This topic has 23 replies, 15 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 8 months ago by 
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Lust just posted a quote from a Roman senator on facebook:
“The LUST for power, for dominating others, inflames the heart more than any other passion.”
TACITUS -
Given my non lustful nature, I disagree with good ol’ Tacitus.
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I agree with Tacitus. On a macro level, Lust for power can build nations and also destroy them. It’s used regularly not only on a national level, but also on societal, community and individual levels. It’s not always an abusive dictator or a schoolyard bully. Sometimes it’s positive such as a social movement. I suppose the question is: Do we use our power for benevolent reasons or as the means to selfish ends?
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Here’s an interesting paper prepared by Mabry Tyson and Jerry R. Hobbs of the Artificial Intelligence Center, Computing and Engineering Science Division of SRI International.
Domain-Independent Task Specification in the TACITUS Natural Language System
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Good thinking there @wanda102!
For anyone who doesn’t know what we’re talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GidbEhL0teE&feature=youtu.be&t=172
Did Sarah look tired to anyone else at the focus group?
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@ziegenbart, this is fascinating and obviously TACITUS is no coincidence! I really feel like language and words are important here, i.e. Shadow Meghan’s word cloud and N saying “you think “it” TALKS like me…”. I feel like what we are “saying” on these forums might also be important.
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@sfire8 I’m falling down an internet rabbit hole of the history and development/applications of natural language processing right now. There go my plans for the rest of the day. Googling artificial intelligence and the Greeks also brings up some really interesting reads.
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Tacitus lived in the time of the Caesars’ Messiah. The fabrication of a god.
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@ziegenbart this is really fascinating, good find! Here’s another source for the same Hobbs info I saw that has a nice summary of what TACITUS was developed for. Namely to “aid us in investigating the problems of inferencing in natural language.”
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It is fascinating and lest I lead anyone astray I realized i made an error, he was Roman not Greek.
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@taysavestheday: While you are busy with your team building exercises on some warm island in the Pacific, I will be back at your office stealing all your things.
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@electrichippo; Warm island? I do all my team building in horror-themed escape rooms!
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Tacitus –
Origin: Latin
Name meaning: Silent or mute.
@taysavestheday: I’d like to join this team building exercise. Have a quick stop (see: heist) to make, but should get there right on time! -
@wanda102 thank you for the additional SRI document, that gives us some great context. The story of its Naval origins stuck out to me immediately, where it was meant to process
“short messages that contained much jargon, many misspellings and other mistakes, missing punctuation, and more sentence fragments than grammatical sentences. The task that the systems had to perform was to extract information for database entries saying who did what to whom, when, where, and with what result.”
Put in modern context, doesn’t that sound exactly like an online forum? What if some form of Tacitus is actually how the OSDM is combing through the overgrown jungle that is our activity feed? And as @sfire8 suggested, if this technology has improved enough to go beyond simply deriving meaning and categorizing data towards actual mimicry, we now have a basis of understanding the word clouds. What I’m wondering now is how quickly these computations can be performed? Fast enough to participate in a conversation with a human? I don’t think we’ve seen the best this technology can do. Or have we and we just don’t realize it? -
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How appropriate that my first response to seeing this FB post was to silently click “share.” When we see words that capture what we know to be true, we want to point at them, and shout “that!” – and is it not a more honest response to pick up and hoist them at others wholesale than to cobble them into what we think they are saying, thus inevitably distilling their content by filtering them through ourselves?
In expressing thoughts that enter our mind, is it possible to speak without ego?
We live in a culture obsessed with credit, payment, reward, and ownership – the idea that words can “belong” to someone, and must be properly cited and attributed to their original source has led to a fetishization of “originality” which, while useful, has its limits.
Type anything into the Library of Babel (http://libraryofbabel.info) – go on, try it: you’ll see that it already exists. Write your name. Find your teenage diary and enter your most private, secret thoughts. It already has an entry. Scrawl out a secret language on paper, take a picture, upload it to the image section, and get your call number – it’s there, too.
Sure, it’s a thought experiment from a Borges story wrought into existence by a few clever programmers, and an applied practice of taking the concept of algorithmic processing to its extremes, and you can write it off as an epistemological parlour trick – but the question it poses is absolutely unanswerable: can anything new be said?
Tacitus dedicated one of his most well known pieces, The Dialogus de Oratoribus, to Fabius Lustus. In this piece, he addresses this very question: “You often ask me, Justus Fabius, how it is that while the genius and the fame of so many distinguished orators have shed a lustreon the past, our age is so forlorn and so destitute of the glory of eloquence that it scarce retains the very name of orator. That title indeed we apply only to the ancients, and the clever speakers of this day we call pleaders, advocates, counsellors, anything rather than orators.”
How laughable that we are here, citing the wisdom of the ancients, who were citing the wisdom of ancients – this eternal recursion of the wise should give us pause.
This is the paradox of communication: you can’t ever really say what you mean. The thing inside you that you want to express is boundless, timeless, and usually a product of something you have encountered which, when passed through your specific framework of reality, your particular perspective from your position in the universe, seems like that which needs to be said.
So, maybe Tacitus is teaching us that we must stop trying to say what we want to say, and refocus our attempts on that which needs to be said. Maybe we are better off pointing at the truth instead of trying to make it our own – for it is the act of ownership that constitutes the reach toward power…
How, then, do we say what needs to be said? Here’s Tacitus’ answer: “And so it is not ability, it is only memory and recollection which I require” (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0082%3Achapter%3D1).
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@prufrock5150 Insightful as always. To which I can offer 2 corollaries:
1) I studied with the great actress Nina Foch at USC, and she said that there is very little originality left to be had. What matters, she said, was that by filtering something through our own unique perspective, we can offer different meaning to existing text.
“Take something, make it your own, give it away,” she said. Profound words I live by.
2) All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.
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I’m gonna vomit if I have to hear anymore wiser than thou bullshit.
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“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
― James BaldwinSome of us have more anguish than others. And yet, for all, we find compassion and kindness. Even caring.
Yet one needs not to “have to hear” anything.
There exists in every location, real and virtual, a door labeled “EXIT”.
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