Academic Writing

One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between “concepts.” There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience… Sociology—by its very nature?—seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died.

Peter Elbow

You don’t come to live here

You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. “A reality shaped around your own desires” —there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

Zadie Smith, Find Your Beach, The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014

What is tolerance?

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

Voltaire

Well first of all

Well first of all, tell me, is there some society you know of that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed?

Milton Friedman

Beware

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

George Bernard Shaw

Give people what they want

Give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I think we can take a bite out of piracy.

Kevin Spacey

The Peter Principle

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Dr Laurence J. Peter, The Peter Principle

Genuine Poetry

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

The person, be it gentleman or lady

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 1818

There ain’t no answer

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.

Gertrude Stein

True Readers

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented… In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. 

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.

First line from The Secret Garden by Frances Hogdson Burnett

Squire Trelawney

Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

Leap Years

There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. The three extra days were for leap years.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Last Lines

Only when I am in bed, at dawn, listening to the cars down below in the streets of Paris, my memory betrays me; that summer returns to me with all its memories. Anne, Anne, I repeat over and over again softly in the darkness. Then something rises in me that I welcome by name, with closed eyes. Bonjour Tristesse!

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

The Literary Memoir

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It

From The Wall Street Journal

The web is in crisis, and artificial intelligence is to blame.

For decades, seeking knowledge online has meant googling it and clicking on the links the search engine offered up. Search has so dominated our information-seeking behaviors that few of us ever think to question it anymore.

But AI is changing all of that, and fast. A new generation of AI-powered “answer engines” could make finding information easier, by simply giving us the answers to our questions rather than forcing us to wade through pages of links. Meanwhile, the web is filling up with AI-generated content of dubious quality. It’s polluting search results, and making traditional search less useful.

The implications of this shift could be big. Seeking information using a search engine could be almost completely replaced by this new generation of large language model-powered systems, says Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who has lately made a name for himself as an analyst of these AIs.

This could be good for consumers, but it could also completely upend the delicate balance of publishers, tech giants and advertisers on which the internet as we know it has long depended.

AI agents help cut through the clutter, but research is already suggesting they also eliminate any need for people to click through to the websites they rely on to produce their answers, says Mollick. Without traffic, the business model for many publishers—of providing useful, human-generated information on the web—could collapse.

Over the past week, I’ve been playing with a new, free, AI-powered search engine-slash-web browser on the iPhone, called Arc Search. When I type in a search query, it first identifies the best half-dozen websites with information on that topic, then uses AI to “read” and summarize them.

It’s like having an assistant who can instantly and concisely relate the results of a Google search to you. It’s such a timesaver that I’m betting that once most people try it, they’ll never be able to imagine going back to the old way of browsing the web.

While Arc Search is convenient, I feel a little guilty using it, because instead of clicking through to the websites it summarizes, I’m often satisfied with the answer it offers up. The maker of Arc is getting something for free—my attention, and I’m getting the information I want. But the people who created that information get nothing. The company behind Arc did not respond to requests for comment on what their browser might mean for the future of the web. The company’s chief executive has said in the past that he thinks their product may transform it, but he’s not sure how.

In December, the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement over these exact issues. The Times alleges that the technology companies exploited its content without permission to create their artificial-intelligence products. In its complaint, the Times says these AI tools divert traffic that would otherwise go to the Times’ web properties, depriving the company of advertising, licensing and subscription revenue.

OpenAI has said it is committed to working with content creators to ensure they benefit from AI technology and new revenue models. Already, publishers are in negotiations with OpenAI to license content for use in its large language models. Among the publishers is Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

Activity on coding answer site Stack Overflow has dropped in the face of competition from these AI agents. The company disclosed in August that its traffic dropped 14% in April, the month after the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can be used to write code that developers otherwise would look up on sites like Stack Overflow. In October, the company announced it was laying off 28% of its workforce.

“Stack Overflow’s traffic, along with traffic to many other sites, has been impacted by the surge of interest in GenAI tools over the last year especially as it relates to simple questions,” says Matt Trocchio, director of communications for the company. But, he adds, those large language models have to get their data from somewhere—and that somewhere is places like Stack Overflow. And the company has responded to this fresh wave of competition by releasing its own AI-powered coding assistant, OverflowAI.

Traffic to sites like Reddit, which is full of answers from real people, could be next, says Mollick. A spokesman for Reddit said that the one thing a large language model can never replace is Reddit’s “genuine community and human connection,” and that its “community-first model imparts trust because it’s real people sharing and conversing around passions and lived experiences.” Reddit is set to go public in March.

Liz Reid, general manager of search at Google, has said that the company doesn’t anticipate that people will suddenly switch over to AI chat-based search all at once. Still, it’s clear that Google is taking the threat of AI-powered search very seriously. The company has gone into overdrive on this front, reallocating people and resources to address the threat and opportunity of AI, and is now rolling out new AI-powered products at a rapid clip.

Those products include Google’s “search generative experience,” which pairs an AI-created summary with traditional search results. “Users are not only looking for AI summaries or AI answers, they really care about the richness and the diversity that exists on the web,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a recent CNBC interview. “They want to explore too. Our approach really prioritizes that balance, and the data we see shows that people value that experience.”

This moment also means there is opportunity for challengers. For the first time in years, scrappy startups can credibly claim that they could challenge Google in search, where the company has above a 90% market share in the U.S.

Eric Olson is CEO of Consensus, a search startup that uses large language models to offer up detailed summaries of research papers, and to offer insights about the scientific consensus on various topics. He believes that AI-powered search startups like his can offer an experience superior to Google’s on specific topics, in a way that will carve off chunks of Google’s search business one piece at a time.

Asking Consensus whether social media is bad for teen mental health provides an instructive example: Consensus uses AI to summarize the top 10 papers on the subject, and then offers a longer breakdown of the diversity of findings on the issue, in which every paper cited is individually summarized.

It’s an impressive feat, one that would take a non-expert human many hours of effort to accomplish on their own. (I’ll save you even more time. The short answer is yes.)

This kind of AI-powered search is also better than simply asking the same question of a large language model like ChatGPT, which is famously lax when it comes to answering such questions, often making up studies that don’t exist, or misattributing information. This is known as the “hallucination” problem, and forcing an AI to draw only from a prescribed set of inputs—like scientific papers—can help solve it, says Olson.

This doesn’t mean that the problem of hallucination can be eradicated completely, says Mollick. This could put Google at a disadvantage, because if the world’s largest search engine gets one out of 10 queries to its AI wrong, that’s a problem, but if a startup with an experimental offering has the same performance, it can look like a triumph.

. . . .

Despite these issues, users may move toward AI-based answer engines for the simple reason that AI-generated content threatens to make the web, and existing search, less and less usable. AI is already being used to write fake reviews, synthesize fake videos of politicians, and write completely made-up news articles—all in hopes of snatching dollars, votes and eyeballs on the cheap.

“The recent surge in low-quality AI-generated content poses significant challenges for Google’s search quality, with spammers leveraging generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, to produce content that — usually temporarily — ranks well in Google Search,” search-engine optimization expert Lily Ray told me.

The problem isn’t just with Google’s search results. AI-generated content has also been spotted in listings within Google Maps, the summaries that appear above and alongside search results known as “featured snippets,” within Google’s shopping listings, and in the news items the company features in its “top stories,” news and “discover” features, she adds.

It’s important to note that Google has for decades battled those who would manipulate its search algorithms, and it continually updates its systems to sweep away spammy content, whatever the source. Its guidelines on AI-generated content, last updated in February, re-iterate that the company is fine with using AI to help generate content—but only if it serves the people consuming it.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

Were it left to me to decide

Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

Thomas Jefferson

One of the penalties

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato

To write

To write is human, to edit is divine.

Stephen King

If this was a normal cover

If this was a normal cover for a normal book, I would tell it’s FANTASTIC!GRIPPING! (according to all book covers they’re fantastic and gripping)

Pseudonymous Bosch

A Fundamental Humility

What you need is a fundamental humility – the belief that you can learn from anyone.

Clayton Christensen

I like being present in spaces

I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you’re racist or sexist or small-minded.

Scaachi Kou

Dysphemism

Nowhere are they more common than in the argot of the greasy spoon (a dysphemism for the word “diner”), immortalized in the 1941 book by Jack Smiley, “Hash House Lingo”. Toast was called a board or a shingle; tea was boiled leaves and coffee was mud; bullets were baked beans, and a steak, well-done, was a burned steer.

Merriam-Webster

I do write by hand

I do write by hand. I just think – I don’t know, it’s a physical thing for me. It’s a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.

Elizabeth Strout

But wherever they go

But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

The House At Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

The House At Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

We fall out of bed

We fall out of bed and into our rags, still crusted with the grime of yesterday.

Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill

Great Last Lines in Books

In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

The Road

Great Last Lines in Books

I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Censorship

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

Federico Fellini

Much publishing

Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.

Charles Bukowski

There is a marvelous peace

There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy.

J. D. Salinger

The majority of the wealth of human knowledge

The majority of the wealth of human knowledge is owned by a few publishing companies that hoard information and make billions off licensing fees, although most scholarly articles and journals are paid for by taxpayers through government grants.

Abby Martin

Censorship

Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.

Potter Stewart

Disruptive Innovation Quotes

From CIO magazine:

Regardless of the word’s over/misuse, there’s no denying that we are in an era of disruption. From Amazon to Apple, and of course Uber, disruptive innovation is happening at a staggering rate. While disruption is an easy topic to chat about and the innovations that cause it seem like common sense once they gain popularity, few tasks are more difficult or require greater dedication than disrupting a stagnating industry.

 So, to help inspire you to keep striving to create innovation, I’ve put together this list of 13 amazing quotes about disruption. Enjoy.  

 Gabor George Burt

“Meaningful innovation does not need to be based on outright invention. Rather, there is an exhilarating shortcut. It is based on bold, new combinations of already existing components that simultaneously unlock heightened levels of consumer value and reduce costs.” 

Travis Bradberry

“Influential people are never satisfied with the status quo. They’re the ones who constantly ask, ‘What if?’ and ‘Why not?’ They’re not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and they don’t disrupt things for the sake of being disruptive; they do it to make things better.” 

Richard Branson

“There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you.” 

Dale Carnegie

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”

Clayton Christensen

“The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.”

Steve Jobs

“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”

 Guy Kawasaki

“Great companies start because the founders want to change the world… not make a fast buck.”

 Ash Maurya

“Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.”

 Phil McKinney

“When it comes to innovation, an ounce of execution is worth more than a ton of theory.”

 Elon Musk

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

Link to the rest at CIO magazine

Dealing with Change

As dealing with change becomes a regular activity, leading it becomes a skill to hone, an internal capacity to master.

Arnaud Henneville

Reading Fiction

Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin.

Ann Patchett