This is just a straight-up republication of an article from the Toronto Star by Northrop Frye. It's increasingly difficult to find this ...

This is an old opinion piece by Northrop Frye way back in 1986(!) about thought, articulation, social control, and militancy. It’s an increasingly difficult article to find (for some reason/s) so I’ve liberated it and posted it.

And I can’t help but feel that in LLMs we have reached the apotheosis of Frye’s feared “verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking”.

I think Frye, had he lived to see their introduction, would likely have sunk into a great depression over LLMs and what they represented.

  • ☭可爱小猫☭@programming.dev
    2·
    26 days ago

    cant agree more with this para

    A STUDENT often leaves high school today without any sense of language as a structure.He may also have the idea that reading and writing are elementary skills that he mastered in childhood, never having grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus.