On Robopoetics

“Frost’s diction hones our cognition, schooling us to see the world in a fresh way. None of that is possible with gpt-3. Short for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer,’ the model is unique not simply because of what it does, but also how it does it. It learns about language from watching grammar and syntax in action. The algorithms effectively train themselves. They pick up patterns in the data and, through a relentless process of trial and error, approximate them. That’s how, under the right conditions, gpt-3 can parrot impressively realistic paragraphs of text. Its credibility, however, drops to zero the longer you spend with it. Eventually you realize it is vacantly yoking bits of colloquialized detritus, bobs and tags of speech. Of course, the system makes a nice show of making sense, so we forgive its failures. But the failures are no less real: malfunctioning tones, misfires of inflection. gpt-3’s output is a shell of hyperactivity with nothing inside—a mesmerizing mix of materials without a center, language on autopilot. This is what led the MIT Technology Review to call gpt-3 ‘a fluent spouter of bullshit’ and the researcher Timnit Gebru to warn against giving too high a mark to the program, citing the human tendency to ‘impute meaning where there is none...’ For gpt-3 to pull off the real thing will require that algorithms not only move data, but are moved by it; that they not only consume our experiences but feel the fleetingness of our lives. How do you confer knowledge of mortality? There is no computational shortcut for that. Compressed into Frost’s choice of ‘appall’ was a lifetime’s insight on loss. This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be mastered by our species. There is no superhuman way to write poems because we write them by virtue of being what a computer isn’t: human.”

Carmine Starnino, “Poetry and Digital Personhood,” newcriterion.com/issues/2022/4/poetry-digital-personhood. An interesting summary of recent natural language processing developments. While not cited, it echoes debates about the way poetry is endemic to human being after Martin Heidegger’s work. This was a point taken forward in Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Still Can’t Do. At issue is the degree to which human minds are, in essence, not reducible to computation. The point made in the essay above is similarly that the pursuit of robopoetics is a red herring. Nonetheless, the essay cites the more interesting question which is the degree to which AI can be applied to manipulate human behavior, nonetheless. While incapable of poetry, computational approaches to language are beginning to excel at exploiting natural human empathy and emotions. In another register, it is interesting how so many video games have trafficked on the human feeling of frailty or what Heidegger referred to as the poetics of being towards death. The anxiety built into the video game is often precarious lives lost. While incapable of replicating Frost’s poetry, they nonetheless excel at generating clickbait.

On Abecedarian Reading

“Reading, as Alberto Manguel elaborates in his book A History of Reading, came before writing. Ancient astronomers read the stars. Ancient hunters read animal tracks. Ancient diviners read the guts of sacrificed animals. Even today, reading is not entirely about reading writing. Farmers read the sky to ascertain the weather. Card players read the faces of their opponents. Lovers read each other’s faces. All these readers ‘attribute meaning to a system of signs and then decipher it’ (Manguel). Still, the best part of reading is reading books. Books written by writers.”

Priscilla Long, “On Writing: An Abecedarian,” hudsonreview.com/2022/01/on-writing-an-abecedarian/

On the Academic Social Contract

“As such, it must begin with the University of Berlin, which was established in 1810 as an institution with the dual tasks of knowledge creation and dissemination (that is, research and teaching). Here scholars were free to pursue Wissenschaft, or scholarly research, in exchange for training a new civil service and an army that would serve the needs of the state and the aspirations towards nationhood. I would add further that if the academic social contract is constant, the partners of it evolve with time. As the society that the university served evolved, the university co-evolved into such forms as the central state university in Berlin, the land-grant university in California, and the privately funded urban university in Baltimore, and each time, the academic social contract was reconstituted. The premise is that once an academic social contract was exhausted, academic entrepreneurs rushed in to find new partners, formulate new ideas, and establish new institutions—sometimes even outside the university.”

Emily J. Levine, “University at the Crossroad,” jhiblog.org/2022/01/26/university-at-the-crossroad-an-interview-with-emily-levine/.

On Reading Critically

“Reading can make you feel close to someone without actually knowing them, a precious gift in a lonely world. But if the pleasure of reading is feeling connected to a distant stranger, then the pain of watching people read badly is its opposite: a severing of shared humanity. A cold, demoralizing reminder that we never can look inside each other’s minds, no matter how we try.... But what we love is never free of flaws. Every day of the last two years, we’ve seen the devastating consequences of combining a torrential flow of information with lousy reading and thinking. We have to do better, and that’s not just some vague call to arms I’m plunking in here at the end because I’ve used up my brain for the day and want to go to bed. Reading better, thinking better, is quite literally a matter of survival in the time of Covid and climate change, in these days when we’re reflecting on the first anniversary of disinformation-powered insurrectionists breaching the U.S. Capitol. It’s no longer enough to see a headline, feel a feeling, and go off. ”

Kate Harding, “Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?” - damemagazine.com/2022/01/07/have-we-forgotten-how-to-read-critically/. A lighthearted screed on why reading and writing remain important in digital information cultures. Quiet inspiration as another academic year is set to begin in Australia.

On Grief

“One of the Metropolitan Museum’s crown jewels, ‘The Death of Socrates’ by Neoclassical master Jacques-Louis David is a magisterial canvas that speaks to the grandeur of noble sacrifice, with clean brush strokes and a symmetrical composition. David bathes the condemned philosopher in incandescence, left hand raised in salute as his right reaches for the cup of hemlock; his students and friends turn away, distraught, some weeping in disbelief. On the left, the painter has placed Plato, sitting grimly with brow furrowed—an artistic license, since the younger man wasn’t present. The tension between the defiant Socrates and his anguished followers infuses the scene with pathos and resolve. As Michael Cholbi observes in his clear-eyed, meticulously argued study ‘Grief: A Philosophical Guide,’ this emotion has long been neglected by Socrates’ heirs, relegated instead to literature and art, and later to psychoanalysis and neurobiology... David painted ‘The Death of Socrates’ in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution; the canvas can be interpreted as an allegory for the twilight of monarchy and an elegy for France’s Ancien Régime. In just a few years the austerity of Neoclassicism would give way to a turbulent Romanticism. ‘Grief’ implicitly calls for a revolution in how philosophy understands itself: It must seek new tools to sustain us through consequential inflection points, such as the long tail of our current pandemic. This time, with feeling.”

Hamilton Cain, “‘Grief’ Review: What We Learn From Loss” - wsj.com/articles/grief-review-what-we-learn-from-loss. I’ve been teaching a course on suffering that addresses this topic. It is interesting that Socrates’s example has left such little fodder for further thought on human experiences so common to us all.

On Open Libraries

“In 1598, the University of Oxford received an extraordinary proposal. Sir Thomas Bodley, a retired diplomat and Oxford alumnus, offered to restore the dilapidated university library, entirely at his own cost... The convulsions of the sixteenth century left a lasting impression. In 1605, Francis Bacon thanked Bodley for building ‘an ark to save learning from the deluge.’ Scholars on the continent, Catholic and Protestant, felt similarly, and by around 1600, universities, new and old, began to acquire libraries. Yet the purpose of these institutional libraries, what books would be in them, and, crucially, who would pay for them, were contentious issues, in many cases inadequately resolved... Thomas Bodley was without doubt a visionary. A child of exile during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, he had seen many scholars scattered to the winds, their libraries confiscated or abandoned in their haste to depart. He enjoyed a superb education in Geneva and Oxford that had instilled in him the value of books, but he also understood that libraries could not survive if one did not plan for their future, so that the initial enthusiasm did not die with its founder. Bodley, it seemed, had learned the lessons from the failures of earlier collectors: he ensured that his library would be provided with a substantial endowment, of land and property rents, to acquire books. This was key if the library was to remain supplied with the latest scholarly publications; he was rightly convinced that it was the absence of this provision that had caused so many ambitious library projects to atrophy... Bodley was adamant in his instructions that the library should never be closed, and this too was followed to the letter.”

- https://lithub.com/before-oxfords-library-was-the-finest-institutional-library-in-europe-it-was-kind-of-a-dump/. This is an excerpt from The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur de Weduwen (2021).

On Strangers

“Thinking back on that moment before the painting in the gallery, I now realize I would usually have taken the subway. I have only just started taking the train again, which has reminded me that the experience of New York usually is an experience of a sea of innumerable faces. Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait, I wasn’t left thinking about the history of early Netherlandish panel painting. I was instead reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?”

John Vinclair, “On the Faces of Strangers: Michaël Borremans’s Pandemic Portrait” - theparisreview.org/blog/2021/07/30/on-the-faces-of-strangers-michael-borremanss-pandemic-portrait/

On Focus

“There aren’t many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day. As I’ve written before, it’s positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn’t just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point)… The truly valuable skill here isn’t the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people’s demands unfulfilled. That’s the spirit embodied by one monk at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico, interviewed by the writer Jonathan Malesic for his forthcoming book The End of Burnout, which I’ve been enjoying. The monks’ daily work period lasts (can you guess?) three hours, ending at 12.40pm. Malesic writes: ‘I asked Fr Simeon, a monk who spoke with a confidence cultivated through the years he spent as a defence attorney, what you do when the 12:40 bell rings but you feel that your work is undone. “You get over it,” he replied.’”

oliverburkeman.com/fourhours. I’d only add that if you practice this regularly over time you can find longer stretches become possible for five hours or so each day. The other thing that’s missing here is that most creative work is surrounded by other tasks that have to get done for various reasons but aren’t that challenging to accomplish. In university life there is the almost constant tedium of email and spreadsheets, but also other chores depending on your administrative roles that have to be kept at bay. The trick is to get them out of the way when energies are low and you couldn’t do focused work anyway. Work so that the focused concentration is directed to your priority publication each day no matter what else is happening and leverage that momentum to the next day and so on until it’s ready to send out for editorial review. Even if overwhelmed with crises in one day, let it go, and set the goal to protect at least four hours tomorrow knowing the technique works over the long haul.

On Meritocracy

“Wooldridge rehearses – and largely owns – many of the arguments levelled against meritocracy since the 1950s and voiced with such vehemence on both the left and the right today. Our world clearly is too divided, too unequal, too unfair. But the answer, Wooldridge insists, is not to scrap meritocracy altogether and still less to return to the kind of old-school nepotism and patronage... Rather, he argues, we need a concerted push to introduce more and wiser meritocracy, while at the same time striving to remoralise it. That would involve major investments in education and further efforts to pluralise elite schools and universities that still cater disproportionately to the well connected, despite their rhetoric of inclusion. It would also involve fighting seriously to improve social mobility and to challenge the sclerosis of the rich, putting more workers in elected office and on corporate boards, and (though Wooldridge doesn’t say so directly) paying them more. Finally, the cognitive elite needs to relearn humility and a sense of duty and responsibility to the social whole – call it, if you like, noblesse oblige.”

Darrin McMahon, “Review of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge” - literaryreview.co.uk/earning-our-stripes.

On Complaint

“Weil’s essential contribution to the theory of complaint comes by way of her distinction between ordinary suffering and something she calls ‘affliction.’ Suffering is pain one can bear, pain that does not imprint itself on the soul. Sometimes, we even choose suffering, as in strenuous exercise, unmedicated childbirth or getting one’s ears pierced. Getting beat up in an alleyway by strangers is not like any of those forms of suffering. A violent attack, even one that does minimum physical damage, hurts in a distinctive way—in a way that, as Weil would put it, raises a question. ‘The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another,’ writes Weil. Her view is that the kind of suffering that makes a mark on the soul is incomprehensible suffering.”

Agnes Callard, “Why Am I Being Hurt?” - thepointmag.com/examined-life/why-am-i-being-hurt. Interesting essay on complaint, protest, venting and how to really listen to others in light of recent events.