Mazviita Chirimuuta: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. Knowledge is social. Communities accomplish what individuals can't. But collective knowledge is still knowledge from somewhere. This matters, right? It's shaped by particular questions, particular tools and particular blind spots. I think 1 of the interesting things about this phenomenon, not only of LLMs but the internet as this idea that it's the repository of all human knowledge is that it goes along with this idea almost that knowledge doesn't have to be perspectival, it doesn't have to be like of a place of a community, it kind of can float free of the situation in which this knowledge was acquired. That's kind of the aspiration of these ideas sort of a universal repository of knowledge. But what this perspectivalist position actually sort of points us to is actually knowledge is inherently of a place, of a community. We acquire knowledge not by being like completely open minded to everything that's possible to know, but actually by sort of narrowing our view, discounting possibilities actually is what allows you to pursue a line of inquiry and actually pin down some information about say the natural world which is humanly achievable. So the contrast I'm trying to make here is between a view which says that knowledge is perspectival. It's inherently from a human point of view, which means that it's inherently finite. We cannot aspire to this sort of universal free floating knowledge because as finite human beings, we can only achieve knowledge of the world through recognizing our limitations. And this notion of like, you can have non perspectival knowledge like everything in the internet based on like all of the different possible perspectives all blended together. This somehow gives us a god's eye view. LLMs aspire to be this like every person voice, but it's precisely because they don't have a particular socialization into a finite community that they're not reliable, that we can't pin them down to actually what would be a kind of honest trustworthy perspective. So Chiromuta has this idea that she calls haptic realism. Most of the philosophy of science treats knowledge like vision. You stand back and you observe reality from a distance. She thinks it's more like touch.…

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