#19 made me think about the two postcards I got from Isaac Asimov. Is the actual content all that special? Of course not. But he was replying to letters I wrote him, and so for just those few moments he was writing something directly and only to me. What a gift.
"The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck."
"My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it."
"lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing."
"Every writer, whether they know it or not, is subtweeting themselves."
1) Melville would roll over in his grave if he ever found out "Moby Dick" was considered his magnum opus. It barely sold 100 copies in his lifetime, and he much preferred his (far better edited) adventure stories at sea.
2) Writing is hard and feels like compulsion because it IS. There are spirits out there who are literally using you to get their story told, so being an author is like being jerked around at the end of a bunch of marionette strings. It's pleasant AFTERWARD because the story usually turns out to be kinda cool, but yeah, it sucks giving up your free will and being forced to dance to someone else's tune. If you're lucky, you get some money later on, but most of the time, you don't even get that.
Reading and thinking now are like walking through an enormous mansion with a flashlight. There are practical limits to the size of the flashlight, although you can make it somewhat brighter. You turn the beam over dusty bookshelves, massive chesterfields covered in faded paisley, a waist-high dollhouse, a row of pots on hooks. Whatever you look at you can see well; sometimes you can see a bit of a few things close together. But you can't see the whole house, or even the contents of an entire room at once. And so the point is that you must invent the mansion out of what you see, or think you see. The best approach, if you're a little mad and care in the first place, is to wander as far as you can, or perhaps to try to look at everything in a particular room.
AI will turn on emergency lighting throughout, a kind of dim glow over the whole house. Eventually nobody will remember what it was like in the Flashlight Times. They'll do something else, presumably. Perhaps they'll even get to the fundamental truth of the humanities: the melancholy that comes from a true understanding that all things pass away.
I like your flashlight analogy. Put a bit differently, reading, thinking and writing are like life itself, gradual, sequential, experiential, a narrative of exploration and invention rather than an instantaneous capture and exposition of everything all at once.
An AI can construct a narrative, but it can't experience it ... which is why, as Adam puts it, it can convey only the necklace and not the neck. Whatever neck it might seem to have is something we attribute to it, but that is OUR creation, and not its own.
As humans and artists, it matters -- since it is the very nature of life -- that things unfold; our lives and our artistry attend to that unfolding because therein lies the beauty. AI might achieve something like sentience, but it cannot experience the beauty of unfolding.
Far from being magnificent, it may be that omniscience is just boring.
I've been thinking a lot when working with copywriters who write for their own brands, about what's missing. And it's almost always a sure sense of their take. We write for others and their takes so often that we can lose the compass to our own.
re: #5 Wadsworth Constant: Today I learned that the Wadsworth Constant, a circa 2011 meme originating from user u/Wadsworth, is not to be confused with the Wadsworth Constant Deviation System, related to optics, specifically used in designing spectrographs, as developed by Frank L. O. Wadsworth (1867-1936) [who may have been a British mathematician and scientist and/or an engineer from the Ohio State University who worked for Albert A. Michelson at Clark University in the development of the spectrograph.]
I love reading your posts because they always perk my interest. I totally get the Ray Bradbury quote, although for me it's the space of a week. I can go a few days without writing, but by the time a week rolls around I get anxious, and need to sit down and write something. Also: fascinating what you say about motivation. I'm always motivated to write. There are so many things wrong with the world that need to be corrected, or, as in philosophy, wrong with how people are seeing things that need to be corrected. My work is never done! I appreciate your sense of humour.
(3) Everybody wants to be somebody else. Elvis wanted to be an actor. H.C. Andersen wanted to dance ballet, or at the very least write for adults. There's a more general law here, not just for writers.
"My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it."
The inevitable ineffable pun. =)
Soooo good. That line made me smile.
And having done that... what's next?
#19 made me think about the two postcards I got from Isaac Asimov. Is the actual content all that special? Of course not. But he was replying to letters I wrote him, and so for just those few moments he was writing something directly and only to me. What a gift.
This was fun to read on the morning of my 28th birthday 🥳
And on my 90th.
Happy birthday to you both!
Happy birthday, Walter!!! Cheers to our trips around the sun :)
dear adam,
great piece! some of my favorite nuggets from it:
"The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck."
"My job is to carve off a sliver of the ineffable, and to eff it."
"lots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing."
"Every writer, whether they know it or not, is subtweeting themselves."
thank you for sharing as always!
love
myq
Awesome post! A couple of notes:
1) Melville would roll over in his grave if he ever found out "Moby Dick" was considered his magnum opus. It barely sold 100 copies in his lifetime, and he much preferred his (far better edited) adventure stories at sea.
2) Writing is hard and feels like compulsion because it IS. There are spirits out there who are literally using you to get their story told, so being an author is like being jerked around at the end of a bunch of marionette strings. It's pleasant AFTERWARD because the story usually turns out to be kinda cool, but yeah, it sucks giving up your free will and being forced to dance to someone else's tune. If you're lucky, you get some money later on, but most of the time, you don't even get that.
Reading and thinking now are like walking through an enormous mansion with a flashlight. There are practical limits to the size of the flashlight, although you can make it somewhat brighter. You turn the beam over dusty bookshelves, massive chesterfields covered in faded paisley, a waist-high dollhouse, a row of pots on hooks. Whatever you look at you can see well; sometimes you can see a bit of a few things close together. But you can't see the whole house, or even the contents of an entire room at once. And so the point is that you must invent the mansion out of what you see, or think you see. The best approach, if you're a little mad and care in the first place, is to wander as far as you can, or perhaps to try to look at everything in a particular room.
AI will turn on emergency lighting throughout, a kind of dim glow over the whole house. Eventually nobody will remember what it was like in the Flashlight Times. They'll do something else, presumably. Perhaps they'll even get to the fundamental truth of the humanities: the melancholy that comes from a true understanding that all things pass away.
I like your flashlight analogy. Put a bit differently, reading, thinking and writing are like life itself, gradual, sequential, experiential, a narrative of exploration and invention rather than an instantaneous capture and exposition of everything all at once.
An AI can construct a narrative, but it can't experience it ... which is why, as Adam puts it, it can convey only the necklace and not the neck. Whatever neck it might seem to have is something we attribute to it, but that is OUR creation, and not its own.
As humans and artists, it matters -- since it is the very nature of life -- that things unfold; our lives and our artistry attend to that unfolding because therein lies the beauty. AI might achieve something like sentience, but it cannot experience the beauty of unfolding.
Far from being magnificent, it may be that omniscience is just boring.
"Good writing, in fact, might be a sign of pathological caring."
10000000000000%
Wonderful. And a list! Would I have read the whole thing if it were strings of unnumbered paragraphs? Embarrassingly, perhaps not.
29. Got a bunch of disconnect thoughts? Number 'em
Funny that the origin of "pot boiler" should come up so early in this post.
I had to look it up, I had previously assumed it meant "exciting piece of fiction". You know, the kind of prose that would get your pot boiling!
I thought that, too!
We need a take, not a topic! Love it!
I've been thinking a lot when working with copywriters who write for their own brands, about what's missing. And it's almost always a sure sense of their take. We write for others and their takes so often that we can lose the compass to our own.
This was unputdownable. Just necked the whole article in the middle of traffic.
re: #5 Wadsworth Constant: Today I learned that the Wadsworth Constant, a circa 2011 meme originating from user u/Wadsworth, is not to be confused with the Wadsworth Constant Deviation System, related to optics, specifically used in designing spectrographs, as developed by Frank L. O. Wadsworth (1867-1936) [who may have been a British mathematician and scientist and/or an engineer from the Ohio State University who worked for Albert A. Michelson at Clark University in the development of the spectrograph.]
Thanx for the rabbit-hole!
Hahaha
I love reading your posts because they always perk my interest. I totally get the Ray Bradbury quote, although for me it's the space of a week. I can go a few days without writing, but by the time a week rolls around I get anxious, and need to sit down and write something. Also: fascinating what you say about motivation. I'm always motivated to write. There are so many things wrong with the world that need to be corrected, or, as in philosophy, wrong with how people are seeing things that need to be corrected. My work is never done! I appreciate your sense of humour.
Thanks for writing this.
(3) Everybody wants to be somebody else. Elvis wanted to be an actor. H.C. Andersen wanted to dance ballet, or at the very least write for adults. There's a more general law here, not just for writers.
On 3, I read about half of *The White Company* not long ago. It's not very good.