can be lobbed your way. It's just not worth it. I have my sanity and peace of mind to preserve.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪Philosophim


    That is a really stupid post.
  • Tranwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?
    ↪Philosophim


    Obviously if "man" is only about sex, trans men are not men. But this "if" is what is being debated, so you're just begging the question.

    The debate has been going on for years, and you have made no attempt to research it or address the arguments that defend the notion that trans women are women etc., i.e., the sophisticated arguments which try to show that the terms "man" and "woman" are more complex than your snappy definition allows.

    See for example the idea that "man" and "woman" are cluster concepts:

    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Sorry for ranting. — bongo fury

    :cool:
  • Banning AI Altogether
    For some reason it always puts spaces between em-dashes, which is a stylistic faux pas outside a few style guides (basically just AP), and so this is one way to tell between usages—also, it virtually never uses an em-dash for a single trailing clause, instead always bracketing a clause in them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    This is useful information. I had it in my mind that it didn't use the spaces, so I started using spaces to distinguish myself. I guess I'll go back to spaceless em dashes. (But I think either way is ok, despite what style authorities might say)

    But the fact that it never uses an em dash for a single trailing clause—this is very good to know.

    Anyhow, it seems to me that the main risk of them are:

    Sycophantic confirmation bias; anything said to GPT in particular is "genius;"
    Hallucination of sources, which is bad for any information environment when they get repeated.     — Count Timothy von Icarus

    :up:

    Yes, the hallucination is still quite bad.
  • Is sex/relationships entirely a selfish act?
    ↪Darkneos


    Please identify the author and source of that quotation so it can be read in context.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    This is obviously missing the point. We knew the order of listing was biased and constantly under attack from bots. It was our job to filter and find actually authored texts, and attribute their epistemic value or lack of it to the genuinely accountable authors. — bongo fury

    And we have to do something similar with LLMs. So it's a "no" to this:

    You honestly now want to defer those epistemic judgements to a bot? — bongo fury

    As for the thesaurus issue...

    No. Well done you. Getting the thesaurus to suggest whole phrases and sentences is obviously plagiarism. The gaping difference denied, again. — bongo fury

    I'm not denying the difference between a word and a phrase. I'm just wondering where the line is in your mind. One word is ok, but a two word phrase isn't? Three, maybe?

    If you're here just to rant, I guess that's ok, but I won't be carrying on a discussion with someone so rude and confrontational. There really is no call for it. What I want to do — now that @T Clark and @apokrisis have clarified this for me — is develop a set of best practices. Since the technology won't go away, your complaints are beside the point from my point of view as someone who wants to work out how best to use it.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    I'm mystified that percipient philosophers can't see a gaping difference between (A) using a search engine to produce a list of texts containing a given string (well done, us and it) and on tother hand (B) swallowing the insulting fantasy of interaction with an intelligent oracle. — bongo fury

    This is obviously a false dichotomy. One can use LLMs without committing to the latter.

    That is, I can't understand or sympathise with them admitting to reading the AI summary, instead of ignoring that insulting click-bait and searching immediately among the genuinely authored texts. — bongo fury

    This is quite amusing. The regular Google results have been garbage for years, and it was partly this fact that led to the tendency getting its own name: enshittification. And search engines have never simply produced "a list of texts containing a given string". To think that the AI-overview is clickbait, but the actual clickbait, i.e., the sponsored and gamified results that actually try to get you to click are somehow not — well, you've got it completely the wrong way round.

    Yes — bongo fury

    Is using a thesaurus to write a novel and saying you wrote it lying?
  • Banning AI Altogether
    ↪Tom Storm


    I don't know what's going on there. It could just be bad, lazy, or inconsistent use of LLMs. If there are any applications which are not terrible, they might be written by people who are better at using them.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Part of that discussion has to be putting our cards on the table, and refusing to be ashamed of it. It's not a matter of using AI vs. not using AI; it's how we use it.

    Currently, its use frowned upon and seen as cheating — like using a calculator to do arithmetic — such that most people will be reluctant to admit how much they use it. It's like telling the doctor how much you drink: you don't completely deny drinking, you just under-report it.

    Take me for instance. Although I use LLMs quite a lot, for everyday tasks or research, in the context of philosophical discussion or creative writing I always say I never directly cut and paste what they give me. But sometimes they come up with a word or phrase that is too good to refuse. So — was I lying?

    But using that word or phrase is surely no worse than using a thesaurus. Which leads me to think that it probably ought to be seen as, and used as, a multitool.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    ↪Janus


    I sympathize. But you're proposing something and instead of telling us why it's a good proposal you're saying "if you want reasons, go and find out yourself." This is not persuasive.

    And it isn't clear precisely what you are proposing. What does it mean to ban the use of LLMs? If you mean the use of them to generate the content of your posts, that's already banned — although it's not always possible to detect LLM-generated text, and it will become increasingly impossible. If you mean using them to research or proof-read your posts, that's impossible to ban, not to mention misguided.

    The reality, which many members are not aware of, is that a great many posts on TPF have been written in full or in part by LLMs, even those posted by long-term members known for their writing skills and knowledge. I've been able to detect some of them because I know what ChatGPT's default style looks like (annoyingly, it uses a lot of em dashes, like I do myself). But it's trivially easy to make an LLM's generated output undetectable, by asking it to alter its style. So although I still want to enforce the ban on LLM-generated text, a lot of it will slip under the radar.

    And there are cases where a fully LLM-generated post is acceptable: translation comes to mind, for those whose first language is not English. Maybe that's the only acceptable case, I'm not sure. But then it becomes fuzzy how to define "fully LLM-generated": translations and grammar-corrected output, it could be argued, are not fully generated by the LLMs, whereas the text they produce based on a prompt is — but is there a clear line?

    Anyway, the following comments, though totally understandable, are significantly outdated:

    I guess I’m naïve or maybe just not very perceptive, but I haven’t recognized any posts definitely written by AI. There have always been enough overblown and oratorical but poorly thought out OPs and posts here on the forum even without AI that I don’t know how easy it is to tell. Perhaps it would be helpful if people called them out when you see them. — T Clark

    Interesting, I haven’t noticed particularly. But I avoid reading lengthy and didactic posts which are often poorly written. The AI stuff I’ve seen often seems peculiarly worded and difficult to read. — Tom Storm

    LLMs now routinely write clear and flowing prose.

    people can educate themselves about that by undertaking a search in whatever search engine they use — Janus

    Where they will now get an AI-generated answer, which will be infinitely better than the enshittified results that Google was giving us until quite recently.

    This is the reality:

    The A.I.-derived OP’s are likely to be better thought-out than many non-A.I. efforts. Banning A.I. is banning background research that will become built into the way we engage with each other. Think of it as walking around with a host of sages constantly whispering purported words of wisdom into your ear, and it is up to you to sort out what is valuable and what isn’t, what is true and what is false. — Joshs

    The tool is now ubiquitous. Every intellectual is going to have to factor it into their practice. Time to learn what that means.

    If you need to cheat to pass your exams or publish your research, then in the end it is you who suffers. But if AI can be used in a way than actually expands your brain, then that ought to be encouraged.

    PF seems a suitably low stakes place to evolve some social norms.     — apokrisis

    :up:

    It cannot be avoided, and it has great potential both for benefit and for harm. We need to reduce the harm by discussing and formulating good practice (and then producing a dedicated guide to the use of AI in the Help section).
  • Does Zizek say that sex is a bad thing?
    ↪Darkneos


    Stop starting discussions to discuss discussions you've been having on Quora and Reddit. I'm closing this.
  • Does Zizek say that sex is a bad thing?
    Had Zizek posted that here without us knowing it him, he'd be ridiculed relentlessly. — Hanover

    They're not Zizek quotes.
  • The News Discussion
    ↪javi2541997


    :up:

    I'll be delving into his work soon.
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    Nope, across the board people do end up stupider for using it. — Darkneos

    I already understood that you believed so. I told you that I disagreed, and you just re-iterated your belief. This is not how discussion works.

    Which. Studies.
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    Studies have found that people who use AI have lower cognitive ability than people who don't, you're making yourself worse off for using it. — Darkneos

    Which studies?

    I think what it comes down to is that it depends on how it's used. This is where it gets interesting.
  • The News Discussion
    ↪Mikie
    ↪AmadeusD


    There is only so much garbage I can tolerate on the forum, and I'm not going to spend my time deleting posts one by one. So please up your game or be banned.
  • Reading group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
    To be clear, I am not saying that Aristotle's accidents are equivalent to Adornos non-identical. Equivalence itself is taken as an identity type of relation which would be misleading in this context. I am using Aristotle's approach to the object, defining it as primary substance, as an analogy to help understand Adorno's approach. So I am pointing at a similarity between the two. — Metaphysician Undercover

    Yes, I suspected so. I should have just said that I appreciated the analogy.

    So I am definitely not saying concepts=bad, and intuitions=good — Metaphysician Undercover

    Cool.
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