“Ronaldo says Jesus broke his word," says ESPN headline.
I for one clicked through.
“Ronaldo says Jesus broke his word," says ESPN headline.
I for one clicked through.
Happy Tad Williams pub day!
The Splintered Sun was originally going to be a standalone adventure set in the before times of Osten Ard. Then it demanded a sequel, which Tad is currently working on, called The Crooked Tower. And now that will have a sequel, tentatively titled The Holly Ring.
And thus we have a trilogy: Flann’s Crows. All in my favorite fantasy world. An October treat.
In CT this morning I have a review of James Marriott’s new book on the death of reading.
William Davies, “What is LinkedIn?":
One answer provided is the kind of weird, syncopated prose style seen above: a succession of Pinterest slogans combined into verse, that seems so eager to express its depths of humanity that you instantly question whether it really has any. It’s a style of writing that reaches so hard for meaning, that it ends up as a set of free-floating signifiers, which refuse all interpretation. You can’t misunderstand something that evades understanding altogether. The lack of conflict, the lack of humour, the lack of any tangible referents, creates the feel of a new kind of cyborg that seeks an eerie peace, honesty and consensus. If you asked the author (wherever they may sit on the human-LLM continuum) what they meant by any of it, they would be able to do little else than simply repeat themselves with even greater sincerity.
Later he also refers to “gloopy consensus,” which is a great line. One final excerpt:
Rhetoric that achieves such consensus is not machine-like, de-humanising or cold. On the contrary, it is warm, empathic and respectful, a little like how chatbots reply “You’re right” every time they are challenged or queried. Culturally, the spectre of this ‘mindful slop’ has already been pushed to an extreme dystopian limit by the remarkable Pluribus, a science fiction in which the entire global population (minus 13 surviving humans) has become taken over by a single AI hive mind. Part of Pluribus’s genius is to depict a world in which anger has become taboo, positive feedback is relentless, and empirical reality is completely malleable. This is a form of hell, in which conflict, disagreement and frustration have evaporated (save for those of the main protagonist).
Oh, and read Dale Coulter on Bonnie, evangelicals, and 9/11.
On my friend and colleague Richard Beck’s blog he wrote up a series of posts engaging my friend and editor Bonnie Kristian’s new book on evangelicalism. I wish I had time to respond fully, but I encourage readers to go back to one of my posts attempting to define the E-word as best I could.
In the latest issue of The Lamp in my hands (I know the next one is already online), I enjoyed Nic Rowan on Ray Bradbury and Matthew Walther on the SSPX.
Kirsten’s review of du Mez’s new book is maybe the finest thing I’ve ever read by her.
Read Caldwell on Ohio and the state of the parties nationally heading into the midterms.
Like everyone else in the world of Bible nerdery, I had a blast reading Lyman Stone on OT censuses.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from Dan Hitchens' profile of Roger Scruton’s youth and intellectual formation, but like everything Dan writes, it’s outstanding. Well worth your time.
One more argument for simply opting not to use any LLM at all in one’s work, writing, or personal life: their ‘idiom’ won’t infect your own voice.
AI-style is ugly, boring, and contagious. The easiest way not to catch it is straightforward: stay away.
So Brad Bird gets bundles of Netflix cash to make his long-shelved dream animation project … and his aesthetic vision is to recreate George Lucas’s version of Coruscant from the worst Star Wars film ever made?
Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.
That is Anil Dash, in “Endgame for the Open Web” (h/t: Alan). It’s a lovely sentiment and a wonderful peroration of an article, but this kicker leaves me less rather than more persuaded. After all, the analogy is to fast food versus healthy, home-cooked meals. We know what’s better. But, given the “choice,” what do people in fact opt for?
Phaedrus 253a:
ἰχνεύοντες δὲ παρʼ ἑαυτῶν ἀνευρίσκειν τὴν τοῦ σφετέρου θεοῦ φύσιν εὐποροῦσι διὰ τὸ συντόνως ἠναγκάσθαι πρὸς τὸν θεὸν βλέπειν
You could translate the bolded clause as: “an impetuous compulsion to see God.” Or in Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff’s translation, “their driving need to gaze at the god.”
Socrates in Phaedrus 256b:
οὗ μεῖζον ἀγαθὸν οὔτε σωφροσύνη ἀνθρωπίνη οὔτε θεία μανία δυνατὴ πορίσαι ἀνθρώπῳ.
Jesus in John 15:13:
μείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην οὐδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων αὐτοῦ.
An excellent essay in The Point by Campbell Scribner. Titled “Internal Goods,” it uses MacIntyre’s account of rationality, moral reasoning, and the university as a lens for understanding both the tragedy of Jason Arday and the response to it on the part of academics.
Quote:
In colleges of education, one often hears the slogan “all education is political,” which people repeat with the certainty of moral truth. And it is true. But it is also a truism, a phrase that one can utter without fear of contradiction: either others agree and confirm the statement, or they disagree, reveal their political bias and confirm the statement. The mistake is in the circularity. All education may be political, but it does not follow that politics is all education is, that power is the only or even the best criteria through which to evaluate teaching, learning and research. To imply otherwise is merely to beg the question. When students or colleagues inform me that all education is political, I sometimes ask whether all education is not also cultural, spiritual, artistic and moral, and why we never talk about those aspects? I have yet to receive a clear answer.
And:
Context, power, intention and articulated reasons are all important, but they can only be judged by similarly situated peers proceeding on shared norms. This is what accusations of “hounding” or “piling on” in the Arday scandal seem to miss: once one acknowledges that there are meaningful distinctions between academic critics, investigative journalists, opinion columnists and random online trolls, it becomes difficult to see exactly who is being blamed for what, and on what standard we should expect them to act differently in the future.
Yesterday on the blog I wrote about the (perhaps unwitting) heteropessimism of the Australian TV show Colin from Accounts.
Read Leah Libresco Sargeant on “anti-anti-family policy."
“The AI Apocalypse is Already Here," by Gregory Conti in Compact, is an early front-runner for essay of the year. I plan to blog about it later.
Read Caldwell on “Why the AfD Wins."
You don’t have to share Caldwell’s political sympathies to find his analysis illuminating—if every report out of Germany amounts to little more than scaremongering with euphemisms and epithets, we will continue to fail to understand what is happening right now, both there, here, and everywhere else.