Finished reading: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany 📚
Finished reading: Phantastes by George MacDonald 📚
Finished reading: The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode (good to return to this masterpiece of criticism). 📚
To date I have been recording what I’m reading but not when I finish a book. But doing the latter might be useful, so I am about to register several of them from the year so far. Don’t be alarmed.
Just posted a State of My Mind Address to my Buy Me a Coffee supporters.
frictionless ignorance
Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.
Today’s Bard announcement feels like their natural evolution: extracting all value out of the internet for themselves, burying pages at the bottom of each GPT-generated essay like footnotes.
Yep. Similarly, Joanna Stern thinks the new AI-powered search at Bing is terrific, but note this: When she asked Bing’s AI a question, “Bing’s chatbot typed out the answer, with a bulleted list of winners and a mention of Beyoncé’s most-Grammys-ever record. The answer also contained clickable citations, noting the source of the listed information.”
My question: Who’s gonna click through to the links? Almost nobody. People who use such services will simply assume that Bard and Bing, that classic comedy duo, provide the correct answers and thus will never leave the search page. Ease of use and superficial plausibility will leave users in a state of frictionless ignorance; sites that contain genuinely useful information will remain unvisited; and the various AI “services” will comprise a new power/knowledge regime.
Ted Gioia’s State of the Culture 2023 “speech” is a feast of provocations.
the verdict is in
I think the importance of [Katelyn Beaty’s Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church] is the conversation it opens about ethics in institutions, not (just) pious personal practices. The scandal at the heart of her book is not the celebrity pastors; their corruption and scandal is the least interesting and most predictable part of the package. The scandal is the enabling organizations and the collapse of institutional ethics — a dangerous pragmatism married to a startlingly idealistic naïveté.
Thus the need for the repair of institutions, something that I think requires the cultivation of piety.