Steven Pinker’s new essay on Harvard is outstanding: fair-minded, well-reasoned, clearly-argued, and full of links to articles that provide copious support for his key claims.
The Taming of the Shrew, illustrated by Valenti Angelo
Phil Christman on Paul Elie's new book:
It is perfectly normal not to be able to decide whether or not we believe in a religious doctrine. It is another to act as though their truth or untruth were a matter of indifference. It matters whether or not there is such a state as enlightenment, and whether or not dharma is the purpose of human existence, and whether or not there is one good of whom Muhammad is the prophet, and whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. Some crypto-religious art is deeply powerful because the artist cannot resolve to believe or not; but lots of it is, in the precise Frankfurtian sense, bullshit because the artist doesn’t really care. I would, for example, respect Andres Serrano — the photographer who famously immersed a crucifix in a jar of urine and found himself the victim of an old-fashioned right-wing witch hunt — far more than I do if he simply said that “Piss Christ” is an attempt to rile people up. The line that Elie takes here is that “Piss Christ” “stood on the threshold, in liminal space: inside and out, religious and not,” and he quotes Serrano, with seeming approval, as saying that the work expresses “something inside of me that had to come out.” What exactly does it express? That getting crucified is like getting peed on nonconsensually? That urine can be kind of pretty, depending on a person’s hydration levels and the mineral content of their diet, if you photograph it just right, and if you don’t tell people right away that it’s urine? I call bullshit, unless “something inside of me that had to come out” is simply Serrano joking about the urgency of one’s need to go.
Alasdair MacIntyre: Lux æterna luceat ei, Domine.
Finished reading: What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade, which I wrote about, at some length, here. 📚
I wish tech writers were more consistently mindful of the distinction between (a) announcing the development of a product and (b) actually shipping that product — and then, if the product ever is shipped, between (a) the claims a company makes for its product and (b) what the product actually does.
Coming soon
Kafka announced to us long ago that the meaning of life is that it stops. True enough. But [Jennifer] Banks walks the reader alongside seven intellectuals who took seriously the bookend of starting: new life, fecundity and generativity — and, in my mind, our many distributed practices of creative midwifery that get new ideas off the ground. Hannah Arendt is one of Banks’s chief companions on natality. She thought our creative beginnings are not just universal but necessary, a strong stance against authoritarianism, a rebuke to brute force power. Natality, for Arendt, embodies the amor mundi, an outwardness and expectation of beginnings, of making room for others. She called it “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal ‘natural’ ruin.” And the amor mundi has to start somewhere. Not just the endless talking about what the world should be like. Prototyping is beautifully restless and insistent: Show me how. Let’s start.
John Siracusa: “The recent Apple Intelligence fiasco has revealed that the company is further away from properly prioritizing software reliability than it has ever been. Apple was seemingly willing to sacrifice everything, including its own reputation, to ensure that it had enough new AI features to announce at WWDC. If we want a different result, it seems like we need different leaders.”
Magnolia season
Half-listening to the NBA game and when someone said “Julius Randle” I heard “Jewish Rambo” and now I want to see that movie.
If you ask any of the LLMs to summarize a book or article, they do so with some accuracy. If you ask them to provide relevant quotations from the text along with the summary, they make the quotations up.
The current energized narratives around AGI and Superintelligence seem to be fueled by a convergence of three factors: (1) the fact that scaling laws did apply for the first few generations of language models, making it easy and logical to imagine them continuing to apply up the exponential curve of capabilities in the years ahead; (2) demos of models tuned to do well on specific written tests, which we tend to intuitively associate with intelligence; and (3) tech leaders pounding furiously on the drums of sensationalism, knowing they’re rarely held to account on their predictions.
While media attention remains focused, as always, on elite universities, this story is a sobering reminder of the reality at less selective and less famous schools.
I think about this post by Adam Roberts at least once a week:
When I was a kid I memorised — don’t laugh — the Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’, and used to repeat it quietly to myself when I was in a place of terror. I was eleven or twelve, and my family had moved to Canterbury in Kent, from London SE23. Where we lived was about a mile’s walk into town, and the only way was down the narrow pavement alongside the Dover Road, on which enormous lorries and trucks would hurtle at incredible, terrifying speeds, on their ways to and from the port at Dover and London town — nowadays the city has built a ring-road to relieve its city centre of this burden of traffic, but that postdates me. Walking along this road as these T.I.R’s roared and howled inches from me was scary. Repeating the litany helped me cope with that fear.
I mean, sure: by all means laugh at me if you like … I was a massive SF nerd, not skilled at making friends, quite inward and withdrawn. I can see this little story has its ridiculous side. Then again, if I’m honest, when I look back at my younger self I find something touching and even, in its miniscule way, heroic about it, actually. I made it into town. I went to the Albion bookshop and spent my pocket-money on yet another pulp SF book. I got home again without being swallowed or consumed by my fear, although the fear, which perhaps looks trivial to you, was, inside me, vast and pressing and lupine, and was given prodigious materiality by the howling hundred-ton trucks speeding inches past me and whipping their trailing winds about me. I wasn’t really scared of the lorries; the lorries only gave temporary physical shape to something more pervasively in me and my relationship to life. I was a much and deeply frightened kid, as, in many ways, I still am, as an adult. Stories for kids should be beautiful and moving, but they should also furnish kids with the psychological wherewithal to understand and navigate the world and their own feelings about it.
To be able to be an ordered and logical and discerning thinker is more important in this current era than it has been in at other points in my lifetime. The ability to understand the arguments that other people are making, the ability to understand how to rebut those arguments, the ability to discern between good research and bad research and good points and bad points and what studies have been verified and what studies are double blind — understanding a fire hose of information and also having the historical context to understand that information. I think that colleges can and should still be a place to produce those kinds of abilities, which are hard skills — skills that can and should be taught.
Right? I mean: This isn’t debatable, so let’s act accordingly.
Kathleen Guthrie, Flowers with Fish
Crystal Palace’s Chris Richards: “I think growing up, I never watched the FA Cup. I’m from Alabama, so we definitely didn’t have that on TV.” Same. ⚽️
Despite Montaigne’s concerns, we cannot help but comment upon one another. We are irrepressible commenters. (In the essayist’s case, he simply turned to making learned comments about himself.) The trouble now is not that we make so many comments; it’s that we’ve lost the conversation partners — the IRL kind — implied in Bakhtin’s public scenarios. We make our comments while sitting alone at our tiny command centers, and increasingly the machines are the only ones attending.