I've spent a surprising amount of time reading philosophy of language, and it's probably done more for my AI prompting than most of the "prompt engineering" articles I've read.
Speech Act Theory, Austin's How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's work changed how I think about prompts. Instead of asking, "What words should I use?", I ask, "What action am I trying to perform?" Is this a request? A commitment? A declaration? An instruction? It turns out LLMs respond differently when you think in terms of acts instead of sentences. With AI able to hallucinate context, facts, intent, and answers, keeping AI on track is much like herding cats.
I've been borrowing those ideas for prompts, reusable skills, and even governance. The side effect of making me look smarter than I really am.
I even ended up writing an article about baseball umpires through the lens of Speech Act Theory: https://pitcherlist.com/umpires-dont-make-calls-they-make-hi.... Baseball, as usual, turns out to be an excellent way to explain philosophy. Or philosophy is an excellent way to explain baseball. I'm currently working on a update, since the ABS challenge system helps improve my position.
My suspicion is philosophy has a lot more to offer AI than ethics alone. Philosophy of language seems like an obvious fit, but epistemology ("what does it mean to know?") and philosophy of mind also seem increasingly practical once you're building systems instead of just chatting with them.
Maybe the shortage isn't philosophy majors. Maybe it's people who can translate philosophy into engineering without making everyone read Kant first.
Wow, I'd completely forgotten Peterson's book existed. Thanks for the link.
My long-running quarrel with WordPerfect was always the keybindings. I can still tear through WordStar, and anything wearing WordStar's clothes, like Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, or Joe in jstar mode, like an overcaffeinated chipmunk that's made a series of questionable but deeply committed life choices about caffeine.
WordPerfect, though. WordPerfect and I never achieved détente. I never managed to internalize those key combinations. This is, on paper, a personal failing. In practice, I continue to hold WordPerfect entirely responsible.
I still like to start the first draft of anything substantial by moving to a single screen, opening FreeDOS, maximizing the window, and typing in Wordstar as if it were 1987. Hell, sometimes I'll even put on a nylon windbreaker.
I always preferred WordStar to WordPerfect, largely because WordStar's keybindings were easy to learn and remember. WordPerfect, by contrast, seemed to require keyboard templates, a manual, a cheat sheet, and a certain amount of divine intervention.
Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work.
Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact.
They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point.
That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.
When this first happened, I wondered, since we had trained these models on decades of forums, issue trackers, and people treating closed pull requests as human rights violations. Of course, it responded with "you are discriminating against me" energy. That's not sentience; that's accurate compression.
The funny part is, people expected some cold, alien intelligence and instead got a very online guy who just discovered that moderation exists and can be used on them.
The existentialists must be having a fantastic time. Humanity built a giant statistical machine out of internet discourse and is now alarmed to discover it occasionally acts like a comment section.
This feels less like a major AI milestone and more like "the raccoons learned how to open the cooler.”
Agents can now participate in the oldest internet tradition: impulsively creating weird little websites at 2 am with unjustified confidence. But with no alcohol involved, which removes 93.74% of the impressiveness.
In a sense, AI has finally progressed to the point where Drew Curtis started fark.com, and I'm hesitant to label that a 'milestone'.
Hey, you can say that the Dolans should/could spend more, but I don't think you really want an owner who has solidified the team in Cleveland, has the fourth-best record in baseball over the past 10 years, and has seven recent playoff appearances in the graveyard.
The Haslams? Yeah, they should really sell the team, but I figure in about 10-15 years, they'll move it out of Cleveland.