> It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.
Indeed, I hold that driving readers to intuit one specific parallel to divination and apply it to AI is the goal of the comparison, and why it is so jealously guarded, as without it any substance evaporates.
The thermometer has well-founded authority to relay the temperature, the bones have not the well-founded authority to relay my fate. The insight, such as you call it, is only illuminative if AI is more like the latter than the former.
This mode of analysis (the structural) takes no valid step in either direction, only seeding the ground with a trap for readers to stumble into (the aforementioned propensity to not clear caches).
> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.
If the authority is well-founded (i.e., is causally entangled in the way I described), the observation is meaningless, as all communication is interpretative in this sense.
The structural approach only serves as rhetorical sleight of hand to smuggle in a sense of not-well-founded authority from divination in general, and apply it to AI. But the same path opens to all communication, so what can it reveal in truth? In a word, nothing.
Indeed, I hold that driving readers to intuit one specific parallel to divination and apply it to AI is the goal of the comparison, and why it is so jealously guarded, as without it any substance evaporates.
The thermometer has well-founded authority to relay the temperature, the bones have not the well-founded authority to relay my fate. The insight, such as you call it, is only illuminative if AI is more like the latter than the former.
This mode of analysis (the structural) takes no valid step in either direction, only seeding the ground with a trap for readers to stumble into (the aforementioned propensity to not clear caches).
> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.
If the authority is well-founded (i.e., is causally entangled in the way I described), the observation is meaningless, as all communication is interpretative in this sense.
The structural approach only serves as rhetorical sleight of hand to smuggle in a sense of not-well-founded authority from divination in general, and apply it to AI. But the same path opens to all communication, so what can it reveal in truth? In a word, nothing.