Alan Jacobs

Dan Cohen:

Call me an optimist, but I believe that the majority of scholars, despite being under enormous pressure to publish, would prefer to be more engaged than removed from the fundamental pursuits and texture of their discipline. They enjoy wrestling with sources, data, and theories, and are innately repelled by the superficiality of having AI write a complete paper. They want to lean into their work, not lean back in an automated armchair. As NYU astrophysicist David Hogg recently wrote, “Anyone working in astrophysics is someone who wants to do astrophysics, not someone who wants to learn the answers.” 

I would say that anyone “working in astrophysics” at a university may well want to do astrophysics but also wants to get tenure and be promoted and maybe even get a job at a more prestigious institution — and if using chatbots promises an easier and more reliable path to those goals, then they’ll use chatbots to do the work for them. Intellectual curiosity even when real can be overwhelmed by greater urgencies. 

The three careers of Vida Chenoweth.

When Oklahoma! was near the beginning of its staggeringly long Broadway run, the great Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn saw it and spoke to Richard Rodgers afterwards. Goldwyn thought it was the best show he had ever seen, brilliant and riveting from the first notes of the opening number to the very end. He had never seen anything to approach its greatness. “And,” he added, “I know what you should do next.”

Rodgers: “What?”

Goldwyn: “You should shoot yourself!”

Yesterday I stopped at the McDonald’s in Burnet, Texas, and the young man who brought me my food said “Here is your luncheon, kind sir!“

Daniel McGregor

Francis Young:

Religions are as significant for what they leave unmapped and open to the imagination in the supernatural world as for what they rule on definitively – and religions are often pretty bad at drawing definitive conclusions beyond their core tenets. So I don’t see religious faith as a bar to being very curious and open-minded about high strangeness, and to adopting an agnostic attitude to speculative claims about the supernatural. But ‘organised woo’ is rather different. Like fundamentalist materialism, it is organised around the core principle that everything can and should be explained. That is not, in and of itself, a bad aspiration – genuine curiosity is arguably sustained by the conviction that an answer can, in theory, ultimately be attained. But in reality the belief that everything can and should be explained, harmless in itself, elides into an excessive confidence in available explanations. It becomes a pigeonholing exercise, on the implied assumption that our current state of knowledge can account for everything; or, in the case of ‘organised woo’, it becomes a process of inventing new pigeonholes for weird experiences to go in. The fundamentalist materialist and the occultist systematiser may seem at diametrically opposed ends of the epistemological spectrum, but they are more similar than either would care to admit – for they are both uncomfortable with doubt, with the unexplained, and with free-floating weirdness. 

I’ll be making good use of the phrase “organised woo.” 

An elegant snuffbox 

Tom Stafford:

I like to think that the imaginary crowd has a similar salutary effect on more complex thoughts. The audience does more than just make me imagine I might be wrong. It invites me to consider, from the diverse perspective of the audience members, the multiple dimensions along which I might be wrong.

Phenomena like these mean that thinking is never really a solitary activity. It is fundamentally social. Even when we are talking to ourselves we are using the socially orientated mechanisms of language to externalise our thoughts and feed them back “into” our minds. 

Someone should write a book about this idea that thinking is “fundamentally social”! Oh wait.