Your word of the day explains all you need to know about the inanity of our modern politics and culture. The word is shibboleth.
Ashibboleth is anycustomor tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.[3][4][5]Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies aspasswords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats.
It’s a fun word to say also: shib – o – leth. Sounds like the name of a forgetful Irish boxer.
The thing is, in the Bible there is a story about how the difficult pronunciation of this word was used to separate out a tribe that was then slaughtered.
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
It’s all fun and games till lisping causes genocide. And BTW, if you actually let your kids read the Bible you’re likely in danger of having child services called on you, so make sure to have them play some violent video games afterwards to calm down their Bronze-Age PTSD a little.
A shibboleth is, culturally, what gerrymandering is politically. It’s a way to divide with the intention of destruction of a group. Our shibboleths are the dog whistles of race, gender, assault weapons, abortion, etc.
The thing is, in the 20th c there used to be things you just didn’t say, because everyone realized that talking about differences in a pluralistic society was, well, dangerous.
What changed? Well, I hate to say it, but the Internet happened. Or as Neil Stephenson calls it in his recent book Fall, the Miasma.
Let’s consider the name of the Internet as a shibboleth for a second. What if we started calling the Internet “The Miasma”? We could at least separate out the folks who blindly believe everything they read from those who view the whole thing as a pernicious distraction from the real issues facing us. That would make for a better world, right?
But that’s the trap, thinking that just changing the words leads us to a greater understanding of the truth. The truth is, language itself is the trap, and until we build new and better forms of communication for brains to interface, the trap will just draw us in deeper the more we struggle with it.
Not a fan of Musk personally, but at least his Neuralink company is building in the right direction.
The work is the product ofNeuralink, a company Musk founded in 2016 to develop a high-bandwidth, implantable brain-computer interface (BCI). He says the initial goal is to enable people with quadriplegia to control a computer or smartphone using just their thoughts. But Musk’s vision is much more ambitious than that: he seeks to enable humans to “merge” with AI, giving people superhuman intelligence—an objective that is much more hype than an actual plan for new technology development.
Neuralink prototype device. Credit: Neuralink
On a more practical note, “the goal is to record from and stimulate [signals called] spikes in neurons” with an order of magnitude more bandwidth than what has been done to date.
Once you start seeing language itself as just bad technology, you start to imagine better ones, where our interface plane is managed by AIs devoted to facilitating better communication and interaction. This is HAiL, and I am convinced more and more every day it’s the right river for our species to float down. Dangerous waters for sure, but the camp we have made out of words is hopelessly befouled.
Why do you need AI’s to translate between different groups of people? Isn’t this what human leaders ought to be doing?
You seem to view language as being bad or broken technology, but then it seems that you propose what looks like an even more complex form of language, namely AI systems that translate from one language to another.
I think it’s entirely possible for humans to have leaders that do this translation work, and ideally this is what we would do. The people who do this in the modern world, though, are largely attacked by American left for even _associating_ with people on the right.
There is definitely a community of people who are trying to understand both sides, who are capable of empathizing both with trump voters, and with the people who were terrified of trump. This community finds itself attacked by mainstream sources, and could never present its arguments in the New York times, for example, i think because of the amount of fear that is present in America right now.
Witness both the extreme popularity of someone like Joe Rogan, and the animosity which his rise has been greeted by people on the left. They hate this guy for being willing to _talk_ to someone like Alex Jones. I think they are right that Jones has said some awful things, but i think they’re wrong for thinking you can silence unpopular opinions and then make them go away. There’s also this cultural denialism; the progressive left is culturally extremely powerful, and seem to be in denial of the extent to which this is the case.
I doesn’t take a complex AI algorithm to understand that when Alex Jones says he’s worried lizard people run the world, this is easily translated into a belief that the world is run by unfeeling sociopaths who don’t care about human values. For whatever reason that believe doesn’t seem to have been picked up, i think because most serious adults think Alex Jones is ‘insane’ and, doing “the language thing” you’ve talked about extensively – this means we can’t think anything positive about him at all. All i think it takes to fix this is a cultural norm that says ‘avoid attaching emotional salience to words; see them as predictive descriptors only, as much as possible.’ This is tricky to do but not impossible.
I’m fascinated by your blog because you seem to have reached a conclusion i reached years ago – that there’s something seriously fucked up with language – but the difference is that i immediately discarded this conclusion as being absurd. What I eventually concluded was that i needed to prioritize relationships and emotions _above_ language, and to not allow language exchanged between me and loved ones to cause me to become upset towards them. That has been an amazingly effective technique, which I think i picked up from the line in ‘Snow Crash’ where Uncle Enzo says that we stop ideological viruses by prizing personal relationships above rules and patterns.
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TrustNoRobot 
Why do you need AI’s to translate between different groups of people? Isn’t this what human leaders ought to be doing?
You seem to view language as being bad or broken technology, but then it seems that you propose what looks like an even more complex form of language, namely AI systems that translate from one language to another.
I think it’s entirely possible for humans to have leaders that do this translation work, and ideally this is what we would do. The people who do this in the modern world, though, are largely attacked by American left for even _associating_ with people on the right.
There is definitely a community of people who are trying to understand both sides, who are capable of empathizing both with trump voters, and with the people who were terrified of trump. This community finds itself attacked by mainstream sources, and could never present its arguments in the New York times, for example, i think because of the amount of fear that is present in America right now.
Witness both the extreme popularity of someone like Joe Rogan, and the animosity which his rise has been greeted by people on the left. They hate this guy for being willing to _talk_ to someone like Alex Jones. I think they are right that Jones has said some awful things, but i think they’re wrong for thinking you can silence unpopular opinions and then make them go away. There’s also this cultural denialism; the progressive left is culturally extremely powerful, and seem to be in denial of the extent to which this is the case.
I doesn’t take a complex AI algorithm to understand that when Alex Jones says he’s worried lizard people run the world, this is easily translated into a belief that the world is run by unfeeling sociopaths who don’t care about human values. For whatever reason that believe doesn’t seem to have been picked up, i think because most serious adults think Alex Jones is ‘insane’ and, doing “the language thing” you’ve talked about extensively – this means we can’t think anything positive about him at all. All i think it takes to fix this is a cultural norm that says ‘avoid attaching emotional salience to words; see them as predictive descriptors only, as much as possible.’ This is tricky to do but not impossible.
I’m fascinated by your blog because you seem to have reached a conclusion i reached years ago – that there’s something seriously fucked up with language – but the difference is that i immediately discarded this conclusion as being absurd. What I eventually concluded was that i needed to prioritize relationships and emotions _above_ language, and to not allow language exchanged between me and loved ones to cause me to become upset towards them. That has been an amazingly effective technique, which I think i picked up from the line in ‘Snow Crash’ where Uncle Enzo says that we stop ideological viruses by prizing personal relationships above rules and patterns.
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