Always on(line)
Provence, Summer 2023
Quote of the Day
”Profit models are not philosophies, and should not be gussied up as such, festooned with purloined intellectual gew-gaws and other pirate fineries. Serious thinkers should not be pressed into service merely as propagandists for the cause.”
- Henry Farrell, commenting on tech industry moguls who aspire to be public intellectuals.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan | Shelter from the Storm
Long Read of the Day
A Killer App for Large Language Models
Lovely essay by Henry Farrell about a piece that he and Marion Fourcade had published in the Economist arguing that LLMs’ most straightforward application is as “engines of organisational ritual”.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. … Rituals aren’t just about God, but about people’s relations with each other. Everyday life depends on ritual performances such as being polite, dressing appropriately, following proper procedure and observing the law. … Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed …
My bits of the article were inspired by two reinforcing pieces of information. One was a conversation with a friend, who works for an organization that requires Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statements. The friend described how they had spent hours writing a thoughtful serious statement; and then spun up ChatGPT to generate one. The friend ended up submitting their own handcrafted statement, but couldn’t help feeling that their organization would have preferred the bland inanity of what ChatGPT had put out, which more perfectly combined the organization’s expectations and the general form of the thing.
The second was an observation from playing around with ChatGPT, which
[is that]ChatGPT is very good at generating Schelling Points…
Read on. It’s quirky and insightful.
Books, etc.
I’ve just listened to a fabulous conversation between Ezra Klein and Zadie Smith, which made me realise that I need to read her essays. What clinched it was that, like me, she’s a great admirer of Neil Postman.
My commonplace booklet
I love September. For me, it’s always been the first month of the year, which is why I don’t care much for January 1st. It’s a consequence of working for many years in universities, I suppose, but also of the rhythms of primary and secondary school. Cycling in to College the other day at 8am I suddenly remembered that it was 60 years ago — to the day — since I had walked up the drive of University College Cork for my first day as an engineering student. And what came flooding back were memories of what had been going through my mind that day.
Context: I was the first member of my family to go to university, and when I was growing up in a book-free household in small towns on the West coast of Ireland (what is now grandly called ’The Wild Atlantic Way’) the possibility of being able to get there had seemed exceedingly remote. But then, in 1964, a combination of luck, location and scholarships made possible what had once seemed unattainable, and there I was on my way into the ivory tower! It was, as PG Wodehouse put it in another context, “like dying and going to heaven without the trouble and expense”. And what I remember most vividly was the intense pleasure of finally getting into a place where ideas were taken seriously.
Which explains why I was so looking forward the other morning to breakfast in college with a dear friend who had just arrived from the US, and whose new book I had read and enjoyed.
Wodehouse nailed it — as usual.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- The Amazing Recording History of Here Comes the Sun. Want to see what consummate musical geniuses the Beatles were? See this fascinating account of how that beautiful recording of George Harrison’s song was made.
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