6 Comments

So glad to see you promote what Henry Farrell calls Gopnikism. It seems particularly important for educators to use this frame to make sense of AI given the cultural nature of learning. We need to think beyond optimization and efficiency as reasons to adopt AI if we are to discover its educational value.

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Those Gopniks, both Adam and Alison, are talented people. But the concept of "cultural technologies". . . is that really deserving of the term Gopnikism? I mean instrumentalism (the idea that tech are neutral tools that we use strictly instrumentally for our ends) has been in retreat since, well, the Phaedrus. And the idea that artifacts shape culture is, um, pretty much implicit in the field of archeology and anthropology. We are, as Arendt would put it, conditioned beings who are conditioned by our tools. Or, following Winner, if artifacts have politics, it's pretty darn evident they also have culture. Why give the credit of that ism to Ms. Gopnik?

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Well, I did distance myself from the phrase by saying it is all Farrell's fault, but it does seem to me that we need a name for the idea that LLMs are cultural tools.

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You are right. The alternatives r clunky. Tech determinism? Too controversial. Mumfordism? Post-instrumentalism? McLuhanism? Ugh. Still I hesitate to use Gopnikism even if it's convenient. The ism predates her.

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Mumfordism is my new favorite, but we'd have to explain who Mumford is to just about everyone. We need to reanimate that great coiner of terms Charles S. Peirce to solve this. If only digital necromancy worked.

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Why is it that there is no direct and logical way to understand how our social system of macroeconomics really works, after I provided a most simple, logical and minimal way for its comprehensive modelling in SSRN 2865571?

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