Category: Presentation of self in everyday life

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.

Foundation models

It is widely admitted that the use of language in terms like formal language and language model tend to mislead neophytes, since they suggest the common-sense notion (roughly, e-language) rather than the narrow technical sense referring to a set of strings. Scholars at Stanford have been trying to push foundation model as an alternative to what were previously called large language models. But I don’t really like the implication—which I take to be quite salient—that such models ought to serve as the foundation for NLP, AI, whatever. I use large language models in my research, but not that often, and I actually don’t think they have to be part of every practitioner’s toolkit. I can’t help thinking that Stanford is trying to “make fetch happen”.

New-jack Elon haters

It’s on trend to hate on Elon Musk. This bugs me slightly, because I was doing it before it was cool. The thing any new-jack Elon hater should read is the 2015 (authorized!) biography by Ashlee Vance, entitled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, which your local library almost certainly has. (There’s even an abridged YA edition.) Basically all the worst things you can imagine about Musk were already firmly documented by 2015. Repeated there is the suggestion that he abused his first wife and more or less purchased his second one. Occasionally, Vance allows Musk to interject things, particularly about who deserves credit for which rocket nozzle, but apparently Musk had “no notes” about these salacious personal life details.

Stop being weird about the Russian language

As you know, Russia is waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine. It should go without saying that my sympathies are with Ukraine, but of course both states are undemocratic, one-party kleptocracies and I have little hope for anything good coming from the conflict.

That’s all besides the point. Since the start of the war, I have had several conversations with linguists who suggested that the study of the Russian language—one of the most important languages in linguistic theorizing over the years—is now “cringe”. This is nonsense. First, official statistics show that a majority of Ukrainian citizens identify as ethnically Russian, and that a substantial minority speak Russian as a first language (and this is probably skewed by social-desirability bias). Secondly, it is wrong to identify a language with any one nation. (It is “cringe” to use flag emojis to label languages; just use the ISO codes.) Third, it is foolish to equate the state with the people who live underneath them, particularly after the end of the kind of mass political movements that in earlier times could stop this kind of state violence. It is a basic corollary of the i-language view that children learn whatever languages they’re sufficiently exposed to, regardless of their location or of their caretakers’ politics. The iniquity of war does not travel from nation to language to its speakers. Stop being weird about it.

Dialectical vs. dialectal

The adjective dialectical describes ideas reasoned about through dialectic, or the interaction of opposing or contradictory ideas. However, it is often used to in a rather different sense: ‘pertaining to dialects’. For that sense, the more natural word—and here I am being moderately prescriptivist, or at least distinctivist—is dialectal. Dialectical used for this latter sense is, in my opinion, a solecism. This essentially preserves a nice distinction, like the ones between classic and classical and between economic and economical. And certainly there are linguists who have good reason to write about both dialects and dialectics, perhaps even in the same study.

On “significance levels”

R (I think it was R) introduced a practice in which multiple asterisk characters are used to indicate different significance levels for tests. [Correction: Bill Idsardi points out some prior art that probably predates the R convention. I have no idea what S or S-Plus did, nor what R was like before 2006 or so. But certainly R has helped popularize it.] For instance, in R statistical summaries, * denotes a p-value such that .01 < p < .05, ** denotes a p-value such that .001 < p < .01, and *** denotes a p-value < .001. This type of reporting increasingly can be found in papers also, but there are good reasons not to copy R’s bad behavior.

In null hypothesis testing, the mere size of the p-value itself has no meaning. All that matters is whether p is greater than or less than the α-level. Depending on space, we may report the exact value of p for a test (often rounded to two digits and “< .01″ used for abbreviatory purposes, since you don’t want to round down here), but we need not. And it simply does not matter at all how small p is when it’s less than the α-level. There is no notion of “more significant” or “less significant”.

R also uses the period character ‘.’ is used to indicate a p-value between .05 and .1. Of course, I have never read a single study using an α-level greater than .05 (I suppose this would simply make the possibility of Type I error too high), so I’m not sure what the point is.

My suggestion here is simple. If you want, use ‘*’ to indicate a significant (p < α) result, and then in the caption write something like “*: p < .05″ (assuming that your α-level is .05). Do not use additional asterisks.

Avoid adjacent delimiters

A mundane but highly effective writing tip is to avoid structures like “…) ( …” in your writing. For instance instead of

As argued by Chomsky & Halle (1968) (henceforth, SPE)…

you can (and should!) write

As argued by Chomsky & Halle (1968; henceforth, SPE)…

which I think you’ll agree Just Looks Better. A closely related trick is to avoid things like

The Greek letter Υ denotes /y/, /yː/…

and instead write

The Greek letter Υ denotes /y, yː/…

You can do this with phonemic forward slashes, phonetic square brackets, or the curly braces used to specify sets.

Quiet quitting is work-to-rule but worse

This week’s hot media trend is quiet quitting, and if you’re even remotely familiar with the US labor movement, you’ll recognize this as a version of organized labor’s work to rule actions, in which workers do the absolute minimum amount of work required by the contract. The difference is that a quiet quitter slacks off alone, whereas work to rule actions are applied across organized groups of employees under similar work conditions. The Wall St. Journal is willing to tell you about the former behavior, which is youth-coded and unlikely to result in improved conditions, but is not in a hurry to tell you about traditional forms of collective labor action.

On who is allowed to graduate

There is a convention I’ve seen at several institutions whereby a PhD (usually) student who already has a job or post-doc lined up is permitted to defend a dissertation that is less complete than would otherwise be accepted were they not up against a deadline. One suspects this sort of thing is applied in a rather biased fashion, but let’s suppose it was not. I cannot see any justification for it. It produces poor science, it is bad for departmental morale and espirit de corps, and it doesn’t prepare the student for future success in an environment where their advisor can no longer put a finger on the scale.

Now it is true that advisors or committee members, for whatever reason, occasionally try to squeeze a student for more one more experiment that is more of a nice-to-have than essential to make the argument being made in the thesis, but it is not clear why accepting a sub-par dissertation should be a remedy for it, and why such a remedy should only be available if you have a new job starting in two weeks.