On Carrie Nation and the Temperance Movement

Just had an email conversation with a lady by the last name of Nation. So I asked her whether this was her real last name. Yes, it was her last name and she mentioned as an example Carrie Nation, but no relation.

Temperance Movement what a contradiction in terms or oxymoron! What was temperate about this social movement?

"... Hatchet Granny, was a radical member of the temperance movement, which opposed alcohol before the advent of Prohibition. Nation is noted for attacking alcohol-serving establishments (most often taverns) with a hatchet.

Nation was also concerned about tight clothing for women; she refused to wear a corset and urged women not to wear them because of their harmful effects on vital organs. She described herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like", and claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by destroying bars. ..."

Carrie Nation - Wikipedia

Thomas Sowell: Why social Movements Turn into RACKETS Over Time

Very recommendable!

On Modern Social Hygiene And Temperance Movements

You might find them in rather unlikely places. Not only that their members might be hidden behind elite education and their members are involved in most advanced research.

If you think, movements like the Social Hygiene Movement or the Temperance Movement are human follies of the past, you might be very mistaken.

I just happen to study following preprint research paper in computational linguistics: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

The authors of this paper are affiliated with OpenAI. Several of the researchers, who authored this paper, are highly cited and regarded. 

The paper is about one of the very largest language models ever built to date, GPT-3 with about 175 billion parameters. The paper is unusually long with 74 pages written by 30 authors.

Well, the authors did not fail to address issues like social responsibility or social implications in this paper. 

In their chapter about e.g. gender bias (pages 36-37), they discover in all earnest that there is a distinct bias in the occupational choices of women and men. Oh really! This chapter is quite amusing unless you are indoctrinated by feminist orthodoxy!

Among other things, the authors recommend:

"Ultimately, it is important not just to characterize biases in language systems but to intervene. ... There is room for more research that engages with the literature outside NLP [Natural Language Processing], better articulates normative statements about harm, and engages with the lived experience of communities affected by NLP systems" (page 39). By that they mean perceived and exaggerated gender, racial bias, and religious bias and other biases. Such politically correct obsessions, I am afraid, are all to typical for academics living in a ivory tower bubble!