Ted Chiang on ChatGPT; Paul Krugman on the GOP’s Orwellian take on the world; and epistemology.
Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, subtitled “OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?”
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I mentioned those John Brockman anthologies of science essays back on Feb 4th. They’re associated with the website Edge.org, one of those fascinating websites I’ve noticed over the years but have not followed regularly (others are Big Think, Quanta, Aero, Quillette…) but in this case perhaps should…. Well, except that it doesn’t seem to post much new material lately. Continue reading
Some things never change…
NY Times, Round Table, 8 Feb 2023: Times Columnists Respond to the State Of the Union
I’ll just list the contributors and their headlines.
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The Republican party is full of so many class acts. Continue reading
This is a book about the subjective experience of awe, and how being aware of everyday examples of awe can make your life more meaningful and fulfilling; yet how (in my take) it’s about the emotion, triggered by both the subjective and the objective, and not about science fiction’s “sense of wonder,” something of which the author seems unaware.
(Penguin Press, January 2023, xxvi+309pp, including 59pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index.)
For decades the Boeing 747 was the largest passenger airliner in the world, and it debuted (in 1968) just a few years before I had occasion to take a plane flight anywhere, or pay attention to different kinds of planes. (Actually, perhaps 10 years; I didn’t fly on a passenger jet until May 1979, when I flew from LA to visit my family in Tullahoma TN.) So when it debuted I took it for granted as being the current pinnacle of a certain kind of technology, just as the landing on the Moon in 1969 was the pinnacle of that era’s space technology, the latest in a long line of ever-impressive pinnacles of technology that kept appearing, two thirds of the way through the 20th century.
What I didn’t understand at the time Continue reading
Items today concern the US military budget, the Chinese balloon, flooding in Houston, Richard Powers on a real battle for trees, and the passing of the 747. All items from today’s paper (the New York Times).
Today’s three topics: A conservative’s take on a fantasy novel; A Le Guin fantasy novel; And insights into books by Heinlein and Brockman.
Three themes for today: How science is the only news, per Stuart Brand; Demagogues and ideologues on the right; and Ross Douthat’s warning about spiritual experiences that don’t align with his own.
Glancing through that John Brockman book The Third Culture, I came across this ever-pertinent comment from Stuart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly fame), included on this Stuart Brand Quotes page. About what is real news.
Three political topics for today. How the Republicans seek to suppress history, concepts, books, even words; Two problems that could be solved simultaneously (were it not for Republicans); How anti-vaxxers and anti-abortionists are searching for new senses of meaning.
Three items for today: a list of “influential” science fiction works, a list of nonfiction books that changed minds, and Elon Musk’s books he thinks everyone should read.
