Who are these dudes?
Top right in this picture: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GgTm194WIAEqak3?format=jpg&name=...
"You can't change the people around you -
But you can change the people around you."
Whereas in the example here, acting on that advice is costly (it means losing friends) but believing it is free. And there aren't different layers of meaning accessible to different parties. It's straightforwardly a play on words.
Edit: Not sure why I was being coy. I'm talking about the Claremont Institute.
But I like the idea there is a term for this, be it Straussian Memes or something else. What I didn't quite get is how "self-stabilizing" works?
What I'd like is for TV-anchors to get wise and start asking their interviewees "What EXACTLY do you mean when you use this term ...". But I guess they won't because they too are happy to spread a meme which multiple different communities can like because they understand it in the way they like.
This is the core rhetorical tactic of the progressive left in a nutshell. Linguistic superposition, equivocation, Schrodinger's definition - whatever you want to call it, it's the ability to have your cake and eat it too by simply changing your definitions, or even someone else's, post hoc.
Let us take a moment to be reminded of the English Socialism of Orwell and doublespeak.
I live in Wyoming and have MAGA and ultra-progressive friends.
Multiple messaging is a hallmark of all elites. Sometimes it’s functional: being able to say something sharp that if repeated is ambiguous is a skill. Anyone who has any power or authority wields it. It is so common to suggest requirement. (Other times, multiple messaging lets one apologise in a public setting without making things awkward.)
In many respects, it’s an essential feature of commanding language. Compressing multiple meanings into fewer words is the essence of poetry and literature.
Aye, perhaps prompting is the be-all-end-all skill, after all: the ability to distill out an idea into its most concentrated, compressed essence, so it can be diluted, expanded, and reworded ad infinitum by the LLMs.
brb while I search for the word prompt that generated the universe...
Nobody said people haven’t rendered themselves unable to understand poetry or literature through the ages. Nor that these skills haven’t had a distinct class mark to them.
Same here. Someone who relies on LLMs to speak and read will not be able to compete in a live environment. (Someone who uses them as a tool may gain an advantage. But that’s predicated on having the base skill.)
When the left tries this today it results in equal and opposite backlash and has no effect in terms of policy, winning elections, and that sort of stuff, but it certainly can be a motor that keeps online bubbles bubbling.
I would hazard that you are underestimating the impact of these rhetorical tactics, but I've not the energy to aggressively litigate and cite this point further.
They may be a converse of the Scissor Statement, which has a dual meaning that is irreconcilable between the separate interpreters. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190508)
I suspect that the use of incredibly bad examples is some sort of intentional Straussian joke, and that the entire article itself, and not the examples in it, is supposed to be the real example of a Straussian meme.
The article itself is an example of something that overlaps to some extent with its subject without being an example of the subject, like all the examples in it. It's an intriguing idea, like "things you can't say" but without examples it falls flat but that won't bother the rationalists anymore than they are bothered by Aella's "experiments" or allegedly profound fanfics or adding different people's utility functions or reasoning about the future without discounting. It's a hugbox.
Or maybe it is something they can't find any examples of it because humans can't make them, only hypothetical superhuman AI.
That said, I'm not impressed with the notion of Straussian memes and agree that way better examples are needed to give the idea some validity.
In my head I think of it has just really high linguistic compression. Minus intent, it is just superimposing multiple true statements into a small set of glyphs/phonemes.
Its always really context sensitive. Context is the shared dictionary of linguistic compression, and you need to hijack it to get more meanings out of words.
Places to get more compression in:
- Ambiguity of subject/object with vague pronouns (and membership in plural pronouns)
- Ambiguity of English word-meaning collisions
- Lack of specificity in word choice.
- Ambiguity of emphasis in written language or delivery. They can come out a bit flat verbally.
A group people in a situation:
- A is ill
- B poisoned A
- C is horrified about the situation but too afraid to say anything
- D thinks A is faking it.
- E is just really cool
"They really are sick" is uttered by an observer and we don't know how much of the above they have insight into.
I just get a kick out of finding statements like this for fun in my life. Doing it with intent is more complicated.
What the author describes seems more like strategic ambiguity but slightly more specific. I don't think it is a useful label they try to cast here.