š§µ View Thread
š§µ Thread (31 tweets)
@eshear Yes. Good example is the concept of "gentrification". Gentrification is a Marxist term focused on class resentment over progress with tangible measurable outcomes. It was coined by Ruth Glass a Marxist sociologist in the 1960s.
@eshear Tim ferris talked about this a lot in his initial book about popularising framing language and coining new terms and having the most detailed posts on it ie lifestyle design or slow-carb diet but I most often think of EY's cached thought essay around this https://t.co/Hxr6aVGdsC
@eshear There are much stronger mediums than language. https://t.co/jIh1iXUCz7
@AdamWintle Newspeak is kind of the opposite, it's how you use existing power to enforce your will on how ppl think by limiting them. The key part here is that the new word has to actually give them MORE power, or it won't persist in usage.
@DavisonVideo No, like āparasocialā or ālinkbaitāā¦they have to be useful concepts that expand the thoughts you can think https://t.co/mCLVWB5rd3
@eshear I haven't noticed this in my own LLM use/influence. I've tried to coin a number of phrases, but I don't think I've seen even the successful ones like 'scaling hypothesis' or 'commoditize your complement' come up in LLM outputs.
@gwern In the case of LLMs, I have relatively few data points. The original post was mostly about how ppl influence ppl, not AI at all. But it does obviously extend into LLMsā¦and of course it has toā¦bc the limits of language are what we have words forā¦
@gwern Not just that we have words for but ideas that sit close by to words we already have, that can be easily conveyed in a small number of ways. Amusingly I think we are missing a good word for this phenomenon. Physicists would call it a ācoarse grainingā.
@gwern Look into your own personal experience, when you are learning a new field or skillā¦to a first approximation the process is equivalent to hanging meanings onto new words (or hanging new meanings on existing words in that context)ā¦
@gwern If you donāt think of it in terms of control but merely capability, giving someone a new vocabulary to discuss a new topic gives them new affordances in discussing it. And we are more interested in topics we have more affordances in.
@eshear People like some words and phrases better than others, while LLMs are presumably neutral. I've heard the claim that some chemical compounds are systematically under-studied because their names are so unwieldy. That may be a good place for LLMs to discover things people missed.