I'd like to have a narrow, precise argument please
March 31 2023
I was reading Resident Contrarian’s recent blog post when a throwaway line at the beginning caught my attention, prompting a longer train of thought:
The most troublesome arguments to try to make are those that are both very specific and limited (and are by nature of that more or less non-controversial) …
I’ll need to re-read his post multiple times to understand his actual argument — I find that often true of him, and the rationalist community (even though he hates them). Until then, I want to address just these lines, and the sentiment behind them, which frustrates me in many aspects of my life.
Yes, specific and limited arguments are less controversial, but they’re not less interesting. I firmly believe being specific and narrow in your line of questioning or argument (or even interests) is a good thing. It usually doesn’t carry the baggage that RC is afraid of — or if it does, just state that you don’t want to generalize outright and move on.
I see this with research all the time; work on a niche subject or topic needs to be generalizable beyond the domain of analysis, or the authors will have a hard time with reviewers. You can’t just study, for instance, how Eagles fans talk about Cowboys fans online. What about other teams? What if its not online? What if its not sports? I get that a research question is always grounded in past and contemporary work, and we need to be cognizant and report that, but I think we’re overdoing it in Computational Linguistics and NLP right now. Anything and everything you do has to be generalizable, or fit into the existing work perfectly.
Not that this is a unique problem with research in my area, or research in general. Arguments online and in-person get derailed because we forget the specific circumstance or incident — it’s so much easier to generalize without actively wondering if it makes sense to generalize. I do this too, and am trying hard everyday to counter this (I suspect) deep-rooted tendency in my mind to find patterns, over-generalize, or at worst, stereotype.
I’m not happy with this post as it stands; I feel like I’m jumping between the specificity of arguments, questions, beliefs, and thoughts. That’s fine — I’ll always be thinking about this, and writing my thoughts down clarifies them for me. Maybe in a few months, I’ll revisit this topic. But today, I do want to mention and link to two comments that resonated with me, and possibly catalyzed my thinking on this topic. First, from Christopher Hitchens in this video (starting from 18 seconds in), on how to ask a question:
Here’s a piece of advice about asking a question. Try and narrow it down a bit… if you give me too much to chose from, you’re likely to get everything or nothing, and I certainly can’t give you everything…
Also, here’s Nikki Giovanni, starting at 21:10, on being parochial in her activism (the entire interview is amazing):
… because I tend to be parochial, for one thing, and I tend to care about Afro-Americans … It’s very parochial because I don’t care about my third world brothers and sisters … If I deal with my block, and you do with your block, we’ll have two good blocks.
Being parochial in one’s passions might seem like a different thing from what I was talking about earlier, but they’re not separate in my mind. I don’t think I’m overgeneralizing here to lump these two together. I think what they’re both saying succinctly describes the value of being narrow, be it in questions, arguments or interests.
Language is for writing is for thought
March 11 2023
Kate Manne, over on her lovely substack:
I write in this space in order to put ideas out there quickly, often in an unpolished form. I like the idea of sometimes making my mistakes in a relatively open forum. Unlike an article, or a book, which are years and years in the making, this substack newsletter capitalizes on my strong desire to write, sometimes quickly: to seize a few hours or even minutes here and there, and try to articulate ideas which have sometimes nagged at me for a decade or more without ever reaching fruition. By and large, I think by writing.
All my agonizing over what this blog is for, and what I should write about, and why, and someone else puts it down in better words than I ever could. Like it does for her, writing clarifies and helps me think. I don’t however, think by writing right now — I would, however, like to. I aspire for it, for its own sake.
The Bridges of Venkat County
March 3 2023
I’ve burnt a few bridges in my short life. Some bridges have water under them, but most don’t. I was obsessed with idioms when I started writing this post — perhaps because the reading for the research seminar that week was on Construction grammars, where idioms (and constructions of all kinds) are as essential as syntactic categories, lexical items and morphemes. I might be misunderstanding construction grammar considering I have only read a few papers about it, but I’ll take this opportunity regardless to overuse various constructions to death, violating one of Orwell’s maxims.
It was only recently that I realized that sometimes, frayed and broken relationships cannot be fixed. I could apologize, make up for my mistakes and shortcomings, undo all the harm I’ve caused, and yet. I think I learned that a sincere apology transfers the responsibility onto the other person to forgive, forget, and accept you back. The truth is that there is no moral or natural law that mandates people forgive, forget and accept after a sincere apology, nor would I want there to be.
All of this may seem obvious in hindsight, but this is my blog after all. I can write about the trivial as if they were life-altering revelations.
The finite, bounded interface trumps the infinite, unrestricted interface
31 January 2023
Me, back in October 2020:
It struck me that today’s AI assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) are all based around having conversations. If these systems ever approached anything close to human intelligence and common-sense, perhaps having a conversation is the best way to interact with AI…maybe the best way to interact with artificial intelligence is the same way we interact with other people — using conversations.
Austin Henley, in a lovely blog post from a few days ago:
A great user interface guides me and offers nudges.
Couldn’t a natural language interface help with that?
Certainly.
But not as the only option. Probably not even the main interface.
My first thought after reading this was Why didn’t I think of that?! Everything Austin says about software and user interface design I (sort of) knew 2 years ago. People know what they want — but they can rarely express it well, especially using words. Relying solely on natural language to gauge user intent is lazy, and will lead to poorly designed software.
A brief digression to put down my perspective on software and UI design: I believe that self-imposed constraints and strong opinions (weakly held) are good and necessary towards building well-designed software. This path will lead to your product not appealing to everyone, but that’s okay! My favorite apps are opinionated and have relatively a small/medium-sized customer base; but that’s all they ever wanted. It always frustrates me when a new service/product clearly has aims to be ‘the next big thing’ from the start. Why do you need millions of users/customers? If you’re one person building something new, you only need thousands.
Circling back: my original post was about the best way to interact with virtual assistants like Siri. Natural language is the only interface for this class of software. They’ve been around for a decade, and while useful (especially for accessibility), they haven’t revolutionized how we do things everyday, nor have they opened up new opportunities, I think. How do we make people successful at using computers using a lazy interface?
I hope I’ll play a role in answering that question one day.
Why so glib?
30 January 2023
Two years ago, I wrote a post right as I started my study of interpersonal biases in language. I don’t remember what my state of mind was when I wrote it, but I do know what it is like right now. If anyone embarking on a Ph.D. is reading this, I’d love for them to know how tortured the journey was to get to where I am. The only idea I had back then was computationally replicate and evaluate the LIB. Now, after many missteps and detours, and a lot of nudging from David & Jessy, I have (I think) a topic that I can call mine; a research program that no-one else has worked on (yet) that I can initiate and contribute to. Generalized (Linguistic) Intergroup Bias is what I’ve termed it.
I feel relieved and optimistic at this juncture in my Ph.D. And yet, the fear is still there, receded in the background. I can envision scenarios where it engulfs me again, but not many. In any case, I will face it when it comes, and only I will remain after it passes.
Will my research program lead anywhere, change anyone’s mind, or even be one that anyone apart from me finds interesting? Probably not, but I’ve come to realize that all that matters is I do the work, do it well, and that I grow during the process. Like programming languages, I’ve come to learn that the research programs that gain traction in a community, especially a relatively young one like Computational Linguistics, have little to do with the program’s promised benefits — external factors like the progenitor’s community and its ease of use play a big role. I can only aim to do the best on what I control — ensuring that I pursue my research questions honestly and rigorously.
Addendum
I was a little too optimistic with giving my own name to my focus of study, but it was good in the end to get pushback on Generalized Intergroup Bias or GIB. I study intergroup bias; how is in-group language different from out-group language? That’s the one sentence summary of my dissertation, and I’m quite happy with it. My own term and acronym would have just made it too confusing.