> Left-leaning news media tends to use the terms woke and wokeness in the vicinity of terms such as bogeyman, trumpists, denigrate, deride, vilify, ridiculed, reactionaries, pejorative, fearmongering, demagoguery, and racism.
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 term is understood well enough, and is deliberately used so.
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.
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 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.
Able to perform observations that human senses are unable to. Able to hold more data in memory at once. Able to perform calculations at a much faster rate. Freedom from emotional bias. There's four reasons right there.
Wall Street journal isn’t right leaning [0]. This may be a case of Overton window at work. [1]
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)
But can you trust "allsides.com" to be impartial in its determination? Another widely known website [0] classifies the WSJ as centre-right (which as a European I would tend to agree more). According to Wikipedia [1], AllSides was founded... by a Republican.
WSJ is classic economic conservative- and has slowly leaned more and more leftwards (towards the center) socially over the past decade. Same place the NYT ended up- probably an outcome of socially liberal people becoming wealthy and realizing that there are problems with extremely left politics.
It's been a really fascinating shift to watch which is also not completely surprising.
This article misrepresents the theory of distributional semantics.
The article implies that words that most often appear "in the vicinity of" each other, or words that are "colocated", are semantically similar.
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.
Sort of disappointed on the comments so far: everyone seems to want to argue the definition rather than examining the approach taken by the author, which is the more interesting point in the article.
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.
I see woke as mainly two things. First, it’s the elevation of feelings above reality, and if need be redescribing reality to contort to certain people’s feelings. (“Certain people” leading into the second point) Second, it’s seeing everything through the lens of historical power imbalances, but importantly it’s taking an “ends justify the means” approach that discards all principles to rectify those imbalances…that rectification is itself the only principle.
It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.
Yeah, see, this is what you've been trained to believe by people with an agenda against addressing systemic reform. They have made you a really great little political pawn.
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.
> red and blue America have very different ideas in mind when they use the terms woke/wokeness. This renders the two groups almost unable to communicate with each other
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?
> It is unfortunate though that forces exist that would try and poison any discussion.
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'm not sure there is any other recourse but to abandon the word.
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.
A related thread yesterday was about how to programatically determine whether a text has been generated by an ML model and how it's very difficult to do it. There are still some aesthetic cues but we will likely become economically indifferent to them in coming months.
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.
[+] [-] msravi|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ashwagary|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] the_gastropod|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] h2odragon|3 years ago|reply
Deus ex machina, then?
If humans can't decide truth for each other, why would machines be better at it?
[+] [-] methodin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fallingknife|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nevermark|3 years ago|reply
Humans can’t. Often don’t want to.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacephysics|3 years ago|reply
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...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
[+] [-] skywal_l|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.allsides.com/blog/fox-news-bias-rated-right-alls...
[+] [-] hadrien01|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllSides
[+] [-] crenwick|3 years ago|reply
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/wall-street-journal-opi...
[+] [-] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
It's been a really fascinating shift to watch which is also not completely surprising.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] the_gastropod|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] srobilliard|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/03/how-to-define-woken...
[+] [-] brodouevencode|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bedhead|3 years ago|reply
It’s all a cult, and an extremely ugly one at that.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] Nevermark|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jfengel|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
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.