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Morning. And its Groundhog Day today. https://t.co/gRs4Dc8RH2


Some useful threads will follow, first on the Northern Ireland protocol, where unfettered is still being defined...


And on fish and level playing field. The latter seems, has always seemed, the most problematic, because the UK has apparently ruled out any compromise on shared minumum levels even if not automatic. That would be a deal breaker, but seems... unnecessary.


Your reminder closing complex deals is never easy. But there are ways to facilitate and EU is good at doing this if you meet their red lines. But still the biggest concern that the UK never understood level playing field terms are fundamental to the EU.


In the UK, one man's decision. Allegedly backed by a Cabinet who in reality will be quite happy to blame the PM either way. The temptation to send Michael Gove to seal the deal and end his leadership ambitions must be there...
This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).


This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.

And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.

We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.

This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.