Jill Dosso
@jilldosso.bsky.social
161 followers 395 following 65 posts
UBC Lecturer; Neurosci PhD. I’m interested in patient experience, assistive technologies, neuroethics, #HistPsych, and sewing big pants.
UBC Lecturer; Neurosci PhD. I’m interested in patient experience, assistive technologies, neuroethics, #HistPsych, and sewing big pants.
![Screenshot of text which reads, "When Metaphors Stop Being Metaphors
But modern chatbots do something to get from a user’s language-based input to a linguistically well-formed output (response). The processes within that arc are increasingly referred to as “reasoning”, a word that carries connotations of human cognition, even though computationally-grounded terminology such as “goal-based processing” might be more appropriate. Naming conventions often draw from human experience: Biology research gives us “hitchhiking” genes, graphical modeling work gives us “belief” propagation. The etymology of “invasive” plants and parasite “hosts” documents how the earlier meanings of these terms were expanded as we applied them outside of human social life. Etc.
Such metaphors can be genuinely useful: They light up new ways of understanding phenomena, and provide high-level intuitions about scientific mechanisms that are otherwise unnamed. They help us appeal to things that people are deeply familiar with, in order to “give a sense” of something they’re not familiar with. Yet as these terms are absorbed into technical jargon, the work of rigorously interrogating such metaphors — testing their applicability, elaborating on them, discharging them, adjusting them, etc. — is rarely done [6]."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ex2of3bizlrghrqplkp3rztc/bafkreidcblszj7silxtqhe4ieaynvmxylkrmuyzncoqzjbxpkvevbpdszi)
