Summer 2024
Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art – Ted Chiang does it again
- It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch.
- Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium.
- People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.
- But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.
- As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get.
- We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world.
- Unbelievable investigative journalism about Spotify’s “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program. Musicians who provide PFC tracks “must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.”
- Spotify identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music
- A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose.
- Good blog post about this
- I am just perpetually trying to learn how to read
- So we in the forgetful majority must, I think, confront the following question: Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?
- One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading.
- “There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
- we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall. You may remember the specifics of only a few conversations with your best friend, but you would never ask if talking to him or her was a waste of time.
A Leading Memory Researcher Explains How to Make Precious Moments Last
- I think of memory more like a painting than a photograph. There’s often photorealistic aspects of a painting, but there’s also interpretation. As a painter evolves, they could revisit the same subject over and over and paint differently based on who they are now. We’re capable of remembering things in extraordinary detail, but we infuse meaning into what we remember. We’re designed to extract meaning from the past, and that meaning should have truth in it. But it also has knowledge and imagination and, sometimes, wisdom.
- If you capture the feelings and the sights and the sounds that bring you to the moment, as opposed to the facts of what happened, that is a huge part of getting the best of memory.
- …the “reminiscence bump” — the centrality of memories from the ages of about 10 to 30 — shows up when people list their favorite movies, books or music, which tend to come from that period in peoples’ lives.
Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It
- Clance and Imes describe the cycle that impostor feelings often produce—a sense of impending failure that inspires frenzied hard work, and short-lived gratification when failure is staved off, quickly followed by the return of the old conviction that failure is imminent
- Some women adopt a kind of magical thinking about their pessimism: daring to believe in success would actually doom them to failure, so failure must be anticipated instead. The typical case hides her own opinions, fearing that they will be seen as stupid; she might seek the approval of a mentor but then believe it has been secured only because of charm or appeal; she may hate herself for even needing this validation, taking the need itself as proof of her intellectual phoniness.
- Once I’d finished this brief summary of my impostor syndrome—trying on the term, which wasn’t one I could remember using before—my dinner companion, another white female academic, replied curtly, “That’s such a white-lady thing to say.”
- My seatmate and I turned to the only woman of color at the table, a Black professor, so that she could, presumably, tell us what to think about the whiteness of impostor syndrome, … She hadn’t often felt like an impostor, because she had more frequently found herself in situations where her competence or intelligence had been underestimated than in ones where it was taken for granted.
- Landry understands now that what her classmate characterized as a crisis of self-doubt was simply an observation of an external truth—the concrete impact of connections and privilege.
- “Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.”
- …the impostor phenomenon, as a concept, effectively functions as an emotional filing cabinet organizing a variety of fraught feelings that we can experience as we try to reconcile three aspects of our personhood: how we experience ourselves, how we present ourselves to the world, and how the world reflects that self back to us. The phenomenon names an unspoken, ongoing crisis arising from the gaps between these various versions of the self, and designates not a syndrome but an inescapable part of being alive.
- Captures the ongoingness of each individual and humankind
- The gift of attention: When you offer a gaze that communicates respect, you are positively answering the questions people are unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Am I a priority to you?” Those questions are answered by your eyes before they are answered by your words.
- Accompaniment: If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being.
- The art of conversation:
- Be a loud listener
- Storify whenever possible — instead of “what do you think about that”, ask “how did you come to believe that?”.
- Looping! Paraphrase what the person just said
- Turn your partner into a narrator – ask a specific follow-up question! Help them revisit the moment in a more concrete way
- Don’t be a topper!!! “I know exactly what you mean…I had this experience” will shift the attention back to yourself
- BIG QUESTIONS – After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above.
- These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs. Other good questions include: If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about? Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?
- What talents are you not using right now?
- “Why you???” – Understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. Understand motivation
- How do your ancestors show up in your life?
- Think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility.
- Stand in their standpoint
- The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings.
- But the public square began to shrink in China—at first slowly, in the years leading up to Xi Jinping’s rise to power, in 2012, and then precipitously thereafter. Party journals began to cast civil society as a “trap” set by Western agitators.
- For reasons ranging from political repression to pandemic lockdowns and a relentless work culture, a growing number of Chinese have become practitioners of runxue—“run philosophy,” or emigration. In each of the past two years, more than three hundred thousand Chinese have left the country, according to data from the United Nations—more than double the number in 2012.
- “It was just—oh man—it was so emotional,” Zhang told me. His cherished life in Beijing was gone. Somehow, it had reappeared in Tokyo.
Why Should Institutions Be Transparent
- Process and outcome legitimacy are necessary, but never sufficient to explain an institution’s authority.
- legitimate authority – authority with moral weight – can’t exist. Institutions not grounded in community are only followed for pragmatic reasons, never obeyed out of a sense of moral duty.
- The more institutions publicize their inner workings, the more outsiders can influence those inner workings. This is good – it is, indeed, the essence of democracy – if those “outsiders” are not actually outsiders, but rather legitimate participants, i.e., democratic stakeholders seeking to improve the institution. But that is a big if. Transparency, by definition, does not guarantee it. When information is publicly disseminated, it always also goes to institutions’ enemies as well as their friends, and this carries a cost.
- On the whole, it’s useful to think of transparency as a way of broadcasting power over an institution to a more diffuse set of actors; or granting remote access to an important part of the control panels.
- We aren’t thinking about transparency with enough rigor. By and large, we should demand it of institutions when, and only when, we reasonably suspect them of asserting illegitimate authority. A bit like invasive cancer surgery, the role of transparency should be primarily to attack strongly suspected corruption, not to fish for it.
- A bitter family dispute hinged on an impossible question: When cognitive decline changes people, should we respect their new desires?
Why I Am Not a Market Radical – Glen Weyl’s series clearly had a pretty substantive effect on me as I headed into my transition out of economics academia
- More than a substantive field, economics can most easily be understood as the application to social analysis and design of a particular branch of enlightenment thought that I will call Atomistic Liberalism and Objectivist Naïve Epistemology (ALONE). Central to ALONE is a binary between Individuals, conceptualized as largely presocial, independent ultimate loci of value/preference/good/belief (well-being for short), and some global coordination device variously referred to as the social planner, objective truth, the modeler, the mechanism designer, the impartial observer, God or, most commonly and how I will refer to it, The State.
- The possibility of meaningful individual “agency” or “autonomy” is of relatively recent origin and is grounded in the proliferation of diverse social settings and communities. This novelty has been born of modern political economic institutions, such as the city. In more closed and narrow societies, individuality, “selfishness”, and the like had little meaning as nearly all interacting members had the same loci of value.
- That is, it will have to take as input social identity and value rather than individual identity and money. It will have to view the basic problem not as reconciling individual selfishness with the common good, but rather achieving cooperation across lines of social difference.
- Many technocrats are at least open to a degree of ultimate popular sovereignty over government, but believe that such democratic checks should operate at a quite high level, evaluating government performance on “final outcomes” rather than the means of achieving these
- In order to allow these failures to be corrected, it will be necessary for the designed system to be comprehensible by those outside the formal community, so they can incorporate the unformalized information through critique, reuse, recombination and broader conversation in informal language. Let us call this goal “legibility”.
- There will in general be a trade-off between fidelity and legibility, just as both will have to be traded off against optimality.
- If one believes that there will always be critical information necessary to the good which will not be formalizable in the language of a narrow community that can “solve” the AIAP or design a “friendly” AI, then the AIAP is inherently insoluble on the terms in which it has been posed. It is a bit like posing the “genius dictator alignment problem”: how can we ensure that if there is a brilliant dictator, he will serve the interests of the broader public? This question presupposes that we must accept such a dictator or that such a dictatorship would be desirable.
- Instead it should be to create a set of social institutions that ensures that the ability of any narrow oligarchy or small number of intelligences like a friendly AI cannot hold extremely disproportionate power.
Spring 2024
Cultural Criticism Still Matters
- He argues that films aren’t just documents of a culture’s values and chosen narrative tropes, but a kind of document of a culture’s subconscious, one that filmmakers often don’t know that they’re making.
- The popular understanding of what a critic does is that a critic tells you whether something is good or bad. But that is the least interesting part of a critic’s job, when all is said and done, because two critics can see the same movie, agree largely on its strengths and flaws, then weight them very differently in their heads.
- The true role of a critic is to pull apart the work, to delve into the marrow of it, to figure out what it is trying to say about our society and ourselves. You can love a work and think its politics are deeply problematic; you can believe something is terrible yet offers some accidentally acute insights about the way the world works.
- This entire issue was formative in thinking about how I can be a good steward of my research resources
- The World is Hard to Change:
- If we pursue a small intervention that does not succeed, we cannot assume that doing more, faster would work better. It might well be the case that policy effects are weakened by broader social forces and institutions, but that hardly means we can easily change those larger contexts. It is not that researchers limit themselves to one kind of test, but that accumulated evidence often does not point to obvious policy interventions even when large problems are identified.
- There is thus little alternative to muddling through, incrementally and with setbacks
- Vital City | How the Sausage Gets Made: A Primer
- Good social science requires much more than statistical significance. It requires judgment.
- First and foremost, a good hypothesis and/or theory of why one thing may cause another to happen is necessary. Even with this and a seemingly statistically significant result, repeated replication is necessary to strengthen our belief that one thing is related to another.
- The Hubris of Social Scientists
- Most new ideas fail. When tested, they show null results, and when replicated, apparent findings disappear. This is a truth that is in no way limited to social policy. Social science RCTs are modeled on medical research — but fewer than 2% of all drugs that are investigated by academics in preclinical trials are ultimately approved for sale. A recent study found that just 1 in 5 drugs that were successful after Stage 1 trials made it through the FDA approval process.
- Even after drugs are approved for sale at the completion of the complex FDA process (involving multiple RCTs), new evidence often emerges casting those initial results in doubt. There’s a 1 in 3 chance that an approved drug is assigned a black-box warning or similar caution post-approval.
- It would be worrisome if there were big, effective criminal justice interventions out there that we had missed for centuries.
- Liberating economics from the academy
- The solution is not to abandon the economic tools that make causal research possible, but instead to put them in more hands and apply them to smaller problems — a democratization of knowledge generation that could itself be a big social change.
- Reflections of a policymaker
- This is the kind of value we miss when we focus too narrowly on an instrumental conception of “what works”: The very search for solutions and the faith that we can realize them enables people to build trusting relationships and learn from each other in ways that are only possible through collaboration. While these efforts may not always lead to quantifiably evaluable, replicable or durable change, they can arguably contribute to something greater: actions that cultivate shared values of mutual respect, trust and legitimacy that are essential for a safe, just, democratic society.
- Confronting Radical Uncertainty
- We have found, in our own less-comprehensive but wider-aperture work, a similar pattern: that “evidence” is context-dependent, contradictory, often minor, consistently conservative and rarely replicable
- Certainty is convenient
- Good evaluations are momentary glimpses of underlying truths about the world.
- We shouldn’t see evidence as a solution, but as a starting place. The solution is simpler and harder: to collaborate with each other; get customer feedback to people delivering programs; help systems improve. We are not talking about one-off interventions that change the world. The real work isn’t about what we deliver, but how.
- We should also make service delivery more adaptive. Adaptive systems ask us to replace compliance relationships — the dark heart of government — with something that’s more flexible to community needs and changing circumstances. We need to be able to look at progress every week, openly assess what’s working and what’s not and make changes.
- Is Transformational Change the Only Thing That Matters?
- In the world of social innovation, research and evaluation is the analog to profit. It is the means of understanding whether what we are doing is effective. A key difference, though, is that while profit may be difficult to obtain, it is easy to measure. Programmatic effectiveness, on the other hand, is both hard to obtain and hard to measure.
- Causal Research: More, Not Less
- The solution is not to abandon evidence — even the incremental kind provided by RCTs. The solution is to do RCTs faster and across more settings — so that we can continuously update what we know and build evidence for change.
I Am Going to Miss Pitchfork, but That’s Only Half the Problem
- That’s where media is right now: You can thrive being very small or very big, but it’s extremely hard to even survive between those poles. That’s a disaster for journalism — and for readers. The middle can be more specific and strange and experimental than mass publications, and it can be more ambitious and reported and considered than the smaller players. The middle is where a lot of great journalists are found and trained. The middle is where local reporting happens and where culture is made rather than discovered.
- The value of curation, Chayka said, is “not just telling you what to consume. It’s giving you this holistic education and insight into how things work, into the context of objects or ideas. It involves vast amounts of labor and time and work to present objects or ideas or songs or whatever in the context that they deserve. And I feel like that’s been lost on the contemporary internet.” That’s what Pitchfork did, and now it, too, is lost. It will be missed. And I fear it will not be replaced.
- Really good related podcast episode – How Do We Survive the Media Apocalypse on Search Engine
Legal Weed in New York Was Going to Be a Revolution. What Happened?
- In nearly every state where marijuana has been decriminalized, legalization has been followed by an upswing in illegal activity
- Really good look at how a law with good intentions fails in the details of the implementation
- The central question here is, can social justice and capitalism work hand-in-hand?
Why we need to highlight stories of progress to build a better future
Give reasons why it’s valuable to highlight stories of progress.
- Progress creates the momentum for more positive change
- It lets us see that the seemingly unachievable, isn’t
- Past progress is full of lessons that can improve things today
- Pointing out successes puts pressure on leaders to deliver the same (or more)
- To solve problems we need to move forward, not backward
“Nudge” Part 1: A Simple Solution for Climate Change, Littering, and Organ Donations
- We’re obsessed with the aesthetics of counterintuitiveness
- Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today.
- For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.
- The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing.
- I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?
- Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
- Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.
- Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions.
24 hours in an invisible epidemic
- First time that the mode of data visualization made me really emotional, which is distinct from data aiding a point that makes me very emotional
- Wonder what this would look like using Chinese time use survey data. Would be cool if I could enter my demographics and then show what someone like me would experience in China
Spring 2023
Will AI Become the New McKinsey?
- Suppose you’ve built a semi-autonomous A.I. that’s entirely obedient to humans—one that repeatedly checks to make sure it hasn’t misinterpreted the instructions it has received. This is the dream of many A.I. researchers. Yet such software could easily still cause as much harm as McKinsey has.
- As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved.
- It would be different if we already had universal basic income, but we don’t, so expressing support for it seems like a way for the people developing A.I. to pass the buck to the government. In effect, they are intensifying the problems that capitalism creates with the expectation that, when those problems become bad enough, the government will have no choice but to step in. As a strategy for making the world a better place, this seems dubious.
- People who criticize new technologies are sometimes called Luddites, but it’s helpful to clarify what the Luddites actually wanted. The main thing they were protesting was the fact that their wages were falling at the same time that factory owners’ profits were increasing, along with food prices. They were also protesting unsafe working conditions, the use of child labor, and the sale of shoddy goods that discredited the entire textile industry. The Luddites did not indiscriminately destroy machines; if a machine’s owner paid his workers well, they left it alone. The Luddites were not anti-technology; what they wanted was economic justice. They destroyed machinery as a way to get factory owners’ attention. The fact that the word “Luddite” is now used as an insult, a way of calling someone irrational and ignorant, is a result of a smear campaign by the forces of capital.
- Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress.
- Roughly speaking, taming capitalism means government regulation, and resisting capitalism means grassroots activism and labor unions. Are there ways for A.I. to strengthen those things? Is there a way for A.I. to empower labor unions or worker-owned coöperatives?
- A society in which most women were killed or otherwise excluded from reproduction would struggle to maintain its population, as the remaining women would only be able to bear so many more children to compensate. Yet a society that lost most of its men could repopulate the next generation with just a handful of fathers. The rest are, reproductively speaking, expendable.
- When incels talk about the “traditional norms” supposedly eroded by feminism, they are actually referring to a brief historical window in which a number of political and economic currents converged to create an incredible wave of stability and shared prosperity in much of the developed world, giving millions of relatively unskilled and unremarkable men the means to sustain a nuclear household on a single income and reap the rewards of patriarchy. That this was in fact an unprecedented social arrangement, or that people in preceding decades had actually attended church less often, married later, and done so in lower numbers was quickly forgotten as the world of Leave It to Beaver established itself as the perpetual “good old days” in our collective imaginary.
- And now, as globalization and neoliberalism sweep away the last vestiges of economic security, marriage—which has always been men’s most reliable pathway out of celibacy—is increasingly becoming an upper-class luxury. Houellebecq had it wrong; neoliberal economic deregulation isn’t analogous to sexual stratification—it’s the direct cause.
- The automation and professionalization of war have reduced its effectiveness as a meat grinder for processing vast quantities of surplus masculinity. So while feminism is not to blame for the exclusion of large numbers of men from family life, incels can blame modernity for the fact that, unlike their ancient counterparts, they remain alive to stew in their discontent.
Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much?
- In 1992, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a robust defence of the word and the way it carries “a rich emotional nuance”, responding to what had already been a decade of criticism.
- Many of these uses often overlap in a way that is incredibly rich. If you say, “He was like, seething about the pasta sauce,” you are quoting someone’s reaction, but at the same time highlighting you are approximating their response, while pausing to highlight that you are thinking meaningfully about this reaction in real time. That one word is doing all those jobs, all the while creating a sense of familiarity between you and the person you’re talking to.
- Taking someone to task for the way they speak is one of the last societally accepted ways to exercise our prejudices
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