Software you write can have a “belief” as well. The course I took on it had us write Kalman filters, where you start with some estimate of a quantity. That estimate is your “belief”, and you have a variance as well.

this is an abuse of language. words have meanings, and those aren't them. To be clear, are you claiming the course taught you that software has beliefs, or is this a projection of your beliefs onto the course material?

[–] BrickedKeyboard@awful.systems -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No literally the course material has the word "belief". It means "at this instant what is the estimate of ground truth".

Those shaky blue lines that show where your Tesla on autopilot thinks the lane is? That's it's belief.

English and software have lots of overloaded terms.

[–] YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Alright I know you’re temp banned but let’s just leave this to remind you that - whatever your opinion of philosophers - in a territorial pissing match between philosophers and…a software course you took one time…the philosophers, who between them have a very different and would you believe it somewhat richer account of doxa (look at that, it’s even in Greek), probably have kind of an edge here.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM @sneerclub Au contraire: my brother-in-law is a retired philosophy professor, so Voice of Experiece here says: all philosophers are 99% FULL of shit, no exceptions.

(They try to use tools we have no actual understanding of—language and mind—to understand external reality. So they often get bogged down in self-serving rationalizations that appeal to their cognitive biases. There, I'm doing it too!)

[–] YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems 4 points 1 year ago

Well I can’t speak to your experience with your brother, but I spoke of “philosophers” plural, and contrasted that with - quote - “a software course [our friend here] took one time”. Perhaps your brother isn’t great with mind and language, but that doesn’t mean that even he is so incompetent that he can’t do better than our target here. For all that philosophers plural, or this one philosopher, have hit stumbling blocks along the way, they have made an attempt to more than simply stipulate a wildly counter-intuitive and pragmatically tendentious meaning for this complicated word “belief” (indeed: “doxa”).

I don’t know where you get the idea that “we” have “no actual understanding” of language and mind, however, because at least philosophers (as well as their interdisciplinary friends in some of the sciences) have quite a lot of understanding of language and mind, and especially language. Since the innovations of Gottlob Frege, for example, the interpretation of semantics according to a logic of truth has been extremely helpful in clarifying how sentences bear relations to not just external but reality in general. Linguists have done extensive work on the pragmatics of language, which fills out this picture to make sense not just of propositional but questioning and commanding sentences.

These are just examples, there is obviously also a lot more.