Alan Jacobs

Jamie Smith on his new book:

It is perhaps not an accident, then, that at the same time distraction poses an existential and spiritual threat to the fullness of being human, so many forms of modern religion have become an engine for domesticating the divine. Overly confident in their conception of the divine, for example, public forms of Christianity seem to eviscerate mystery. A God that can be conceptually encompassed and comprehended is invoked to carve up the world into a culture war of “us” vs. “them.”

In the face of such distraction and domestication of the divine, we can hear afresh Karl Rahner’s prescient insight: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.” 

Thomas Pynchon, from liner notes for an album of Spike Jones music (1994): 

Nowadays, when everybody knows everything and nobody takes any text seriously, it’s hard to remember how it felt once to share a public world not as contaminated by the terminally wised-up irony that has come to pervade our own lives. 

Even more true today. 

How ‘Tiny Shortcuts’ Are Poisoning Science:

By itself, failure to replicate does not necessarily indicate, and certainly not prove, scientific fraud. Empirical results can vary for many reasons. However, replication analyses usually show that replicated effect sizes are, on average, systematically smaller and often statistically insignificant. If 90 percent of replications deviate from the original article in one direction that is less favorable to what the authors wanted to demonstrate, then these deviations are not innocent random errors or acts of nature. If the deviations were random, they would cancel each other out, and their mean would be close to zero. Instead, these deviations indicate that many published results were likely tweaked, manipulated, or fabricated.

Tweaking is potentially more damaging to science in the long run than data manipulation and fabrication. That might be hard to believe, since tweaked empirical results are likely to have smaller effects on the fabric of science than cases of data fabrication and manipulation. But the cumulative effect of tweaking can still be larger than that of data fabrication and manipulation because these strategies are rare, whereas tweaking is common.

I wrote about Worf’s feelings, the faux neutrality of liberalism, and Iain Banks’s Culture novels. 

I wrote about my two essays in the new issue of the Hedgehog Review, both of which are about human obligations. 

I do not need these books. I do not need these books. I do not need these books. 

The dek here is exactly right: “Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours.” They’ll protect their own IP with every resource available to them and steal ours without a moment’s hesitation. 

Today I was dicing a ham steak for risotto and dropped a few pieces on the floor, which Angus vacuumed up. Here he is a minute later, looking for all the world like Oliver Twist in the workhouse: “Please, sir, may I have more?” 

Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’:

You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a f***ing article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol.

No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does. 

This is why my primary use for chatbots is searching the web — getting the information I need without having to traverse ad after ad, video after video, popup after popup. The periodicals I value the most — the Economist, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement — I subscribe to in print. Print resists enshittification; the web embraces it. 

Richard Beer, Tresham’s Triangular Lodge (1971)

The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier:

What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking? 

Reuters tries to out Banksy:

We concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency. 

The idea that an artist, like a government agency, cannot be allowed to “operate without transparency” is ludicrous. This is idle curiosity masquerading as social responsibility. 

Cal Newport:

This is a worst-case scenario: you work faster and harder, but mainly on shallow, mentally taxing tasks (because of all the context shifting they require) that only indirectly help the bottom line compared to harder efforts.

It’s not quite clear why AI tools are having this impact. One tantalizing clue, however, comes from Berkeley professor Aruna Ranganathan, who is quoted in the article saying: “AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum.”

This points toward a pattern similar to what happened when email first arrived. It was undeniably true that sending emails was more efficient than wrangling fax machines and voicemail. But once workers gained access to low-friction communication, they transformed their days into a furious flurry of back-and-forth messaging that felt “productive” in the ​abstract, activity-centric sense​ of that term, but ultimately hurt almost every other aspect of their jobs and ​made everyone miserable​. 

I’m increasingly inclined to believe that we’ll soon see a Great Sorting with regard at AI at work: coders and scammers will love it, everyone else will hate it. 

A wonderful essay on Constable’s The Leaping Horse and … other matters. 

I’m in The Dispatch this morning on Christopher Beha’s new book on unbelief, belief, and skepticism. And, I am told, if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout you can get 15% off an annual Dispatch subscription.