Original link: https://blog.est.im/2023/stderr-07
Write down some recent cranky thoughts. Why are there so many trolls and so much hostility online?
According to the conventional explanation, the reason for this problem is that the trolls have logical fallacies, their arguments are slippery, they cannot discuss the facts, and they like to engage in personal attacks.
So how can we “discuss the facts as they are”? Now and now, I have a radical opinion: It is becoming more and more impossible for human beings to discuss facts as they stand. The reason needs to start with a classification: Human language is increasingly divided into three uses:
Ⅰ. Human-to-human emotional communication and emotional simulation needs
Ⅱ. People’s need to describe surrounding “things”
Ⅲ. Language is the medium of knowledge storage and transportation
The following are discussed separately in reverse order:
Ⅲ. Language is Knowledge
Most of the knowledge a person masters is declarative knowledge. Like where is the capital of France? Paris; What atoms are water molecules made of? H₂ and O. Without exception, these things have to be stored and transmitted through language. Modern disciplines are highly developed, and even many special-purpose languages other than general-purpose languages have been invented and used:
- body language, sign language, etc.
- Mathematical language, mathematical notation
- computer programming language
- logic symbol
- Physical, chemical, biological formulas, medical terms, etc.
If the “rational” world is established by human-specific “cause and effect” deduction, then we can say that knowledge that cannot be described by language does not exist. Language is the only medium for the storage and transport of knowledge. Even if someone invents/discovers knowledge that cannot be described by language, it can only be known by him and cannot be transmitted or inherited and as if it does not exist.
Ⅱ. Description of “things”
Language is difficult to describe but very important, common things are:
- image. Such as a photograph, a painting, a diagram, a symbol. The so-called picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes it is difficult to describe in words
- The process of action or movement. Belongs to procedure, non-declarative know-how. Such as playing the piano, riding a bicycle. Even if you can tell others all about music theory and performance skills in words, if they don’t practice it themselves, they still can’t.
- experience directly. Such as smell, vibration, etc. For example, you can’t touch fire with your hands, and it hurts your feet when you hit a stone. Only personal lessons are enough
Among them, the language of “music” was also invented to describe specific rhythms and sound waves. “Language” in today’s world has even broken away from the paradigm of text and has become very abstract, such as visual language (VI) and design language (design language). It is discussed separately from category III here because pictures and emotional things are difficult to be serialized by voice/text.
Ⅰ. Transmission of “emotions”
In fact, the previous discussions on “language” all use “sense” as an IO interface. Mainly use the two pairs of channels: hand + eyes and mouth + ears. But man is a complex creature, and it has higher needs—spiritual pursuits. People are defined by society and need to be recognized; people need a basic judgment of good/bad to other people and the world. Specific to discussions on the Internet, emotional exchange is nothing more than gender relations and current political debates. Among them, the key government is mainly based on military affairs and state affairs. These are the hardest hit areas of emotional AOE, and such topics are the natural habitat of trolls (I am not exempt)
history of natural language
After talking about the three categories of the usefulness of language, think about a question: Why do humans invent language? Common reasons say it was originally for foraging, such as gathering and hunting, to describe flora and fauna and location. The second most important thing is ” storytelling “
With the maturity of spoken language, humans also invented writing and writing, mainly to serve three aspects: witch doctor divination and sacrifice, ownership ownership and transaction.
After the emergence of social division of labor, the function of “natural” language to describe “knowledge” and “things” has been stripped away. The oldest human needs have been highly specialized:
- Gathering and hunting languages degenerate into gastronomic languages. In order to feed their stomachs, all have to work to survive. The language of work is highly alienated. Laymen in the industry don’t understand the jargon at all. Speaking of this, English education has a funny problem. The vast majority of college students go abroad after graduating and find that they are confused about the names and menus of the food. It can be seen how outrageous modern language education is, breaking away from the most fundamental and basic physiological needs.
- Describe the environment and geography, quickly replaced by high technology. It used to be a real adventure to go out far away, and you had to plan the route and ask strangers for directions according to the travel brochure. Now it’s all about mobile navigation, reviews and guides. In this regard, human language ability is replaced by tools.
- The ancient humans told stories around the bonfire, which was replaced by the rich film and television entertainment industry.
- Witch doctors, divination and sacrifices are divided into multiple professions. The doctor’s language, such as doctor’s orders, is simply incomprehensible to ordinary people. Divination has been branded as a feudal superstition, people can only make predictions about the industry according to the media, sacrifices are political activities, and party stereotypes also need to be interpreted. Ownership is determined by legal language, and transactions are determined by a complex financial and logistics system.
I don’t know if you’ve read this far, have you noticed that the application of human language in my category III and II has been highly professionalized and industrialized. Then the conclusion is obvious:
The naturally formed language in the traditional sense of human beings has only one main role left in amateur life: Ⅰ. Emotional output.
answer the opening question
If this point of view needs to be further elaborated, it is that the application of “objective” language has been maturely transformed in all walks of life. The remaining function of the ancestral language left by each civilization is to release it according to the “subjective” viewpoint driven by culture.
Why are there so many trolls online? The language at work is all respectful, and you generally don’t have the patience to read things in the professional field. Non-professional content, leaving only emotions. complete
AI and the future
The problem of the troll is over, and I suddenly remembered a doubt I had before:
Why is sentiment analysis so popular in NLP?
As a wild amateur NLP enthusiast, my first impression of this field is sentiment analysis, training a classifier to see whether this sentence is positive or negative; to be honest, the first time I knew this was quite unexpected, because I subconsciously felt that ” “Positive energy” and “negative energy” are subjective things, and human beings like to tell the truth, yin and yang are strange, and it is difficult to analyze accurately. Especially the kind of metaphor with words in it. As a layman, I originally thought that NLP was used to extract “information” and “intelligence”. I didn’t expect that government and enterprises only use this technology to scan whether the comments are good or not. The market uses it to analyze whether leeks have optimistic or pessimistic expectations. Of course, the problem of sentiment analysis is very common because technically it is a classic case of supervised learning + chat collection, and the results are relatively good.
The emergence of tools such as chatgpt/gpt-4 inspired me, one from ” Difficulties and Replacement of Reproducing ChatGPT “
Think of training a model as having children:
1. Pretrain: When the child is 0-3 years old, we can’t explain too much reason, and he can’t understand it. It’s more about letting him observe the world by himself and learn freely.
2. Instruction Tuning: After the child has learned to speak and has a basic understanding of the world, we can start to teach him some things through demonstrations, such as how to wear clothes and how to brush his teeth.
3. RLHF: When the child is older, he will be able to do many things, and he will no longer completely imitate his parents, but will have his own different behaviors. At this time, parents need to give feedback on these unpredictable behaviors. Reward for good grades and punish for bad deeds.
Combined with the Ⅰ, Ⅱ, and Ⅲ classification of language, perhaps AI can be used to solve the problem of too much hostility on the Internet and create different ways of playing. After all, the emotional value is temporary, and the value of language as knowledge is long-lasting. But don’t forget that emotions are an important way to achieve long-term value. Humans must make good choices based on morality and context.
Note
This article does not have any academic theory support, purely personal cranky. Any errors are completely normal. Ended at 2023-03-26 02:07:08
This article is transferred from: https://blog.est.im/2023/stderr-07
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