> be a human in an oral society without writing > all you hear are phonemes > you don't care, it's all abstracted away (Sapir 1933) > you live for a world of pure ideas, chain of concepts, reasoning streams: la pensée sauvage (Lévi-Strauss 1962) > phonemes don't exist.

As Lévi-Strauss once fantasized, logical properties are now perfumes. Best of luck to those attempting to reverse-engineer the subtle art of the blind idiot bricoleur-perfumers in question.

Even my "aggressive timelines" for weird interdisciplinary consilience at the hands of deep learning would not have predicted that in 2025 you could jam this much linguistic anthropology into an ACL paper (and get selected for an oral presentation). Congrats to all involved!

Very nice critique re: "democratization" in AI research from @arjunsubgraph.bsky.social and @zeerak.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2406.11598

So you're telling me all of the billions of weight parameters underlying a seemingly uninterpretable generative model of language and culture can be ternary

bringing it over from the old place: ‘tis the season to read “Father Christmas Executed” (1952) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, for your yuletide structuralism fix: pds12.egloos.com/pds/200901/1...

Join us for EASST-4S 2024 in Amsterdam! Take a look at our panel "Rebooting the STS programme for AI: Emerging controversies and methods for studying 21st-century AI" (P228), with members of the Shaping AI project (N. Chartier-Edwards, J. Roberge, E. Grenier and @mcastelle.bsky.social). Abstracts 👇

Are you a linguistic anthropologist (or related scholar/researcher) working on LLMs? Submit an abstract to this open panel for EASST-4S 2024 in Amsterdam organized by me, @mcastelle.bsky.social, and Siri Lamoureaux!