Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas
What's been happening? It has been a little over two years since I posted on this blog last. I have been doing a lot of writing elsewhere on similar topics - mostly Large Language Models and other AI things - it just never added up to a blog post here. My writing exiles Here are…
Read more →TL;DR Hunting for sense and cardboard gazelles: The limits of a narrative Getting the sense back in a field of grass: The potential of the ruminative node Mind red in tooth and claw: Bringing narratives and ruminatives together into a single ecosystem TL;DR In this post, I dissect two key modes of sense-making: narrative and…
Read more →What is #AcWriMo November is the month of writing. There’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for writing fiction but also AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) for producing academic writing. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to make a commitment and finish a piece of writing. This makes more sense for fiction because everyone has that novel inside…
Read more →Summary This post has two independent parts: I ask what would some of the basic criteria for sentience be and how to check for them in a way that would give us a chance to satisfy our need to know. I explore some of the dilemmas a fully machine-based sentient entity would have to face…
Read more →How to read this This will take about 18 minutes to read (at 230 words/min ) but the text is structured to make it easy to jump around and find the key points faster. I tend to go into more detail than most people find necessary. Two reasons to read : Explore a different perspective…
Read more →How hard is it to translate metaphor? Metaphor seems like it should be very difficult to translate. But I’d like to argue that what is difficult about translating it is not the metaphor part but rather how it is used. This makes it no different from any other aspect of language. But because it is…
Read more →Background - From comment to blog post I just finished reading Andrew Wilson's series of blog posts on the foundation of 'ecological psychology' This post started as a comment but it was too long for the comment field (and at 1800 words, that's not a surprise), so I'm posting it here. It is a bit…
Read more →Note: This post originally appeared on Medium in 2016. This a very lightly revised version with new formatting for ease of readability . It preceded the post on historical revisionism and anthropology of family but it tackles and elaborates on some of the same themes. Outline of the argument History is often accused of not…
Read more →I became a feminist because a woman once told me not to be an idiot and I decided that it was good advice. That was in 1998. But I was all ready to be a feminist long before that, so it really just took a small push to get me over the hump. I was…
Read more →The problem with writing advice The problem with the likes of Steven Pinker and Helen Sword is that they like their own writing way too much. But I don't. Like their writing, that is. [1] I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they…
Read more →On rereading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, I was struck by this passage in his foreword to the second edition: I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability…
Read more →Publication note An earlier version of this was published in the Oxford Magazine No 422. This post expands certain sections based on questions and feedback I received following the first publication of the piece. It is also available on Medium . The state of digital dislocation The current state of digital dislocation is forcing us…
Read more →Brooks on the alternatives to nuclear family Tyler Cowen called the extended essay by David Brooks called ‘The nuclear family was a mistake’ a “so far the best essay of the year with many fine and subtle points”. And he’s not wrong. Brooks who has frequently been caught embellishing data to make a point does…
Read more →Some time ago, Thomas Basbøll followed up his excellent post on how to write a paragraph with a much more daring endeavour on how to write a sentence . And while the post is a pleasure to read, I think it did not quite overcome the challenge the author stated at the start: “it is…
Read more →TL;DR This is an exploration of the difference between wisdom and practical wisdom (phronesis) triggered by this quote from a talk by Ed Catmull : “Once one can articulate an important idea into a concise statement, then one can use this statement, and not have to have the fear of changing behavior.” The main lesson…
Read more →What is this about How badly we’re getting history While the world of history and anthropology of the last 30-40 years has completely redrawn the picture of our past, the common perception of the overall shape of history and the development of humanity is still firmly rooted in the view that took hold in the…
Read more →TLDR; Reports that AI beat humans on certain benchmarks or very specialised tasks don’t mean that AI is actually better at those tasks than any individual human. They certainly don’t mean that AI is approaching the task with any of the same understanding of the world people do. People actually perform 100% on the tasks…
Read more →Note: This is a slightly edited version of a post that first appeared on Medium . It elaborates and exemplifies examples I gave in the more recent posts on metaphor and explanation and understanding . One of the less fortunate consequences of the popularity of the conceptual metaphor paradigm (which is also the one I…
Read more →Recently, I've been exploring the notion of explanation and understanding . I was (partly implicitly) relying on the notion of 'mental representations' as built through deliberate practice. My plan was to write next about how I think we can reconceptualize deliberate practice in such a way that it draws on a richer conception of 'mental…
Read more →This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure. (opening sentence of the preface…
Read more →TL;DR This post outlines 5 levels or types of understanding to help us better to think about the role of metaphor in explanation : Associative understanding: Place a concept in context without any understanding. Dictionary understanding: Repeat definitions, give examples, and make basic connections. Inferential understanding: Make useful inferences based on knowledge about - but…
Read more →TL;DR There are at least 3 uses of metaphor in the educational process: 1. Invitation to enter; 2. An instrument to grasp knowledge with; 3. Catalyst to transform understanding. Many educators assume that 1 is enough but it rarely leads to any useful understanding. Explanation is a salient part of the educational process to such…
Read more →Background This is a lightly edited version of a comment posted on Martin Haspelmath's blog post " Against traditional grammar – and for normal science in linguistics ". In it he offers a critique of the current linguistic scene as being unclear as to its goals and in need of better definitions. He proposes 'normal…
Read more →Butterfly effect and Schrödinger's cat are 2 very common ways of signalling one's belonging to the class of the scientifically literate. But they are almost always told wrong. They were both constructed as illustrations of paradoxes or counterintuitive findings in science. Their retelling always misses the crucial 'as if'. This is an example of metaphor…
Read more →I'm not sure how 'burning' these issues are as such but if they're not, I'd propose that they deserve to have some kindling or other accelerant thrown on them. 1. What is the interaction between automatic metaphor processing and deliberate metaphor application? Metaphors have always been an attractive subjects of study. But they have seen…
Read more →Everybody is agog at what AI systems can do. Nobody thought even 10 years ago that machines could be trained to recognise images or transcribe natural speech as well as they do now. And because of this leap forward everybody has started worrying about AI taking over the world because it will soon be able…
Read more →Innovation is the ‘in’ thing. Innovate or die is the buzz up and down the hive mind. Everybody is feeling like they must innovate all of the things all of the time. But is the incessant innovation the right mode of approaching this? We constantly spin up stories of the intrepid innovator and the change…
Read more →TL;DR Why is this important? Many people believe that mental representations are the next goal for ML and a prerequisite for AGI. Does machine learning produce mental representations equivalent to human ones in kind (if not in quality or quantity)? Definitely not, and there is no clear pathway from current approaches to a place where…
Read more →In some circles (rhetoric and analytics philosophy come to mind), much is made of the difference between metaphor and simile. (Rhetoricians pay attention to it because they like taxonomies of communicative devices and analytic philosophers spend time on it because of their commitment to a truth-theoretical account of meaning and naive assumptions about compositionality). It…
Read more →Note: These are rough notes for a metaphor reading group, not a continuous narrative. Any comments, corrections or elaborations are welcome. Why should you read WFDT? Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind is still a significantly underappreciated and (despite its high citation count) not-enough-read book that has a lot to…
Read more →Frege’s trauma I found the following quote from Frege on the Language goes on holiday blog and it struck as the perfect starting point for this essay which has been written for a while now: “Frege (“Logic in Mathematics”): Definitions proper must be distinguished from elucidations [Erläuterungen]. In the first stages of any discipline we…
Read more →People often talk about music as if it were language. Leonard Bernstein even recorded a series of lectures applying Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar to music . Chomsky himself answered a question on this in a not very satisfying manner. Some people can get very exercised over this. But it seems to me that a…
Read more →Background Sometimes a rather obscure and complex analogy just clicks into place in one's mind and allows a slightly altered way of thinking that just makes so much sense it hurts. Like putting glasses on in the morning and the world suddenly snapping into shape. This happened to me this morning when reading the Notes…
Read more →Over on the excellent 'Genealogy of Religion' , Cris Campbell waved a friendly red rag in front of my eyes to make me incensed over exaggerated claims (some) anthropologists make about metaphors. I had expressed some doubts in previous comments but felt that perhaps this particular one deserves its own post. The book Cris refers…
Read more →A few days ago, I tweeted a link to an article in TES : What Miss really means < It's always worthwhile re-examining ingrained inequalities http://t.co/GKhjc4VgUP #edchat #ukedchat #feminism — Dominik Lukes (@techczech) May 17, 2014 Today, I got the following response back: @techczech 'really means' talks about origins. It doesn't mean that to me…
Read more →The role of metaphor in science debate (Background) Recently, the LSE podcast an interesting panel on the subject of "Metaphors and Science" . It featured three speakers talking about the interface between metaphor and various 'scientific' disciplines (economics, physics and surgery). Unlike many such occasions, all speakers were actually very knowledgeable and thoughtful on the…
Read more →While people keep banging on about Chomsky as being the be all and end all of linguistics (I'm looking at you philosophers of language), there have been many linguists who have had a much more substantial impact on how we actually think about language in a way that matters. In my post on why Chomsky…
Read more →Drafty This was written in some haste and needs further refinement. Maybe one day that will come. For now, it will be left as it stands. Background This post outlines what I think are the key learnings from the output of the research of the field of linguistics that should be reflected in the general…
Read more →Metonymy in the wild Things were not going well for Mitt Romney in early autumn of last year. And then he responded to a query about gender equality with this sentence: "I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men… I went to a number of women's…
Read more →I have been asked (as every year) to nominate three books of the year for Lidové Noviny (a Czech paper I contribute to occasionally). This is always a tough choice for me and some years I don't even bother responding. This is because I don't tend to read books 'of the moment' and range widely…
Read more →" when history is at its most obliging, the history-writer needs be at his most wary." ( China by John Keay ) I came across this nugget of wisdom when I was re-reading the Introduction to John Keay's history of China. And it struck me that in some way this quote could be a part…
Read more →The great blog Genealogy of Religion posted this video with a somewhat approving commentary: The video started off with panache and promised some entertainment, however, I found myself increasingly annoyed as the video continued. The problem is that this is an exchange of cliches that pretends to be a fight of truth against ignorance. Sure…
Read more →For some reason, many accomplished people, when they are done accomplishing what they've set out to accomplish, turn their minds to questions like: What is primary, thought or language. What is primary, culture or language. What is primary, thought or culture. I'd like to offer a small metaphor hack for solving or rather dissolving these…
Read more →I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them. I wrote about that quite a few years ago in: Lukeš, D., 2005. Towards a classification of metaphor use in text: Issues in conceptual discourse analysis of a…
Read more →I am a gaming semi-literate! I was listening to the discussion of the latest BioShock game on the latest TWiT podcast when I realized that I am in fact game illiterate. I am hearing these stories and descriptions of experiences but I know I can't access them directly without a major investment in knowledge and…
Read more →I just found out that both abstracts I submitted to the Cognitive Futures of the Humanities Conference were accepted. I was really only expecting one to get through but I'm looking forward to talking about the ideas in both. The first first talk has foundations in a paper I wrote almost 5 years ago now…
Read more →Update Part of this post was incorporated into an article I wrote with Brian Kelly and Alistair McNaught that appeared in the December issue of Ariadne . As part of that work and feedback from Alistair and Brian, I expanded the final section from a simple list of bullets into a more detailed research programme…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240"] Professor Abhijit Banerjee (Photo credit: kalyan3)[/caption] "We have to use cliches," said professor Abhijit Banerjee at the start of his LSE lecture on Poor Economics . "The world is just too complicated." He continued. "Which is why it is all the more important, we choose the right cliches." [I'm paraphrasing here.]…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Teacher in primary school in northern Laos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is "knowledge is power". It is used to refer not just to…
Read more →George Lakoff is known for saying that "metaphors can kill" and he's not wrong. But in that, metaphors are no different from any other language. The simple amoral imperative "Kill!" will do the job just as nicely. Nor are metaphors any better or worse at obfuscating than any other type of language. But they are…
Read more →I never meant to listen to this LSE debate on modern atheism because I'm bored of all the endless moralistic twaddle on both sides but it came on on my MP3 player and before I knew it, I was interested enough not to skip it. Not that it provided any Earth-shattering new insights but on…
Read more →Given how long I've been studying metaphor (at least since 1991 when I first encountered Lakoff and Johnson's work and full on since 2000) it is amazing that I have yet to attend a RaAM (Researching and Applying Metaphor) conference. I had an abstract accepted to one of the previous RaAMs but couldn't go. This…
Read more →Jim Shimabukuro uses Rupert Murdoch's quote “We have a 21st century economy with a 19th century education system” to pose a question of what should 21st Century Education look like ( http://etcjournal.com/2008/11/03/174/ ) "what are the key elements for an effective 21st century model for schools and colleges?". However, what he is essentially asking us…
Read more →I thought the moral compass metaphor has mostly left current political discourse but it just cropped up - this time pointing from left to right - as David Plouffe accused Mitt Romney of not having one . As I keep repeating, George Lakoff once said “Metaphors can kill.” And Moral Compass has certainly done its…
Read more →The online media are drawn to any "scientific" claims about the internet's influence on our nature as humans like flies to a pile of excrement. Sadly, in this metaphor, only the flies are figurative. The latest heap of manure to instigate an annoying buzzing cloud of commentary from Wired to the BBC, is an article…
Read more →I have forgotten a lot of things in my life. Names, faces, numbers, words, facts, events, quotes. Just like for anyone, forgetting is as much a part of my life as remembering. Memories short and long come and go. But only twice in my life have I seen a good memory die under suspicious circumstances…
Read more →Niall Ferguson wrote in The Guardian some time ago about how awful history education has become with these "new-fangled" 40-year-old methods like focusing on "history skills" that leads to kids leaving school knowing "unconnected fragments of Western history: Henry VIII and Hitler, with a small dose of Martin Luther King, Jr." but not who was…
Read more →In my thinking about things human, I often like to draw on the domain of second language learning as the source of analogies. The problem is that relatively few people in the English speaking world have experience with language learning to such an extent that they can actually map things onto it. In fact, in…
Read more →I have a distinct feeling of writing about this somewhere but can't find it, so here's the rant redux. The images on which our thinking and reasoning are based can sometimes exert a powerful force. There are many mechanisms we use to counter that force but sometimes it is very difficult. It seems particularly difficult…
Read more →This is a post that has been germinating for a long time. But it was most immediately inspired by Marshall Poe's article claiming that " The Internet Changes Nothing ". And as it turns out, I mostly agree. OK, this may sound a bit paradoxical. Twelve years ago, when I submitted my first column to…
Read more →I've been on a China kick lately ( reading and listening about its history and global position) and a crime public policy kick ( reading and listening to Mark Kleiman). I was struck when I heard Mark say in an interview that the US has more people in jail in absolute terms than China. So…
Read more →Maybe I should be watching more TV but I honestly had no idea what Kate Middleton looked like. There must have been times I would have heard references to her and thought she was some kind of actress or model. And frankly, I still don't care. But I do care about her dress. I am…
Read more →Over on the Language Log , Victor Mair puts to rest that all English expressions have to be tensed and thus prevent timeless poetry. He shares his translation of a 13th century Chinese poet thus: Autumn Thoughts by Ma Zhiyuan Withered wisteria, old tree, darkling crows – Little bridge over flowing water by someone's house…
Read more →Preamble I am an old atheist and a new agnostic. I don't believe in God in the old-fashioned Russellian way - if I don't believe in Krishna, Zeus, water sprites or the little teapot orbiting the Sun, I don't believe in God and the associated supernatual phenomena (monotheism my foot!). However, I am agnostic about…
Read more →About 10 years ago, I was looking through a book on populations changes in the Czech lands. It consisted of pretty much just tables of data with little commentary. But I was shocked when I came across the life expectancy charts. But not shocked at how short people's lives had been but how long. The…
Read more →A very common metaphor in the political discourse on war is that of doves (peaceniks) and hawks (war-mongers). It has been around at least since the cold war. But it stops at "doves=peaceful" and "hawks=aggressive". It completely ignores other properties of the animals, e.g. the fact that "hawks hunt and kill doves". I did a…
Read more →We spend a lot of time worrying about the content to which we expose the young generation both individually and collectively. However, I am exceedingly coming to the conclusion that it makes absolutely no difference (at least as far as morality and lawfulness is concerned). Well sure, we know things like that children of Christians…
Read more →I always thought this little bit by Demetri Martin highlights a crucial deficiency in any distinctive feature analysis. Demetri Martin: "I was at a party, and I saw a guy with a leather jacket, and I thought, 'That's cool'. Then I saw a guy with a leather vest and I thought, 'That's not cool'. It…
Read more →Show me the money! Or so the saying goes. Implying that talk is cheap and facts are the only thing that matters. But there is another thing we are being asked to do with money and that is put it where our mouth is. So evidence is not quite enough. We have to also be…
Read more →Some years ago in a book review , I made an off-the-cuff comment that thriller writers tend to be quite right-wing in their outlook whereas science fiction authors are much more progressive and leftist. This is obviously an undue generalisation (as most of such comments tend to be) but it felt intuitively right. Even then…
Read more →Note: This was intended to be a brief note. Instead it developed into a monster post that took me two weeks of stolen moments to write. It's very light on non-blog references but they exist. Nevertheless, it is still easy to find a number of oversimplifications, conflations, and other imperfections below. The general thrust of…
Read more →I have a number of pet peeves about how people use language. I am genuinely annoyed by the use of apostrophes before plural of numerals or acronyms like 50's or ABC's. But because I understand how language works, I keep my mouth shut. The usage has obviously moved on. I don't think, ABC's is wrong…
Read more →Acclaimed academics have policy agendas just like anybody else. And often they let them interfere with a straightforward critical analysis of their output. The monumental capacity for blindness of highly intelligent people is sometimes staggering. Metaphors and analogies (same thing for metaphor hacking) make thinkers particularly prone to mis-projection blindness . Edward Glaeser , a…
Read more →I was so inspired by the #philbitescomp twitter contest that I wrote a short history of philosophy in tweetable fragments of songs. Parmenides’ lament: I guess it will make a change when things stop changing Heracleitus’ blues: I cried you the same river thrice Plato’s polka: two steps out of the cave and look at…
Read more →"Thanks" to experimental philosophy, we have a bit more evidence confirming, that what many people think about the special epistemological status of metaphor is bunk. We should also note that Gibbs' and Glucksberg's teams have been doing a lot of similar research with the same results since the late 1980s. This is how Joshua Knobe…
Read more →Dan Cohen has decided to "crowdsource" (a fascinating blend, by the way) the title of his next book with the following instructions. The title should be a couplet like “The X and the Y” where X can be “Highbrow Humanities” “Elite Academia” “The Ivory Tower” “Deep/High Thought” [insert your idea] and Y can be “Lowbrow…
Read more →Somebody commented on the Language Log saying "of course [...] Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist" http://j.mp/9Q98Bx and for some reason, to use a Czech idiom, the handle of the jar repeatedly used to fetch water just fell off. Meaning, I've had enough. I think we should stop thinking of Chomsky as a gifted linguist…
Read more →An advertising agency is trying to solve a bloody conflict . This is presumptuous on such as scale that it could be called idiotic. Quoth http://www.theimpossiblebrief.com : "Rather than 'out of date' policies, we need 'out of the box' solutions. Let's show the world that creative minds at their best can inspire even political leaders."…
Read more →Making connections between ourselves and other people no matter how arbitrary, is an incredibly popular communal as well as private activity. The many algorithms for generating one's stripper, mobster or some other kind of name have graduated from napkins in bars to Facebook apps and now proper quantitative analysis of text samples. But deep down…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="740" caption="XKCD on Tropes"] [/caption] via http://volokh.com/2010/07/06/analogies-metaphors-and-similes
Read more →Preliminaries 1. Before you start metaphor hacking you must first accept that you don't have a choice but to speak in some sort of a figurative fashion. Almost nothing worth saying is entirely literal and there are many things whose "literalness" is rooted in metaphor. Look at "I sat in a chair the whole day."…
Read more →Metaphors are not just something extra we use when we're feeling poetic or at a loss for le mot juste, they are all over our minds, texts and conversations. Just like conjunctions, tenses or word. And just like anything else, they can be used for good or ill, on purpose or without conscious regard. Their…
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