Category: Politics

Professional organizations in linguistics

I am a member of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), US-based professional organizations for linguists and computational linguists, respectively. (More precisely, I am usually a member. I think my memberships both lapsed during the pandemic and I renewed once I started going to their respective conferences again.)

I attend LSA meetings when they’re conveniently located (next year’s in Philly and we’re doing a workshop on Logical Phonology), and roughly one ACL-hosted meeting a year as well. As a (relatively) senior scholar I don’t find the former that useful (the scholarship is hit-or-miss and the LSA is dominated by a pandemonium of anti-generativists who are best just ignored), but the networking can be good. The *CL meetings tend to have more relevant science (or at least they did before prompt engineering…) but they’re expensive and rarely held in the ACELA corridor.

While the LSA and the ACL are called professional organizations, their real purview is mostly to host conferences. The LSA does some other stuff of course: they run Language, the institutes, and occasionally engage in lobbying, etc. But they do not have much to say about the lives of workers in these fields. The LSA doesn’t tell you about the benefits of unionizing your workplace. The ACL doesn’t give you ethics tips about what to do if your boss wants you to spy on protestors.  They don’t really help you get jobs in these fields either. They could; they just don’t.

There is an interesting contrast here with another professional organization I was once a member of: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, pronounced “aye Tripoli”). Obviously, I am not an electrical engineer, but electrical engineering was historically the home of speech technology research and their ASRU and SLT conferences are quite good in that subfield. During the year or so I was an IEEE member, I received their monthly magazine. Roughly half of it is in fact just stories of general interest to electrical engineers; one that stuck with me argued that the laws of physics preclude the existence of “directed energy weapons” claimed to cause Havana Syndrome. But the other half were specifically about the professional life of electrical engineers, including stuff about interviewing, the labor market outlook, and working conditions.

Imagine if Language had a quarterly professional column or if the ACL Anthology had a blog-post series…

News from the east

I am a total sucker for cute content from East Asia. I loved to watch Pangzai do his little drinking tricks. I love to hear what the “netizens” are up to. I love the greasy little hippo. I love the horse archer raves. I even love the chow chows painted as pandas. It’s delightful. Is this propaganda? Maybe; certainly it’s embedded a larger matrix of Western-oriented soft-power diplomacy. (That’s why we have so many Thai restaurants.) But I suppose I’m blessed to live in a time where you can get so much cute news from halfway across the world.

Our vocation

If you’re a linguist: well, why?

One thing that stands out about the life of the professional linguist is what Chomsky has the responsibility of intellectuals, to “speak to the truth and to expose lies”, in this case uncomfortable truths about language and its role in society. Certainly this responsibility—and privilege, as Chomsky also points out—is inspiration for many linguists. But other motives abound. I for one am more drawn to learning about (an admittedly narrow corner) of human nature than I am to speaking truth to power, and most likely would have ended in some other area of social science had I not discovered the field. And there’s nothing wrong with a linguist who is most of all drawn to little logic puzzles, so long as these puzzles are ultimately grounded in those questions about human nature. (I do reject, categorically, those who say that linguists ought to be doing nothing than “Word Sudoku” or “Wordle with more steps”. Maybe there are people who work solely in those modes, and if so I wish them a very happy alt-ac career transition.)

I think the truths about human nature uncovered by the epistemology-obsessed generativists—including those of the armchair variety—has something to say about the proper organization of society. But one is more likely to get such messages from sociolinguists. Sociolinguists correctly point out that we have unexamined, corrosive ideologies about language, languages, and their speakers that are mostly contrary to the liberal values most of us profess, and they certainly are well-positioned to speak these truths. That said, I do not agree with an often-implicit assumption that sociolinguistics is somehow a more noble vocation than other topics in the field. The “discourse” on this is often fought as a proxy war over hiring: e.g., one I’ve heard before is “Why doesn’t MIT’s linguistics faculty include a sociolinguist?” First off, it sort of does: it includes one of the world’s foremost creolists, who has written extensively about the role of creole studies in neocolonialism and white supremacy. Whether or not a creolist is a sociolinguist is probably more a matter of self-identity than one of observable fact, but there’s no question that creole studies has a lot to give to—but also a both a lot to answer for on—the problem of linguistic equality. Should the well-rounded linguist have studied sociolinguistics? Absolutely. But there are probably many other areas, topics, or even theories you think that any well-rounded linguist ought to have studied but which are not required or widely taught, and these rarely provoke such discourse.

The presupposition of “recognize”

There’s an interesting pragmatics thing going on in the official statement ex-first lady Melania Trump put out after her husband was grazed by a sniper’s bullet. (The full statement is here if you care; it’s not very interesting overall.) However I was drawn to an interesting violation of presupposition in the document:

A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration.

A few things are going on here; let me put aside the awkward non-parallelism of laughter vs. love of music vs. ingenuity and inspiration and note that the verb she wants in the embedded clause is wring out (figuratively, to extract by means of forceful action) not ring out. But the more interesting one is the use of recognized. To say that the shooter recognized Donald Trump as an inhuman machine presupposes that the speaker agrees with this assessment; or perhaps more generally that it is in the common ground that Donald Trump is an inhuman machine, at least in my idiolect. There is nothing in the text or subtext of the statement suggesting she views her husband as a monster, despite the long and tedious tradition of trying to “read resistance” into the wives of right-wing American politicians. For me verbs like misconstrued or mistook presupposes the opposite, that the speaker and/or common ground disagrees with this assessment, and that’s what I suppose Mrs. Trump meant to say here. I don’t blame Mrs. Trump for this; English is not her first language, though she speaks it quite well. But she’s famous and rich enough that she ought to employ a PR professional or lawyer to proof-read public statements like I’m sure Mrs. Obama or Mrs. Bush do.

Medical bills

Starting about two years ago, I got an unexpected medical bill in the mail. The amount wasn’t very high, but I was quite frustrated and annoyed. First, this was from a local College of Dentistry, where most procedures are free for the insured (and probably not insured too); there was no “explanation of benefits” that explained this was a co-pay, or that my insurance only covered some portion. Secondly, I hadn’t been to the College of Dentistry in quite a while, so I had no idea which of the various procedures this was or even what day I received the billed service. Third, there was no way to get more information: the absolute worst thing about this provider is that the administrative staff are some of the most overloaded and overworked people I have ever seen, and I have witnessed them just let the phone ring because they’re dealing with a huge line of in-person patients (some of whom are bleeding from their mouth). So I didn’t pay it. After a while though, the bills continued and I started to worry. Was I wasting paper for no reason? Would this harm my credit score? So I put about an hour into finding a way to actually get in touch with the billing office: turns out this was a Google Form buried somewhere on a website, and if you fill it out, a someone calls you (in my case, within the hour!), looks up your chart, and can tell you the date of service and why you were billed. Why they didn’t just include this in the bill in the first place? I have to imagine this makes it ever harder for the College to actually collect on these debts.

Linguistics and prosociality

It is commonly said that linguistics as a discipline has enormous prosocial potential. What I actually suspect is that this potential is smaller than some linguists imagine. Linguistics is of course essential to the deep question of “what is human nature”, but we are up against our own epistemic bounds in answering these questions and the social impact of answering this question is not at all clear to me. Linguistics is also essential to the design of speech and language processing technologies (despite what you may have heard: don’t believe the hype), and while I find these technologies exciting, it remains to be seen whether they will be as societically transformative as investors think. And language documentation is transformative to some of society’s most marginalized. But I am generally skeptical of linguistics’ and linguists’ ability to combat societal biases more generally. While I don’t think any member of society should be considered well-educated until they’ve thought about the logical problems of language acquisition, considered the idea of language as something that exists in the mind rather than just in the ether, or confronted standard language ideologies, I have to question whether the broader discipline has been very effective here getting these messages out.

Large LMs and disinformation

I have never understood the idea that large LMs are uniquely positioned to enable the propagation of disinformation. Let us stipulate, for sake of argument, that large LMs can generate high-quality disinformation and that its artificial quality (i.e., not generated by human writers) cannot be reliably detected either by human readers nor by computational means. At the same time, I know of no reason to suppose that large LMs can generate better (less detectable, more plausible) disinformation than can human writers. Then, it is hard to see what advantage there is to using large LMs for disinformation generation beyond a possible economic benefit realized by firing PR writers and replacing them with “prompt engineers”. Ignoring the dubious economics—copywriters are cheap, engineers are expensive—there is a presupposition that disinformation needs to scale, i.e., be generated in bulk, but I see no reason to suppose this either. Disinformation, it seems to me, comes to us either in the form of “big lies” from sources deemed reputable by journalists and lay audiences (think WMDs), or increasingly, from the crowds (think Qanon).

e- and i-France

It will probably not surprise the reader to see me claim that France and French are both sociopolitical abstractions. France is, like all states, an abstraction, and it is hard to point to physical manifestations of France the state. But we understand that states are a bundle of related institutions with (mostly) shared goals. These institutions give rise to our impression of the Fifth Republic, though at other times in history conflict between these institutions gave rise to revolution. But currently the defining institutions share a sufficient alignment that we can usefully talk as if they are one. This is not so different from the i-language perspective on languages. Each individual “French” speaker has a grammar projected by their brain, and these are (generally speaking) sufficiently similar that we can maintain the fiction that they are the same. The only difference I see is that linguists can give a rather explicit account of any given instance of i-French whereas it’s difficult to describe political institutions in similarly detailed terms (though this may just reflect my own ignorance about modern political science). In some sense, this explicitness at the i-language level makes e-French seem even more artificial than e-France.

Generalized capitalist realism

One of the most memorable books I’ve read over the last decade or so is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). The book is a slim, 81-page pamphlet describing the feeling that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” As Fisher explains, a lot of ideological work is done to prevent us from imagining alternatives, including the increasingly capitalist sheen of anti-capitalism, and there are a few areas—the overall non-response to climate change and biosphere-scale threats, for example—where capitalist realism ideology has failed to co-opt dissent, suggesting at least the possibility of an alternative on the horizon, even if Fisher himself does not imagine or present one.

A very clear example of capitalist realism can be found in the ethical altruism (EA) movement, which focuses on getting charity to the less well-off via existing capitalist structures. Singer (2015), the moment’s resident philosopher, justifies this by setting the probability of a viable alternative to capitalism surfacing in any reasonable time frame to be zero. Therefore the most good one can do is to ruthlessly accumulate wealth in the metropole and then give it away where it is most needed. Any synergies between the wealth of the first world and the dire economic conditions in the third world simply have to set aside.

Fisher’s term capitalist realism is a sort of pun on socialist realism, a term for idealized, realistic, literal art from 20th century socialist countries. His use of the term realism is (deliberately, I think) ironic, since both capitalist and socialist realism apply firm ideological filters to the real world. The continental philosophy stuff that this ultimately gets down to is a bit above my pay grade, but I think we can generalize the basic idea: X realism is an ideology that posits and enforces the hypothesis that there is no alternative to X.

If one is willing to go along with this, we can easily talk about, for instance, neural realism, which posits that there is simply no alternative to neural networks for machine learning. You can see this for instance in the debate between “deep learning fundamentalists” like LeCun and the rigor police like Rahimi (see Sproat 2022 for an entertaining discussion): LeCun does seem believe there to be no alternative to employing methods we do not understand with the scientific rigor that Rahimi demands, when it seems obvious that these technologies remain a small part of the overall productive economy. An even clearer example is the term foundation model, which has the fairly obvious connotation that they are crucial to the future of AI. Foundation model realism would also necesarily posit that there is no alternative and discard any disconfirming observation.

References

Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
Singer, P. 2015. The Most Good You Can Do. Yale University Press.
Sproat, R. 2022. Boring problems are sometimes the most interesting. Computational Linguistics 48(2): 483-490.