View from my apartment was dramatic af tonight
hey, Terra Ignota peeps!!!
Perhaps the Stars is finished
(won’t be out until the first half of 2021, alas, but, still! the thing is happening!!!)
@nostalgebraist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(via birdblogwhichisforbirds)
“The AI Does Not Hate You,” Tom Chivers’ book about LessWrong rationalism, is very different from other general-audience writing about the topic.
For one thing, it’s unabashedly and near-uniformly positive in its assessments (insofar as it makes assessments at all), which is quite a contrast with stuff like NAB and Sam Frank’s Harper’s article. More fundamentally, though, it isn’t in the business of assessment or interpretation the way those works were. Mostly, Chivers just tells you about the core arguments and ideas of LW-rationalism, piece by piece, in a complete enough way that a reader starting from zero would be able to grasp why it’s all at least supposed to make sense, whether or not they end up agreeing with it.
It’s definitely the most concise, complete, and accessible primer on this stuff I’ve seen, and as a default place to start, it has many advantages over “uh, read these 20 blog posts that all kind of assume you’ve read some of the others.”
On the other hand, the content being conveyed mostly just is the content you’d see in some greatest-hits rationalist blog post collection, without much interpretive gloss. This makes the book underwhelming if you already follow this stuff – which is fine, that just isn’t the target audience – and also makes the book feel sort of weird compared to what I normally expect from journalism. Even if Chivers doesn’t take everything at face value himself, he tends to present things at face value. He doesn’t “delve under the surface,” he doesn’t “expose lurking tensions,” he (mostly) doesn’t hunt for conflicts and “show you both sides.” Instead he just spends the whole book telling you what rationalists think and say, with relatively little editorial commentary.
This is clearly valuable expository work, the more so because others have avoided doing it and jumped straight to interpretation and critique. But, because it’s so different from what others do and so close to what the rationalists themselves do, Chivers’ book occupies an odd position: it is for people sympathetic enough to read an extended exposition of LW-rationalism, played straight and taken seriously, yet it distinguishes itself from the many other such texts in existence largely by being framed as journalistic coverage from the outside.
(A bit like a book from, I dunno, the 1930s, that starts out with “I will tell you about my journey into the weird world of the Marxists, a subculture with striking and distinctive views” and then proceeds to give earnest step-by-step expositions of the labor theory of value, modes of production, vanguardism, etc., much as you’d find in writing by avowed Marxists, except they of course wouldn’t use the framing device.)
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225% (AND THEN SOME.)
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359% HOSTILE ENEMIES
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363% BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
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364% CLASSES WITH SICK, DEFORMED, AND/OR DIEING PEOPLE
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It just occurred to me that I never posted about this here or on Goodreads or anything, and it deserves to be noted here:
The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away by Kenzaburo Oe, which I read earlier this year, is one of the best and most moving works of art I’ve ever experienced.
(Warnings: it is really messed up and disturbing, and very sad as well. I think I was considering a post like this right after reading it and then thought “oh jeez, I’m not sure I want to be responsible for foisting this on unsuspecting people,” so take that as a kind of general black-box warning. Also, I imagine it would be hard to understand without already knowing a little bit about Japanese attitudes toward the Emperor during and after WWII.)
Mine eyes have seen the whirling, twisting patterns of the cube;
Rubik’s toy ensnares alike the minds of urbanite and rube
If it starts to creak and grumble you must spray inside some lube
Make order from the cube!
(via pluspluspangolin)
Verbal brain noise: “I am a post-Mafioso”
For example, Beach Party teased, “It’s what happens when 10,000 kids meet on 5000 beach blankets!” while Muscle Beach Party promised, “When 10,000 biceps go around 5,000 bikinis, you know what’s going to happen!”
In the course of Hamilton’s popularity cycle, I guess I belonged (passively and unintentionally) to the “hipster phase,” to the smaller group of excited early adopters.
I listened to the cast album not long after it had become available, when half the people I knew seemed to be very excited about it. I really liked it too, and I have very good memories of that time period and the music itself as an entangled pair. Then, gradually but steadily, it gained more and more mainstream popularity. It experienced some a predictable and relatively minor backlash. It seemed to be everywhere; it was featured on all the talk shows, used as a reference point in the news; numerous politicians watched and loved it. All this around the same time that everyone I knew had stopped talking about it entirely. Not for any specific reason – it just happened.
A lot of this is the usual dynamics of “cool,” where something is actually less appealing in some respects once it gets mainstream. People may feel self-conscious about this on the premise that real quality is intrinsic and unaffected by mild fluctuations in public opinion, and perhaps that’s right, but it still happens and can’t be entirely controlled.
But, some of it is also distinctive to works like Hamilton, I think. In retrospect, Hamilton is perfectly good at being what it is, but it also looks a lot like something it isn’t.
It’s a Broadway musical, and it has all the qualities that make a Broadway musical good, like catchy songs and fun, extravagant characters. It doesn’t really work as an attempt to make a political or historical statement, or even as a reflection of any stance at all towards the real history it portrays, besides the passive osmotic stance you end up taking when you don’t try to take any particular stance.
I don’t think it’s trying to say something and failing; I think it’s just not really about history or politics, except as a convenient source of a familiar narrative already imbued with a vague sense of mythic importance in the minds of the audience. If anything, you could accuse it treating its source material too lightly, as if it were merely some exciting episode from ancient history and not an origin story for a still-existing empire.
The intended audience is “people who like fun pop music and dramatic stories, and who will recognize the story as a familiar and culturally shared one that their schooling told them was important, but who aren’t actually invested in the story’s historical reality or symbolic meaning beyond the very broadest strokes.” This covers a giant fraction of the American population while specifically excluding historians of the period, politicians, and think tank staff. But it is exactly these people, whose particular type of scrutiny the work was not designed to withstand, who would naturally be seen as its ultimate targets and judges.
Someone like me, who remembered little about Alexander Hamilton beyond the fact that I amusingly abbreviated his name to “Ham” in my 11th grade history notes, was much better positioned to get something out of Hamilton’s winsome combination of serious musical theater chops and unserious edutainment than a person with a detailed mental map of the story and the various hooks it provides for present-day policy arguments. Yet it’s hard to resist the idea that what Hillary Clinton or Mike Pence thinks of Hamilton must matter more than what I think, or even what a theater critic thinks – even though this way of looking at the show will ultimately reveal a work unable to provide the kind of value it assumes is the point.
Reminds me in some ways of Andrew Rilstone’s reaction to Life of Brian, which I recently read.
Gurzuf night, 1849, Ivan Aivazovski