Deviant Meanings

It’s a screenshot of someone searching on google “What is a Hegelian Fake News Machine” or something similar and shows the response from Google’s embedded LLM chatbot. The image is captioned something like: “my new favorite activity is making up a nonsense phrase and getting the AI to hallucinate a meaning for it.” And indeed the chatbot had made something up which sounds plausible enough. I claim the prompter could have done this unaided.

If I sat you down and made you guess what a “Hegalian Fake News Machine” was, what would you say? I tell you it’s real. Don’t look it up it’s definitely real. I just want you to guess what it is. I think you’d probably supply something like the output in the original image.

The phrase concatenates “machine” (a word so sweeping I see it as one step removed from “thingy”) with two very specific terms. The way I approached guessing the full meaning was by composing the meanings of the constituent parts. Any modifiers, attributives, or other kinds of restrictions can only help us by reducing the number of possible interpretations.

A Hegelian something is a thing which in some way refers to or embodies the philosophy of Hegel.

A Hegelian Fake News something is a thing which has something to do with fake news that has a Hegelian quality.

Fake news is perhaps connected to truth, knowledge, reality (the perversion thereof) and things like this. So a Hegelian Fake News something is probably a thing which perverts truth, knowledge or reality by means which are in some way Hegelian or by means which are best analyzed using Hegel’s philosophy.

So a Hegelian Fake News Machine is just a machine which does the above.

What does someone who has only a passing familiarity (via media, commentary, pop-philosophy, etc.) of Hegel, such as myself, think of first when they hear his name? Hegelian dialectics. So my guess at what the chatbot said in reply is something like:

A Hegelian Fake News Machine likely refers to a piece of technology or component of the media apparatus which produces contradictory misinformation packaged as a dyad of thesis and antithesis. The synthesis thus obtained has the plausibility of being a compromise between two extremes, but because both extremes are not based in fact, the synthesis, too, is misinformation.

Ok, now I’m going to ask the google chatbot and grade myself.

Attempting to generalize from the above observation, it seems certain phrases unravel into canonical interpretations. They are so clearly a compression of an idea we can all guess. The phrase “Hegelian Fake News Machine” unpacks in similar ways for most of us.

I also encounter this with essays. I read the title or the thesis statement or perhaps get as far as the introduction and then find I have predicted the rest of the argument; although it is still often fun to see how the author styles and communicates it.

So it goes with connection-finding and synthesis. You have two concepts (anything!) and you synthesize them or find some connection between them—an example could be utilitarianism (the system of normative ethics) and Catan (a board game that I hate).

The obvious connection: In Catan, players can affect each other’s position by negotiating resource trades, blocking each other’s resource production, stealing resources from one another and racing to occupy resource-rich areas before other players can. We can frame these moves as ethical decisions being made by the players and analyze them through a utilitarian lens. Maybe a utilitarian game of Catan is one in which we try to maximize the sum (over all players) of “victory points”.

Pretty boring, eh? A slightly less boring connection borne of my own enduring hatred for this dumb game: Utilitarians should advocate for the abolition of Catan because each game played has net negative utility; the losers are miserable and the winner (still locked into fight-or-flight) is just relieved that it’s over.

If you believe you are in possession of a canonical connection/synthesis, you can simply discard it and find one which is more interesting, surprising, original, fun. If you are lucky, it might depend so strongly on your own experience that it is yours alone.

My advice to you if you want some value-add (for now) unavailable to AI is to seek deviant meanings by using what you have and no one else does. What is a Hegelian Fake News Machine? You tell me. Ignore what I supplied above. Ignore the LLM output. Ignore your own first guess, expectation, the magnetism of conventional semantics. I can feel it, the phrase “Hegelian Fake News Machine” wants to be something more interesting than what prima facie semantics has fated it to be. You can still save it.

I lied. I said my next post would be about math but instead went and wrote this. The math-heavy post is coming in the next week or so. I have discovered that writing good math communication is actually quite difficult.

Unless I hallucinated it, I saw it on a note posted here. Please link in the comments if you know the one.

That is, the parodic misinterpretation of this idea.

This guess might just be me recalling what I read in the original screenshot so I may have awarded myself an ill-gotten grade.

I think my term “Qualia theft” is another example. The idea really just is the name. Is discovering the name sometimes just as good as discovering the idea it points at?

In the course of a game of Catan, players accumulate victory points by achieving certain prescribed milestones. One wins the game by acquiring 10 victory points.