Paying More and Better Attention (Across the Sundering Seas, #6)
Three links for you this week, each touching on a theme I’ve hit on in previous weeks but with a slightly different angle.
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Is There a Case for Racial Reparations, Alan Noble, The Gospel Coalition, July 2014 – I read this a few years ago when Alan wrote it, as a response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ astounding (and horrifying, not least for how little of it I did know compared to how much of it all of us should know) history-telling in “The Case for Reparations”. Noble’s thoughtful response—and in particular, his willingness to consider that he might have just been seriously wrong about this question for a large part of his life—is one I continue to appreciate. Would we were all so willing to have our minds changed on big, important questions. And… maybe there is a case for reparations.
(Hat tip to Matthew Lee Anderson, whose own newsletter brought this back to my attention.)
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Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences, Sarah Constantin, February 2019 – Constantin’s response to the news from OpenAI is one of the more interesting takes I read on it. No surprise there: any new post on her blog is near the very top of my “read as soon as I have the time to think hard about something” list. First, she noticed the same thing I did:
The scary thing about GPT-2-generated text is that it flows very naturally if you’re just skimming, reading for writing style and key, evocative words.… If I just skim, without focusing, they all look totally normal. I would not have noticed they were machine-generated. I would not have noticed anything amiss about them at all.
But then, the interesting bit—her turn to reflect on what it means for attention. Attention is, appropriately an idea that comes up a lot in writing about technology, including perhaps most formatively for me in Alan Jacobs’ 79 Theses on Technology: For Disputation from a few years ago. I expect to return to it thematically in this space often as well. But back to Constantin (emphasis hers):
But if I read with focus, I notice that they don’t make a lot of logical sense… this isn’t actually human-equivalent writing ability. OpenAI doesn’t claim it is, for what it’s worth — I’m not trying to diminish their accomplishment, that’s not the point of this post. The point is, if you skim text, you miss obvious absurdities.
She sees the same obvious downsides the rest of us do, of course. But she also—surprisingly!—sees the possibility of some interesting upsides. I’ll leave you to read the post in full, because it deserves your full attention.
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This is Water – I disagree deeply with an important part of the conclusion of this essay, but from this lovely starting point—
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
…the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete…
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
—the author, even with the caveat that I disagree with much of what the have to say, eventually (and in quite a lovely fashion) gets around to a statement that I think everyone ought to chew on for a good long time:
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.… Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
You might pick a different word for it, but the point stands. (I happen to think worship is exactly the right word for it, though.) Dig deep into this one. (Also: who wrote this? Does anyone know? It’s not obvious to me from the little bit of poking around I did.)
You might also enjoy a couple notes from me on my blog this week—on, of all things, running. But they’re not really about running, as it were: