Alan Jacobs

Gruber: “Mastodon is — deservedly! — getting a lot of attention as people re-evaluate their use of Twitter. But what I’m digging more in our current moment is renewed enthusiasm for blogging, and, on the consumption side, RSS feed reading.” Amen. Pretty much everything that was wrong with Twitter is also wrong with Federated Twitter.

Noah Smith and “roon”:

It’s important to realize exactly why the innovations of the past didn’t result in the kind of mass obsolescence that people feared at the time.

The reason was that instead of replacing people entirely, those technologies simply replaced some of the tasks they did. If, like Noah’s ancestors, you were a metalworker in the 1700s, a large part of your job consisted of using hand tools to manually bash metal into specific shapes. Two centuries later, after the advent of machine tools, metalworkers spent much of their time directing machines to do the bashing. It’s a different kind of work, but you can bash a lot more metal with a machine.

Note the planted axioms here — the governing assumptions that the authors may not even know they’re making:

1. That metalwork is neither an art nor a craft in which humans might take satisfaction but is simply a matter of “bashing” metal;
2. That it’s better to direct machines to bash than to do one’s own bashing, because working with metal is drudgery but overseeing machines isn’t;
3. That more metal-bashing is better than less metal-bashing.

I have, shall we say, some doubts about all those axioms. But let’s move on.

Consider the following, produced in the year 2322:

If, like Noah’s ancestors, you were a writer in the 2000s, a large part of your job consisted of using keyboards to manually bash characters into specific shapes. Two centuries later, after the advent of AI, writers spent much of their time directing machines to do the bashing. It’s a different kind of work, but you can bash a lot more characters with a machine.

What a utopian dream! No one has to write any more — no one has to think of what to say, to struggle for the best words in the best order, to strive to persuade or entertain. You just say, “Hey Siri, write me an essay on why there’s no reason to fear that AI will replace humans.”

Wait — I was being sardonic there but it turns out that that’s what Smith and roon really think:

Take op-ed writers, for instance – an example that’s obviously important to Noah. Much of the task of nonfiction writing involves coming up with new ways to phrase sentences, rather than figuring out what the content of a sentence should be. AI-based word processors will automate this boring part of writing – you’ll just type what you want to say, and the AI will phrase it in a way that makes it sound comprehensible, fresh, and non-repetitive. Of course, the AI may make mistakes, or use phrasing that doesn’t quite fit a human writer’s preferred style, but this just means the human writer will go back and edit what the AI writes.

In fact, Noah imagines that at some point, his workflow will look like this: First, he’ll think about what he wants to say, and type out a list of bullet points. His AI word processor will then turn each of these bullet points into a sentence or paragraph, written in a facsimile of Noah’s traditional writing style.

Behold: an image of the future of writing produced by a writer who quite obviously doesn’t like to write.

What seems to be missing here is the question of why the people who now pay Noah Smith to write wouldn’t just cut out the middleman, i.e., Noah Smith. Maybe that’s the future of Substack: AI drawing on a large corpus of hand-bashed text so that instead of paying Freddie deBoer to write I can just say, “Hey Substack, write me an essay on professional wrestling in the style of Freddie deBoer.” After all, people who write for Substack have limited time, limited energy, limited imagination, but AI won’t have any of those limits. It can bash infinitely more words.

I think Smith and roon don’t consider that possibility because they have another planted axiom, one that can be extracted from this line in their essay: our AI future “doesn’t mean humans will have to give up the practice of individual creativity; we’ll just do it for fun instead of for money.” But we will only do that if we have time and energy to do it, which we will have only have if we’re not busting our asses to make a living. Thus the final planted axiom: AI and human beings will flourish together in a post-scarcity world, like that of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels.

For some reason I haven’t thought about this passage in years, though it is one of the most glorious things I know:

God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quetidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

That’s John Donne’s glorious sermon for Christmas Day 1624, wonderfuly explicated by Joe Mangina here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie comes out fighting for freedom of speech:

We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and then, faced a terrible online backlash. There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash, ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.

To anyone who thinks, “Well, some people who have said terrible things, deserve it,” no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking. There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognises itself to be what it is. Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity. […] 

Literature deeply matters and I believe literature is in peril because of social censure. If nothing changes, the next generation will read us and wonder, how did they manage to stop being human? How were they so lacking in contradiction and complexity? How did they banish all their shadows?

 

FYI, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea tells you what happens when you banish your shadow. 

Tyler Adams’s response yesterday to a confrontational Iranian journalist was remarkably impressive. You can see why even at age 23 he’s the proper captain for the USMNT. ⚽️

Brian Phillips: 

It seems safe to say that beneath this admiration, there is still, for many Americans, a lurking sense of Iran as a geopolitical nemesis. The crypto-racist provocations of old Bush-era “Axis of Evil” rhetoric still have a residual influence on many people, as does the grainy mental afterimage of Ayatollah Khomeini ranting about the U.S. as the “Great Satan” in the 1980s.

I don’t even remember the last time I disagreed with Brian about soccer, but then, this really isn’t a point about soccer. My guess is that “many Americans” do not think of Iran as a nemesis, indeed do not think of Iran at all. I would estimate that the percentage of Americans who have any view of Iran at all is approximately .1%, and yes, I know how to use decimal points in percentages. Moreover, I don’t think that percentage is any higher among footy fans. People in this country don’t remember anything that happened before the election of Donald Trump, and very little of what happened before Covid. 

On a totally different subject: I did not at all expect the USMNT to get through to the knockout rounds, so I am very pleasantly surprised. They look extremely solid defensively and have an absolutely dynamic midfield, but I don’t know where the goals are going to come from — especially if Pulisic’s “pelvic contusion” (ouch) keeps him out of the Netherlands match on Saturday. 

I am thrilled to have been so wrong about this USMNT side. What I didn’t expect: their defensive consistency and reslilence. Tim Ream is their man of the tournament so far — he’s been massive. ⚽️

Carol Rumens:

There’s a human narrator, but s/he bows out after three lines. Of the two crows, one has a single, though essential, line: “Where sall we gang and dine today?” The other, having reconnoitred the scene already and worked out the feeding strategy, replies in vivid, uncompromising detail. Anthropomorphism of this kind can be justified on the grounds that the invented bird-talk reflects real, observable bird behaviour regarding food, territory and judicious co-operation. 

Really? That’s how the poem can be justified — by objective analysis of “real, observable bird behaviour regarding food, territory and judicious co-operation”? If the behavior of these poetic corbies should prove inconsistent with the most up-to-date ornithological findings, would we have to toss the poem in the dustbin? 

It's very hard not to laugh at this: Twitter-addicted journalists decamping for Mastodon only to resume, immediately, their familiar habits of bullying, shaming, proclaiming their victimhood, and Trying to Get Management To Take Their Side. As I have said: “Which way I fly is Hellsite; myself am Hellsite….” 

Jessica Martin:

I am not sure that we meant to place the holy eucharist inside the temple to the marketplace gods; but we did. We put it there for consumption (along with a lot of the Church’s other highly marketised ‘missional’ activity).  Perhaps by doing it we have become subversives on the marketplace gods’ territory. Or perhaps we are the subverted. The internet is a strange platform upon which to choose to place the ritual that reverses all other greeds.

It might be the boldest thing we could do – placing communion in the heart of all commodification. Or it could be the silliest choice, the most foolhardy. Are we blaspheming? Or are we, urgently hungry, sick of gobbling shadows, filling ourselves with the bread of the Presence? 

This is a remarkable essay by Jessica Martin, meditation on what happens when two vital experiences — sex and Eucharist — are made virtual. Can there be a Real Presence in a medium predicated on absence? 

Same

A follow-up on one element of this post: It would be uncharitable and just plain wrong to conclude that doctors and other health-care professionals lack compassion and want to make you suffer. Nevertheless, what Ivan Illich wrote in Medical Nemesis (1975) was true then and is true now: "Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution.” The system works by purposes that the workers within the system may not share — but they are compelled to serve those purposes anyway. 

I think the first thing to understand about the American health-care system is this: some people lose money from illness, and some people make money from illness. Some people pay, and some people get paid. This doesn’t mean that the people who get paid are motivated solely or even primarily by money, though some of them surely are; this doesn’t mean that those who pay always resent having to pay, though some of them surely do. What it means is that there is on this one significant point an opposition of interests between the two parties; and that opposition manifests itself in a thousand ways. You see it when sick people don’t go to the doctor because they don’t want to, or can’t, pay for the services that would be rendered there; you see it when doctors advocate for unnecessary procedures that line their pockets, or prescribe drugs because they have a lucrative relationship with particular drug companies; you see it when money-making procedures are deemed necessary while the poor get dramatically sub-par health care or none at all. 

Again: I don’t think there are many doctors who consciously make medical decisions based on their lust for money. But I do think there are a great many doctors who go along with the incentives established by the system, without thinking about it too much or at all, because on some level they know that thinking about it could well lead to their losing money.

And this opposition of interests cannot be eliminated; in the current system — where profit is God even for supposedly nonprofit hospital systems — it cannot even be diminished.  

But our discourse about medicine and health care is radically skewed towards the doctors and other health-care professionals. The voices of the patients — those who suffer, and those who pay — are rarely heard. This is the importance of books like Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places — and there ought to be a lot more of them. It’s not that we don’t have books and essays by people who have been abused or abandoned by the medical system — there are plenty of them — but they get tragically little attention, largely, I think, because journalists think of themselves as belonging to the same “Professional” category as doctors and don’t want to be class traitors. 

It’s good to have books by doctors who see the evils of the system and fight back against it — people like Oliver Sacks, about whom I have an essay coming out soon from The New Atlantis, and Victoria Sweet — but we really do need to hear more from patients, and especially patients the system doesn’t serve. Because the incentive structures of American health care ensure that, without major changes, things will get worse before they get better.

This is a cause worth fighting for, but it will be hard to get enough people on board if we don’t hear more from those most affected.  

Staying for the Truth | The Hedgehog Review:

Bacon … thinks it is good, very good indeed, to be “well fortified by doctrines of the wise” and thereby to be protected from the storms of lies that toss many people about so violently. It is indeed gratifying, Bacon says, paraphrasing Lucretius, to be “standing upon the vantage ground of truth,” because up there “the air is always clear and serene.” But, he adds, the pleasure one feels is appropriate “so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride.” If you have been able to discover something that is true, then you should have compassion for those who are laboring under the spell of falsehood. And if instead of pitying them, you mock and belittle them, then you will become swollen with pride — and then, when the lies that comfort you come around, you will be unable to resist them. 

That’s me. Let me add to the argument I make there a corollary thesis: In any given community, there will be a profound divide between those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones told by our enemies and those who believe that the most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves.