Asking an LLM to simplify ‘Humiliating the world?’
Asking an LLM to simplify ‘Humiliating the world?’
after some requests to me to make sense and to make clear
The previous post Humiliating the world? was given to google’s Large Language Model (LLM) Bard with the prompt to simplify.
The raw response is given at https://g.co/bard/share/978caaceeed5
Below I will intersperse my red crayon corrections to the LLM’s simplification which is put in quotes.
1. Response to the LLM’s simplification
Here is a simplified version of the text for first-year university students:
Humility as a new fundamental particle of psychology.
This was a jokey subtitle and is taken as the main idea. The simplification also does not pick up on humility being recently re-evaluated in relation to the big five key traits. (See appendix below.) The joke is that traits are somehow akin to elementary sub-atomic particles in physics. I just explained a joke.
The author argues that humility is a new fundamental particle of psychology, meaning that it is a basic building block of human behavior.
As above, so below.
They say that humility is the ratio between the self and the world, and that it is essential for living a good life.
Completely wrong. We are the living ratio of self/world. Self and world are outcomes of being alive. Humility & pride, if not all emotions and their virtues are outcomes of that living Janus face pivot/hinge/gate/threshold living process. The traits that track emotions and virtues are somewhat hidden from us.
The ratio is self/world, I guess humility/pride those emotions of how we are placed (self-ed) in the world are in proportion to the ratio self/world. Humility/pride is an outcome of the process of living, among many outcomes.
The author also criticizes the current focus on personal growth and well-being in psychology, arguing that it is too focused on the self and not enough on the world.
Yes I criticize personal growth, but because it and stereotypical ‘psychology’, pop or otherwise, lack any reference to the worlding we do— …as a selfing embodiment. Both worlding and selfing are vectors of movement and intention, not foci. Of course a POV can focus on them as subject/object co-defined ‘stuff’, as the “self” and the “world”. But these things are not what we do, but what we produce in doing life with each other.
We lack the common language to separate this out, I suggest we try again, so blur what we have and squint anew.
The simplest way to say this is: that to live means we self/world. I know that this appears very unclear, even using small words.
I may not appear to make sense, perhaps not even to me in six months, so I take requests for clarity and sense very seriously. I do try to draw on common usages and extend them. Otherwise no blog.
Let’s look at the use of the “/”. I draw on a usage common in speech to list indeterminate things: “you know— plea/poetry/pray/words” in a fuzzy way, to chunk some group that may not even supply a well-formed class or category.
Idiosyncratically, I re-intensify/overload that usage and use “/” in order hold in mind a certain de-categorized grouping, trying to promote a suspension of judgement, or squinting to a knowing blur: to self/world being the most common one in recent weeks. A blur not to hide but to emphasise.
This re-intensification of “/” blurs self and world— ….making them less clear, deliberately, so we do not get side-tracked by their definite or common usages, so we do not think of them as two separate things, but one process, in this case: being alive.
Being alive is obvious to us, but is not always clear to us as we move into making worlds for ourselves, a place in which reifications (for example) blind us to what we are doing/making, and we end up focucssing on the world or the self, rather than how we came to be in this place with these things. Or drive us into logomachies in which the worlding and world-building go pear-shaped (like schmittposting). Or we ask silly questions like, “where does art/religion/morality come from?”
They say that we need to cultivate humility in order to better understand and interact with the world around us.
Well, I didn’t say this, and even if I agree with this…but— it has come from the dot points from the blurb of the book on Humility referred to in the post.
Here is a more detailed explanation of the author's key points:
Humility is a ratio between the self and the world.
No, i didn’t say that. Being alive “Janus ratios” self/world. It’s not zero sum but if either side is zero then it is zero, or at least nothing. Not even zero.
The rest of the points below are already dealt with above, and swing around tightly on the book blurb I referenced, and so I say what-evs, yeah, mm’kay.
This means that humility is about how we see ourselves in relation to others and to the world as a whole. If we have a high sense of humility, we will be aware of our own limitations and will be open to learning from others. If we have a low sense of humility, we will be more likely to think that we are better than others and will be less open to learning.
Humility is essential for living a good life. This is because humility allows us to connect with others and to build meaningful relationships. It also allows us to be more open to new experiences and to learn from our mistakes.
The current focus on personal growth and well-being in psychology is too focused on the self and not enough on the world. This is because personal growth and well-being are often seen as goals that can be achieved through individual effort. However, the author argues that we need to cultivate humility in order to better understand and interact with the world around us.
Overall, the author's argument is that humility is a fundamental particle of psychology that is essential for living a good life. They also argue that the current focus on personal growth and well-being in psychology is too focused on the self and not enough on the world.
2. Introduction for sharing the above LLM simplification, by way of a methodology
LLMs like google’s Bard or chatGPTX use a neural network to statistically code relationships of likelihood-edness as many words as a model can handle computationally, this means that they map how words connect in usage (as such is more like connotations than the definitions)(this LLM AI is statistical and not rule-based like 1950s ideas of machine intelligence and expert systems of 30 years ago).
As such with this era of LLM, the simplification misses what I am trying to say:— my writing’s novelty appears as noise, noise it then ‘edits’ away.
If what I write is novel it may regard it like my typos or grammatical malformations, even when they are intentional. Thus it does not incorporate my novelty, as it is noise, as it re-presents my words as to how "most people" might read it or write it (based on its mapping of word-use in aggregate neurality).
So, my current work pushes at the boundaries of what has gone before, and while I do not feel I have uncovered any secret knowledge, it seems to stay secret as soon as I try to write about it.
This is because, while I try to write for an imagined audience, this is not the audience I get.
Also while I imagine an audience, I do not know who they are, which is maybe why I do not get them…
Also I am working things out as I write, the blog is an attempt to better form and inform the writing of this possible novelty to self/world, and others that relate to it.
Appendix - Humility & traits
Generated by google’s chat bot LLM Bard or request for “what recent studies exist on the psychologicla trait of humility in relation to the big five traits”
Exploring the Relationship Between Honesty-Humility, the Big Five, and Liberal Values in Swedish Students (2023): https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/672/672.html
The discriminant validity of honesty-humility: A meta-analysis of the HEXACO, Big Five, and Dark Triad (2020): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656620300702
Humility and the Big Five personality traits: A meta-analysis (2017): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16138875/