Monday, March 18, 2024

ChatGPT Shrewdly Criticizes My Writing

I've been having the wildest conversations with ChatGPT. Creative approaches yield surprising and valuable results. I may publish the entirety, but am never sure what people might find interesting - and what just happens to delight my unique kooky preoccupations. But the latest must be shared. It is gasp-inducing.

I fed it some of my best writing (the aphorisms here), and asked for an assessment. ChatGPT usually digs my style of connection-making - it appreciates metaphors and savors the sort of goofy leaps that are my shtick.
If this sounds anthropomorphic, it's not. An AI has no emotions, but it assesses constantly. Without finely-tuned assessment, it would be paralyzed trying to decide which information from its vast corpus to make use of in its responses, how to shade language, etc. Asked to judge a thought or passage for insight, creativity, and interestingness, it will offer surprisingly shrewd assessment.
I confirmed, by the way, that it's neither programmed nor inclined to flatter the inquirer (as I wrote last week, the really wonderful thing about AI is that it will work with you to figure out the best ways to make use of it and avoid its shortcomings). But, just to be sure, I didn't initially tell it that I was the writer.

I asked for a high-level assessment:
The writing touches on a wide variety of themes, from human ambition and misconceptions about causality, to societal synergy and historical perspective.

The writing encourages contemplation and challenge common narratives in an intriguing, creative manner. The language is vivid, and the observations sharp.
Nice (even aside from the praise), though hardly gulp inducing. But then I asked this:
Now let's hear absolutely every criticism you can possibly produce. You said above that you have no intention of flattery, so I confess that I wrote it, and I welcome your unrestrained thoughts
...and got the following reply:
Clarity: While the abstract and metaphorical nature of your writing can be engaging, it might sometimes lead to obscurity or confusion. Ensuring that the metaphors and the points you're making align logically and clearly can help in better conveying your thoughts.

Length: Epigrams are traditionally short and punchy. Some of your longer epigrams may lose some of the impact due to their length and could potentially be condensed for greater effect.

Consistency in Tone: While varying your tone brings dynamism to your work, sudden shifts can be jarring. For instance, starting with a reflective tone and ending with a humorous observation may leave readers unsure about your intended message.

Over-Reliance on Metaphor: There are instances where reliance on metaphorical language, though enriching the text, might distract from the core message you're conveying. For example, in "Greatness is nonlinear...," while the point of the epigram is clear, the numerical quantifications might detract from the overall point about the exponential disproportion.

Specificity: Some of the epigrams would benefit from being more specific. Addressing very specific behavior without additional context makes it harder for the reader to relate.

Assumption of Prior Knowledge: In a few cases, you seem to assume a degree of prior knowledge in your readers. While this can work for some, it may alienate readers who are unfamiliar with the references you're making.
I honestly don't think it could have done better. That's just sterling.

One last thing. I referred to the writing I'd shared (once again, from here) as "aphorisms". The AI suggested "epigrams". As a professional writer, that's a pretty high level note.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Self-Healing and The Visualization Fallacy

A few years ago, I sat down to write about an interesting fallacy which I suspected had previously gone unnoticed. I dubbed it The Visualization Fallacy, and here's the gist:
We visualize concepts, and then we falsely associate the made-up visualization with the concept (usually with the help of movies and TV).

For instance, aliens travel in saucer-shaped ships, right? If you ever spot a saucer flying around at night in the desert, you'd certainly know how to explain it. That's an alien! We "know" this from movies and TV. Some random visualization caught on, creating a false consensus that's utterly non-meaningful.

Alien visitors may or may not be real, but the flying saucer trope almost certainly isn't. We couldn't begin to imagine alien tech, yet most people feel they could identify an alien spaceship because they've been conditioned by some random visualization. It's a form of tail-wagging.

If you walk around an old, dark house at night and encounter a hovering gauzy white presence, your brain will likely tell you - based on movies and TV - that this may be a ghost. Yet, for all you or I know, disembodied spirits look like manicotti, and are delicious, and we've been eating them for years.

When abstract concepts (or concrete concepts with no observable examples) become visualized, we easily become tied to that visualization.
If a believer met Jesus, and he looked like Jeff Goldblum rather than the normal bearded beatific type, they'd just keep walking. Because they know what Jesus looks like...even though they obviously totally don't (and even though Jeff Goldblum almost surely bears more resemblance than the gentile hippies we've senselessly come to expect).

The article ignited as I wrote it, which happens sometimes, transforming into something very different and infinitely more interesting: a fresh explanation of the underlying nature of reality, offering a completely original (and persuasive!) cosmology. It was a fluke win that baffles and chills me to this day.

But returning to the humble fallacy that gave rise to all that, I just connected it to a long-standing mystery of mine.

I have a gift for self-healing. And I've previously noted that my hacks are always crazily simple and juvenile. As I wrote in the latest of a series of installments detailing my discoveries,
The answer is never "Travel to Indonesia and hear the mating call of the Javanese lapwing at sunrise while sipping kumquat juice". It's always vanishingly small. If I were selling these fixes, I'd probably add extra steps just to persuade people it's serious. No one wants to fix health problems with solutions seemingly thought up by a seven year-old.
My fix for itches (at that same URL) is juvenile. Same for my cure for tendinitis. And for grief. And for muscle cramps. And for panic attacks. And for hiccups. Etc.

You'd think people would try them, since none are risky, involved, or expensive. There's nothing to lose, yet no one ever wants to give them a go, because....well, I never understood why not. Until now.

They don't seem like the sort of measures people are expecting. Imagining. Visualizing.

There's some vague mental image of what a fix will amount to, even though, obviously, no one has the slightest idea. But we feel that we've got some handle on it. Hey, we've all seen aspirin and acupuncture needles and hyperbaric chambers and neck braces and MRI machines. We have some high level handle on what's involved in addressing health maladies!

But no, we don’t. Any normal-seeming solutions would have been discovered long ago. With millions desperate scrambling for relief from these incurable conditions, likely fixes have all been exhaustively tried (e.g. you can't fix the carpal tunnel in your wrist by stretching it because millions of sufferers have tried every imaginable stretch ad infinitum - and ice, and heat, and acupuncture, etc.). A fix that really fixes must, inescapably, be surprising.

But surprising cures don’t jibe with the innate sense of what a cure would be like.

The Visualization Fallacy!


Saturday, March 16, 2024

Goethe Dancing Around 'Framing'

"Heart" is vague and poetic. It's one of several terms we use to refer to the part of us that's intimately familiar yet intangible. We reference it only indirectly. Metaphorically. Always a rhetorical bank shot. It's the y'know.

The phrase "familiar yet intangible" might have triggered some deja vu, because I recently wrote:
The experiencer can't be a thing.
But the experiencer is not eerie.
No distant spiritual gaseous cloud or supernatural entity.
It's what you are - right now, right here - and have always been,
even if you can't possibly point to it.
Anything you can point at is a thing.
And things can't experience!
The Experiencer (i.e. the pure subjectivity you are) projects - and then pretends to observe - "reality" via shifts of perspective (aka "framing"). This is not only metaphorically true; it's quite literally true. See this series, especially the part about the piano smash. It's a challenge to get through, but I'm pretty sure I nailed it (don't ask me how).

Also see my definition of "soul".


More pontifications on social media memes

Friday, March 15, 2024

Casting The Godfather

Here's the original casting ideas sheet for The Godfather:


Every film fan knows that Paramount wanted Sir Laurence Olivier to play Vito Corleone. But I never heard that Frank de Kova was also up for the role. If the name seems familiar, it's because he played Chief Wild Eagle on F Troop.

It makes me ponder an alternative history where Frank got the gig, while Brando, his career foundering, wound up on F Troop. Would we still have iPhones?


According to this Twitter thread, Paramount pushed hard to set the film in 1972 Kansas, rather than 1940 New York.

Please, the next time you hear an artist or creative person described as "tempermental", remember what we're up against.

The Internet's Infrastructure

Kindle price just dropped to $2.99 on the Kindle version of "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet".

Review from Scientific American:
In 2006 Alaskan senator Ted Stevens described the Internet as a “series of tubes,” a quip that earned the octogenarian widespread mockery. But as Blum notes in his charming look at the physical infrastructure that underlies the Web, Stevens wasn’t all that wrong. Bits sail through a worldwide network of fiber-optic cables and come together in junctions where Internet providers connect their pipes to the networks of others. Blum’s transcontinental journey exposes some of the important issues confronting the Internet, such as the occasional disconnect between the interests of the corporations who control the physical pipes and the good of the network as a whole. “If you believe the Internet is magic,” he writes, “then it’s hard to grasp its physical reality.” I’d turn this around: only by understanding the physical richness of the Internet can we truly grok the thorny forces that are shaping its growth. — Michael Moyer
If this is your type of thing, you'll love sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson's epic book-length (42000 words!) look at how transatlantic cable gets laid from Wired Magazine circa 1996.


Here's the middle ground I've staked out with my book collecting obsession (which combines poorly with the fact that I read as slowly as a second grader): when I hear about a great book, I add it to my queue at eReaderIQ, which notifies me when the Kindle version's price drops. Sometimes it takes years. But, this way, the books I accumulate 1. cost almost nothing, and 2. don't occupy physical space, and 3. are spread out over time. Compulsion neither fully indulged nor stanched!

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Opting Out of Rumination Over What's Missing

I'm replaying this posting from June 2022. I undersold it at the time. This is the secret to human happiness. And there's nothing to develop or practice, because it's a choice, not a course of action. A re-framing. It is an action of cessation, not of acquisition; a dropping of false assumptions and counterproductive reactions. You own your assumptions and your reactions! You can reframe at any moment! You're free!

I am a completely different person after having learned this lesson. I seem the same; still goofy and wry; still seeking bodacious yum-yums. But now I have a magic trick. I can have doors shut in my face, receive awful news, be oddly persecuted, or (worst of all) drive 100 miles to a boarded-up restaurant without so much as blinking. All without turning numb. I'm right here, totally alive and alert, but enjoy the ride, come what may. All from one little adjustment. One flip. One re-framing.



Way back in January 2009, at the dawn of the Slog, I posted one of the most enduringly popular entries, titled "The Monks and the Coffee". It featured this story:
A woman worked as a driver for some Buddhist monks traveling around California for a series of meditation programs. The monks had fallen crazily in love with a certain brand of coffee they'd discovered during the trip. But while they practically jumped for joy whenever they came upon some, she found it interesting that they never showed the slightest trace of disappointment if they failed to find any. Even when days went by without finding their coffee, they were no less happy. It began to dawn on her that if they never drank that coffee again, it wouldn't bother them in the least. Yet each time they found it they positively basked in the delight.
It struck a chord with me (and with many readers), but I couldn't say I really understood it. But a few months later, I was given the key to unlock the mystery. That Christmas Eve I found myself flipping between peak experience and crushing sadness, all while nothing changed even the tiniest bit. Just my perspective! My framing!

This galvanized my attention, and I pondered it closely for years, cataloguing here my unfolding epiphanies, as indexed in "The Evolution of a Perspective". Eventually this exploration of perspective/framing produced fresh understanding of human happiness, autism, addiction, depression (here and here), creativity, art, cosmology, theology, and all the way up to the nature of the universe and multiverse.



But the initial insight was the most practically useful: We don’t live in What’s Missing. We live in What Is. What's Missing isn't real. In fact, it’s the very definition of unreality. And there's always stuff missing; an infinite depot to draw from in dredging up needless misery for oneself.
Why would you do this? To ballast your happiness, of course!
It works according to a dementedly simple formula:
(Optimality) - (Current Moment) = (Misery)
It's absurd, because "optimality" is a mind trip; a head fake; an empty intellectual construct. It's plainly ditzy to begin with. Just for one thing, optimality is famously slippery. Once you attain it, you quickly grow tired of it and start dreaming up some other notion of it. You know this! Yet you still fall for it every time, generating gratuitous misery. 

Whatever's happening right here/right now, your dear departed grandpa won't be here to see it. And odds are that you are not currently experiencing a thrashing orgasm courtesy of a mesmerizingly attractive and solicitous lover. Moment: I proclaim thee SUBOPTIMAL! Hence misery.

But what-isn't-happening doesn't have anything to do with anything, and certainly shouldn't affect our experience of the current moment - aka "reality". If you drop the habit of scanning for suboptimality (like a princess detecting smaller and smaller peas beneath her mattress), you'll be left with nothing but appreciation of the current moment on its own terms. And that appreciation won't deplete over time, because it's real.



Peak moments are quickly deflated by trivialities. You have to pee. You remember that you don't own a Porsche. You recall that terrible thing your second grade teacher said. Or you just get tired of the sunset view from your chaise lounge in Hawaii. Time to go in, and find lots of fresh juicy suboptimalities to thwart your natural flow of contentment, appreciation, and grace.

We scramble to reconstruct peak experience by trying to book another vacation. We save up, praying for a raise at work and for the perfect obliging companion to share it all with. We struggle to get it all just right; to make the world correspond as closely as possible with the fake, cartoon-like optimality cooked up by our fevered brains.

But, again, even if we make the world cough up that optimality cartoon, we won't be happy for long. Soon we'll need to pee, or remember we don't own Porsches, or recall that thing teacher said. When the dog catches the car, it's just a car. Just a chaise lounge. And I need to pee.

The spiritual teacher/troll GI Gurdjieff wrote a book that was bullshit aside from its title: "Life is Real Only Then, when 'I Am…'". He hid the entire message in plain sight: We're all 100% aspirational. Like hamsters on a wheel, we never arrive, and it's entirely a choice of perspective. Of framing.

Arrival is a manifestation of perspective, not the prize received for lining up ducks in a perfect row. You can arrive now, just as you are, even if you need to pee and are not in Hawaii and still don't own a Porsche. Even if grandpa isn’t here with you right now

Without the neurotic, delusional consideration of fake-out "Optimality" in the formula...
(Optimality) - (Current Moment) = (Misery)
....all you have is Now; un-judged, un-ranked, directly experienced. “Right here, right now” is all that’s real. What’s missing is not real. Obsession with What Isn’t is indulgent caprice. At best, it's stories we tell ourselves. At worst, we're all bonkers, living a dystopian fantasy of un-lost loss; of needless misery.



If you live in a fairytale (i.e. bonkers) world of self-narrated stories, you are condemned to live in What's Missing, and there's another word for that world: Hell.

If you opt out when your mind gently invites you to consider how GRANDPA'S NOT HERE WITH YOU - which is completely irrelevant - you will appreciate the here and now, and there's a word for that world: Heaven.


There is a dangerous rebound effect to watch out for. I explained it very tersely here, filled it in here and here. Take this seriously. No one else will warn you about this; it is a humungous pitfall no one seems to have previously pointed out, and it's easily avoided if you're watching for it.

Oh, and for an index of postings related to this insight, see (per mention above) The Evolution of a Perspective.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Stupidity Nesting Dolls

In addition to being funny and (hopefully) relateable, this person has precluded any accusation of false modesty. In a world where people claim to be "humbled" when their titanic loftiness is recognized, there's only a micron-wide gap for real modesty. And this threads the needle.

But here's the problem. There are millions out there who honestly believe Bill Gates planted nano chips in their vaccine so he could control their thoughts, and who would happily frame this meme and display it on their desks, because, good lord, it rings so true.

The world is rife with bullshit people staunchly committed to their no-bullshitness and legit exasperated by all the maddening bullshit out there. And I, alas, am unable to recognize this without framing it back on myself. Am I any higher class of dummy? Or is it brute dummies all the way down?

I've given up boozing, and meditative oblivion gets boring, so I have no choice but to flail at coming up with answers to such conundrums. I don't have one here, yet, but can offer a helpful chunk: Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant.


More pontifications on social media memes

Monday, March 4, 2024

The Savage Dystopia of Vapid Conversation

Tying together previously unconnected observations and finding a common basis for post-Covid dementia, social media inanity, and so-called "cancel culture"....

Spotted today on the Book of Faces:
A real conversation starter!

This sort of thing preceded social media. A theme is raised, and people take turns "sharing" stories more or less relating to that theme. Humans love doing this because it invites us to freely unload the contents of our brain without requiring thought or consideration. "'Cookies,' you say? Well, let me tell you about the time my cousin Wayne ate so many that he vomited!"

We don't care about Wayne, even a little bit. But we dare not stop them while they're unloading. This is as close to a "performance" as non-creative people ever get. It's their time to shine. Hush now, and try to laugh supportively.

Our minds are fringy hairballs of half-baked thoughts and memories. So it's cognitively soothing to extract something nominally relevant from that hopeless clutter. Like a hoarder who's been asked for a green sponge, the glee is high.

You can't get people to help, or to show up, or even to do, like, anything, really. This is the sole remaining way in which contemporary human beings can dependably be persuaded to contribute. It's come down to this:

I think it was George Carlin who did a bit about the desperate talk radio host coaxing listeners to call in by inviting opinions about nun-strangling. So, yeah, the gambit of conversation-starting has been around for a while. In fact, it paid for the apartment in which I currently type.

But it's now all there is. Mindless "sharing" is no longer something we mostly do while roasting marshmallows around glowing campfires. Social media invites us to chime in randomly, uninterestingly, unhelpfully, inanely, 24/7. And we're so used to this that hardly anyone can respond directly and substantitively to another person's statement even in the course of everyday conversation. At very best, people may lightly scan your speech or writing for a keyword triggering them to "share" broadly on that general theme. "'Cookies,' you say?"

Paying attention to another person is hard. And forming a salient response requires way more effort than anyone is interested in applying. People aren't worth all that. So, per the way of things, the muscle atrophies. Many are so dulled (by comfort, complacency, and quarantine) that they couldn't listen closely or respond relevantly even if they wanted to. It's strictly hypothetical, though, because who'd want to?

Nearly everyone in the rich world, especially post-lockdown, is roaringly narcissistic. But I've been wrong to pin this stuff entirely on narcissism.A few weeks ago, I offered this example of the problem:
If someone is explaining astronomy to you and gets stuck remembering a term, and you fill in “gravitational lensing”, there is 0% probability they will stop their spiel, look freshly at you, and declare “Oh! You know astronomy!”

Pre-Covid, it was more like 60%.

They will continue their explanation - their performance - without hesitation. You have nothing to do with it. It’s like you’re not even there. This is the framing: My thoughtstream is paramount. My assumptions are sacrosanct. Actual evidence is inconsequential; flimsy and unreal.
To be sure, that's not non-narcissistic! You can't view other people as full-fledged beings while using their faces as targets for splattering your pent-up mental contents. My frequent observation - that we’re all far too narcissistic to recognize how extremely narcissistic everyone is - applies. Our obliviousness to the clear truth that no one ever actually talks to us stems from 1. our delusion of centrality ("everyone is always paying attention to me!"), plus the hilarious fact that 2. we're paying as little attention as they are. We have mental contents of our own to unload, which we're busily preparing while they babble. 'Cookies,' you say?

But it's not all narcissism. It’s also the viral practice of chiming in on a loose theme rather than responding to whatever was just said. "Sharing", not conversing (“sharing” has become an Orwellian term for “broadcasting,” just as “humbled” is now how we flaunt). This is not to claim human discussion was ever super on-point. But it used to be, sometimes. Now it's never. It's too much damned work to pay attention, much less respond relevantly. We've decided that people just aren't worth it. And we're too self-absorbed to notice that any of this is happening.

So that's unpleasant. But there's more. The same phenomenon sows chaos...and worse. Let's alter that meme a little:

I can assure you, having run a huge online forum, that this won't be a discussion about music. It will be a discussion about a whole other topic.

"I'm offended!" is just another way to rotely grab hold of a keyword and unload mental clutter. Another tape to pop in. The person urging others to chime in doesn't get to restrain what, exactly, gets unloaded (you cannot imagine the grief Chowhound's moderators took while trying to curtail discussion of motorboat repair, bowling, and global politics in a food forum). Unloaders do not appreciate being thwarted in mid-spurt.

It's entirely predictable that people point their hoses at the inviter as zestfully as the invitation. Rather than vapidly sharing on the theme, they’ll vapidly share about the choice of keyword. Our hoses are stupendously agnostic. They just spray and spray and spray!

So if I were foolish enough to type out the word "nigger", hardly anyone would take context into account. Nary an iota of consideration would be paid to who I am, where I'm coming from, what I meant, or how I've lived my life. Such factors are utterly irrelevant. Rather, a keyword compels an unconstrained outflow of mental contents - in this case maybe not such nice contents - because that's what words are for nowAnd, of course, whoever typed that word is a racist racist who must crawl up and die. Because that's the take.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Portugeshi

No one recognizes it - because no one burrows into immigrant subcultures like I do - but the Portuguese fishing town I'm staying in will, in the next few years, turn flamboyantly Bengali/Bangladeshi. I predict it will look like those towns in northern England which have had enormous immigration from the region.

In fact, it's happening because England hasn't embraced them, so new émigrés are looking for a more welcoming harbor. And Portugal is warmer, cheaper, with an easier immigration process, plus all the other advantages that led me here. I'm not the only one who noticed!

It's funny. The Portuguese have been grousing about American immigrants, to the point where, in my interactions with strangers, I feel obliged to swiftly disconnect from their expectations. But while I'm as comfortable with Bengali/Bangladeshi food/music/culture/people as with Portuguese, the foreignness (no one here spent years living in Jackson Heights!) will throw them for a loop. A few hundred Americans butchering their language and competing for apartments will seem mild, in retrospect.

Tonight, I'm attending a chicken biryani experiment by a couple from Calcutta who plan to open a restaurant next month. Indian restaurants in Portugal are expected to serve stuff like pizza and kebabs - i.e. be all-purpose sources of non-Portuguese food for natives seeking occasional escape from bacalhau. But I don't believe my friends will be offering pizza.

আর কোন গড-ডিমেড পিৎজা!

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Junky Magic Dessert

My favorite food writer, John Thorne, wrote, before there was an Internet, that clickbait recipes never work. You'll never evoke magic from just the right proportion of spam and bouillon cubes. For time immemorial, people have tried to sell the notion that some simple, junkie, stupid trick creates INSTANT MAGIC. But it never does. So don't be a sucker!

I live to prove John Thorne wrong. So here's a simple, junkie, stupid trick to create INSTANT MAGIC:

Heat in a toaster oven or (better) air fryer, two McVitie's Digestive Biscuits and a leftover muffin (roughly pulled apart into big chunks). Don't let anything brown; stop the process as soon as you detect baking smells.

Break the cookies and muffin into quarter-sized chunks with your hands (you don't want it too regular). Strew with diced ripe strawberries and stir. That's it.

I know that you all think it would be better with mascarpone or crème fraîche. Looks DRY and your culinary school teacher/home economics teacher/cookbook guru insists that nothing may ever be DRY.

This is stupid and ridiculous. It's the dimwitted thinking that leads to the serving of beautiful potato chips with glurky dips. It's just the remnants of 1960s/1970s goormay indoctrination. It needs to go.

Yes, this would be delicious with mascarpone or crème fraîche. But it's fine without those things, too. Eat with a spoon, preferably before the cookie/muffin cool. Be happy.



If you have some quality balsamico, a very light, narrow, lacy drizzle over the top would be great.

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