Well before they begin schooling, children are driven to look beyond the obvious. They spontaneously explore and uncover hidden parts that provide pleasing insights into the underlying causal machinery governing their visible properties and behavior. This is where some of the most striking development can occur and where guidance by knowledgeable adults may be most powerful.
But today, children are increasingly confined to considering the surfaces of things and their uses or functions. Information that was easily available a few decades ago has largely evaporated, with no other, deeper webs of information becoming available. It would be remarkable if such dramatic changes in children’s exposure to the underlying architectures of devices had no downstream effects on how they think about causal relationships in the world around them. Our job is to understand whether such effects are likely to be negative, positive, or largely inconsequential.
Someone Is Mysteriously Snapping Up Used Books Around the World - The Atlantic:
For now, this is what we know: A lot of used books are suddenly being bought up by companies including Zoom Books. But we do not know how many of these orders are coming from AI companies, or whether these books will be destroyed. Based on the practices of Anthropic and the attempted purchases by 2077AI, it seems very possible that the books are destined for AI companies, but we can’t be certain.
Regardless, the idea of an AI behemoth destroying books has sent a bolt through the collective psyche. Book destruction is historically linked to authoritarian regimes and attempts to control public discourse, as well as ancient tragedies — the burning of the Library of Alexandria comes to mind.
Wendell Berry, in a 2006 interview about his novel Jayber Crow:
Jayber, as he looks back on his life, feels that he was called to be a member and a servant of Port William. Looking back on my own life, I have a similar feeling — that I was called to do the work I’ve done. Like Jayber, I was a long time figuring out what my calling was and making a response that seemed to me to be creditable. It was an awkward business. There was of course some error and misconception. I really can’t imagine how it could have been otherwise, and of course one learns from one’s errors and misconceptions, and perhaps this learning gathers toward an outcome that is in some way substantially different from error and misconception. I don’t want to make too strong a claim or pretend to too much understanding, but my experience has caused me to believe that help does come. It comes by way of inspiration, and it comes from friends and books met with at the right time.
The Mackintosh Building at the Glasgow School of Art is an extraordinary work of architecture — but it was badly damaged in a 2018 fire and the school can’t afford to restore it. I very much hope some persons or organizations with deeper pockets will step up.
Baylor is transitioning from a monthly to a semi-monthly pay schedule, so this assignment just showed up in my inbox: “Your Semi-Monthly Payroll Readiness Journey has been assigned to all monthly-paid employees.”
My “journey.” My journey.
My Readiness Journey.
This morning I had a difficult conversation with Claude.
Finished reading: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I haven’t read this in many years, and it’s just fabulous. The mastery with which Collins organizes and deploys his many threads of plot is something to behold. I’m tempted to to start over! 📚
For a long time, I conflated the university with the intellectual goods it happened to house. I assumed that if I cared about reading, teaching, inquiry, and intellectual formation, then I had to defend the university in its present form.
I no longer think that.
My more primary commitment is to those practices and to the possibility of participating in them, sharing them, and carrying them forward. The university has cared for some of those practices for the past couple of centuries. In many ways, it is still materially hospitable to them. It gives us libraries, salaries, laboratories, students, and time.
But it has also become increasingly inhospitable to them.
See Chad’s brilliant new book on this subject.