2024-12-21 01:05:28
The worst thing about UFO conspiracists is that they are a bunch of “Soft” sci-fi fans. Their exercise in communal world-building has a place along the Soft vs. Hard sci-fi axis closer to Star Wars (which is Soft because the technology is basically magic, the rules of the universe are subservient to plot, etc). Prominent voices in UFOlogy, those who the media treat as serious people, think that Mussolini once had a crashed flying saucer and the U.S. government took it in WWII and its captured alien beings have attacked human scientists in underground labs—all crappy, derivative space-opera stuff. Their lore, the rules of the universe they're proposing, reeks of the artistic wants of a thirteen-year-old boy; it’s the kind of world where the protagonist gets a plasma gun and says, “Time to melt some bugs!”
It offends me aesthetically. I'd like to say I sometimes write skeptically on UFOs solely because I value the truth and the “UFO community” so often ends up on the wrong side of it (as I wrote earlier this week, the mysterious New Jersey sightings have just been planes). Sure, that’s a big part of it. But I’m also a Hard sci-fi kind of guy, so perhaps a further subconscious motivation is because they don't know aesthetically or intellectually what good sci-fi is.
So instead, let's talk aliens seriously; what would “first contact” actually look like in a Hard sci-fi future? Quite different. First, it’s extremely unlikely our first evidence would be from some sort of physical visitation (and probably not to New Jersey). Contact occurring via an explicitly sent communication (like in Carl Sagan’s Contact) is a bit more likely, but still improbable. We haven't really been worth contacting until a couple hundred years ago and the Milky Way galaxy is over 100,000 light years wide. Who has even had time to send a hello?
Therefore, first contact is likely to be solely observational, which in turn means being inconclusive and probabilistic. A reasonable first contact would be if we accrue evidence of distant alien civilizations from very far away, but then the quality and nature of that evidence is poor and uncertain, accompanied by a great deal of scientific debate. Meaning that first contact might actually entail a stretched-out period of what I'll call “alien agnosticism" within the scientific literature itself. And it's very possible this status will last hundreds of years.
In fact, I think we're beginning to see the moves toward alien agnosticism already. At least, some of the methods that could usher us into that epistemic state are in place. Consider that scientists have now quietly identified 53 Dyson Sphere candidates—stars that look a heck of a lot like some civilization is building megastructures around them to soak up as much energy as possible. That’s right: 53!
2024-12-17 23:54:53
Something's going on.
As reported credulously and breathlessly by just about every major media outlet, there are strange lights in the night sky all over the East Coast; particularly, it seems, in areas heavy with air traffic. Residents are going on “drone hunts” to look at the heavens (a direction that humans don’t usually examine for long periods) and suddenly seeing all sorts of things they can’t explain. “Something's going on,” a New Jersey town mayor says; President-elect Trump says the same. “New Jersey drones” are being spotted as far away as California. '“Shoot them down already!” demands a NJ Assemblyman.
In response, locals are shining lasers at drones that turn out to be planes (like poor FedEx flight 3926) because it’s hard to judge distance well in the night sky. The FBI had to release a statement yesterday begging people not to shoot.
In the rare cases where people use flight trackers appropriately, like when New Jersey Senator Andy Kim went out on a drone hunt with local police, he found that what he saw was… just planes. Meanwhile, ABC News aired this picture of what is probably Venus or Jupiter.
Other prominent examples of sightings include the former governor of Maryland mistaking the constellation of Orion for drones, or this still from a video shared by UFO activists (taken near, ahem, Newark Airport).
Demands for action has led to the FBI deploying observation teams throughout New Jersey and creating a tip line. Of ~5,000 tips received, about 100 leads were deemed even worthy of investigation, finding at most a couple hobby or law-enforcement drones. An FBI spokesperson had to gently explain their findings in the kindest possible way at a White House press briefing.
In overlaying the visual sightings reported to the FBI with approach patterns for Newark, Liberty, JFK, and LaGuardia airports, the density of reported sightings matches the approach patterns of these very busy airports with flights coming in throughout the night.
Meanwhile, downed drone searches turn up nada, and many of the most-shared reports have been unfalsifiable verbal accounts of “I saw something weird in the sky.”
So the only noteworthy thing about this is what it represents at a cultural level: the “I Saw a Mysterious Drone” craze is really the disguised evolution of the UFO craze that began seven years ago with a garbage New York Times article. It is pushed by much of the same people for much of the same reasons (right now the UFO and UAP subreddits are going absolutely bonkers over sightings).
All mass delusions and hysterias have a cause. In the summer of 1518, the year of the Dancing Plague, it was a French woman, Frau Troffea, who began to dance without music on the cobbled streets of Strasbourg in some sort of modern-esque fanatical fashion. Frau must have been very good, maybe the best improvisational dancer to ever live, because hundreds of others joined and danced until they collapsed (some claimed ~15 people died a day, although accounts are unreliable).
Humans don’t change. In the 80s and 90s we had the Satanic abuse panic which broke apart thousands of households based on false confabulations. Such cases require an initial cause which prompts mimicry. It was Frau Troffea in 1518, and it was psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder who created the satanic panic with his discredited book Michelle Remembers in 1980, and now this entire phenomenon of “drones are attacking!” and blurry iPhone videos is a result of a 2017 New York Times article announcing that the government spent years secretly hunting unexplainable UFOs which buzz military bases and dance like Tinkerbell away from pilots.
So to understand the current delusion, we must go back to the beginning. For quietly over the past years it has come to light that essentially nothing about the original UFO story reported by the Times was true.
Remember this?
Well, now we know the program was a farce with government money, conducted mostly by a private company hunting ghouls and goblins and dino-beavers at “Skinwalker Ranch.” I summarized the saga as:
Diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid [privately, a UFO “believer”] by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the sole bidder for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including… dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”
The best insight into how this has all operated is via the reality TV show about Skinwalker Ranch, where they regularly do things like take recordings of flies buzzing across the camera and blur them so they look like unidentified objects.
The associated government-funded paranormal “research program” was called AATIP and ended in 2012. Five years later The New York Times decided to report it as if AATIP was a real serious program headed by a man named Luis Elizondo at the Pentagon who, it is suggested in the article, had been officially compiling and investigating more credible UFO reports such as now-famous videos like FLIR, GIMBAL, and GOFAST.
Except that later, it was reported by The New York Post that:
In 2019, the Pentagon released a statement saying Elizondo had “no responsibilities” with AATIP, a program which they also said wasn’t created to investigate UFOs.
Whoops!
Public interest was (understandably) so great after the Times article that an actual government program to investigate UFO reports was memed into existence, the AARO.
Since their founding the AARO has consistently come up empty handed, over and over, because of course they have. Quietly, most major sightings has now been thoroughly explained. Pilots, it turns out, are also human beings, and one in ten thousand missions they see something weird that they can't explain, which is always just the standard stuff skeptics point out, like balloons, bags, or lanterns. According to the November testimony by current AARO director Jon Kosloski:
Among AARO’s closed cases from the May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024 time period, about 70 precent of the UAP were deemed to have been balloons, 16 percent drones, eight percent birds, four percent satellites and two percent aircraft, according to the report.
Remember the famous “Go Fast” video?
“The Go Fast … captured the public attention and congressional attention when it was made public in 2017. [It] looks like an object flying very fast over the water, very close to the water. Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis, using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” Kosloski said. “As the platform is flying and capturing the object, if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude, a trick of the eye called ‘parallax’ makes it look like the object is moving much faster.”
Using trigonometry! Why that's what skeptics did immediately when they got access to the video… because simple math led to the nominative conclusion: given a UFO video titled “Go Fast,” the object will inevitably turn out to be very slow.
The first director of the AARO, Sean Kirkpatrick, recently confirmed the shady origin of this entire endeavor, along with the rank incorrectness of the 2017 Times article, in an op-ed he penned in Scientific America after leaving his post this year.
… this narrative has been simmering for years and is largely an outgrowth of a former program at the DOD’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was heavily influenced by a group of individuals associated with businessman and longtime ufologist Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace…. after a review by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and DIA concluded that… taxpayer money was being inappropriately spent on paranormal research at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah.
His testimony completely contradicts the more serious picture painted by the 2017 Times article, confirming from the inside the truth that I and others have been pointing out for a while.
Not that people want to hear this. In fact, being sane and working at the AARO is a pretty thankless job, it turns out.
Kirkpatrick has received violent threats, social-media smear campaigns, and even had to call the FBI after a UFO fanatic showed up at his home. “I’ve had people threaten my wife and daughter, and try to break into our online accounts—far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence,” Kirkpatrick says. “I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.”
Coming up empty-handed isn’t because the AARO members are hiding anything, because by nature of the job the AARO has been staffed with UFO believers.
The “chief scientist” of this Pentagon task force was Travis Taylor, who is and was a co-star of “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel. He currently stars on “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch” on the same network.
Yet, now that they have to operate with a modicum of oversight, being an actual official government program, they continuously disappoint those in the outside UFO community, who get mad at them for not confirming their beliefs.
In a sane world, the AARO and its continual null results would be a cautionary tale about getting exactly what you want. Instead, its mere creation has implicitly supported the idea that something’s going on. And now the FBI has to ask people not to shoot at planes landing in Newark.
A disturbing reminder that, despite all our technology and education and literacy, we are still just dancing in Strasbourg. Only the location changes. Under the light-polluted New Jersey night sky our movements become erratic and there is sweat on our brow once again, as, iPhone in hand, we thumb record.
2024-12-12 00:20:21
A recent provocation from the Times; another entry added to what’s become a recognizable and sure-to-trigger-controversy op-ed genre.
David Morris, a creative writing professor, charges headfirst into the breach:
Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.
I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female. When I was a graduate student in a similar program about 20 years ago, the cohorts were split fairly evenly by gender. As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, “the young male novelist is a rare species.”
Now, plenty of people think this genre is overblown and reactionary. It has a long pedigree—heck, you can find pieces in Publishers Weekly 15 years ago asking “Does the lack of men in publishing hurt the industry?” (more recently, check out the “The decline of the literary bloke” in The New Statesman).
What I’m personally interested in is the common meta-opinion about why this is bad, and it’s the opinion that David Morris himself articulates: that the problem with young men not reading literature is confined to young men themselves. As he writes in the Times:
In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the “manosphere” such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan… I think of 2024 as the “Fight Club” election, in which disaffected guys vented their frustrations and anxieties through a brawler who will one day reveal himself to be not their hero, but rather a figment of their imagination.
(Rather ironic that Morris cites Fight Club to explain the election. If literature were so cut and dry, and its pages just made people vote Democrat, there wouldn’t be such an obvious literary reference from within to frame the entire issue!)
Anyway, to the point: Morris thinks it bad for the polity if young men lack literature because…
Novels do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives.
And herein lies the miss. While I do think young men should experience literature, and wish more would (let’s not oversell, it’s no panacea), in the long run I think contemporary literature needs young men more than young men need it.
2024-12-06 00:51:52
My “crackpot” opinion is that our society deprives children of independence, intellectual development, and personal joy, all by refusing to teach them to read until quite late.
In the traditional school system learning to read even simple books independently takes somewhere around 1,000 hours of lessons, a lengthy process stretched out across 3-4 years (under good conditions). It usually begins in Pre-K and arrives at the goal somewhere around 1st to 2nd grade for most kids, although standards and capabilities vary widely, and failures are common (40% proficiency for grade level reading is a “success” in many schools). In light of this, it makes sense that the traditional education system is riven with debates on how best to teach reading. Is it phonics? Whole-word? And so on.
In comparison, children can learn to read by being tutored by a parent for about 15 to 20 minutes a day within a single year (somewhere between 100-200 hours in total, give or take, depending on age). This can be done before kindergarten and it opens up their world (not to mention providing a much-needed alternative to screentime). It’s a result pulled off consistently by people like homeschooling moms, an undeniable case where the “crackpots” and “weirdos” do something objectively ten times faster and easier than the “experts.”
I did this with my own son, who was reading simple stories by age 2. Here’s a progression video for Roman, my now three-year-old toddler, demonstrating a lot of the process I walk through below: first starting with a slower form of “double reading” where he repeats what he initially sounds out, as well as playing complete-the-sentence games for individual words, and by the end he’s reading confidently books with advanced words, like a story about a drake (male ducks—early readers build vocabulary too!) getting caught by a snake. Warning: he likes to snack while reading.
This is Part 3 of a guide for other parents to do this with their kids. Here is Part 1 (why do this) and Part 2 (how to establish a formal time for learning). This one contains the meat of actual phonics practice and is much longer.
Why write a guide? After all, isn’t getting a child reading essentially an educationally-solved activity, at least in theory? Unfortunately, no.
First, there is far less material about getting toddlers and young children to read, rather than older school-age kids with longer attention spans. Second, many of the popular methods that do exist—even those aimed at parents—are not very fun, are overly complicated, often incomplete, and take too long to reach practical real-world reading mastery. Third, they often fail to take advantage of the most potent educational force we know, 1:1 tutoring, and all the flexibility and personalization that it entails.
My method begins with a fun personalized complete-the-sentence game to play that teaches basic phonics, then speedruns the child to advanced books that actually stimulate them.
It's designed for parents who want to tutor their young kids to get them reading for entertainment as fast as possible. That entails four properties:
(a) being “for parents” means that it cannot rely on detailed knowledge or teaching resources. Parents are busy.
(b) being “for young kids” means it must be doable for even toddlers, and so must be fun and game-based, taking advantage of the fact that you are your child's best tutor since you know what holds their attention.
(c) “reading for entertainment” means that it must actually work to achieve the goal of a child spending time reading by themselves.
(d) “as fast as possible” means skipping the over-complications of standard methods. E.g., while phonics is by far the best way to start reading, following phonics slavishly (as many do) will substantially delay and overcomplicate the process.
For instance, usually, if you pick up your average “teach your kid to read” book (Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons below is a popular one with over one million sales) it will look like this for the earliest lessons.
And listen, you can use these as part of a larger process. But I bought this book and never used it because it violates so many of the above principles. It’s overly-complicated for parents and kids; in fact, I still don’t even know what all of those arrows and dots mean!1 Just plowing through one-size-fits-all lessons is too boring and difficult for very young children like toddlers to attend to. It’s not interactive, game-based, or targeted. A bunch of hard-coded lessons will rarely result in a very young kid being able to read independently. It's like teaching Calculus with one or two examples per concept and expecting someone who can’t put on their pants to get an A.
Almost everywhere you look, there's all sorts of overcomplicated advice on the subject of teaching kids how to read. Here's from childrenlearningreading.com:
"Onsets" are the beginnings of words, and "rimes" are the ending parts, which follow the "onset". A few examples:
DOG: D-OG (D is the onset and OG is the rime)
CLAP: CL-AP (CL is the onset and AP is the rime)
Such unnecessary rules (ahem, noise) are major steps to many early reading programs. Consider the normally up-front step of learning how to “blend” sounds into words, which is a huge roadblocks for lots of children. In my method you just let them pick blending up naturally as they go, since they can actually start reading just fine without it! You just skip it. My baseline belief is that kids are smart—the best learners in the world, in a way—and so we should leverage that as much as possible (while still using a rigorous framework and progression).
The goal of this guide is to reduce a lot of the frustrations that I had. For example, if you walk into the bookstore and you buy early reading materials, you will get things like Level 1 Reading: Biscuit and the Icy Gale or other stuff that’s comically advanced in terms of phonics. So the guide provides not only a game-based progression for early phonics, but also all the resources that I used, covering which reading materials are actually high-quality, as well as (later on) how to manage your child's growing knowledge structure and get them reading independently. It’s based on the obvious-to-me but somehow rarely-followed belief that learning to read should resemble:
Tier 1. Memorizing that every letter has its own basic sound.
Tier 2. Mapping individual sounds into coherent words via a complete-the-sentence game.
Tier 3. Phonically-basic sentences and stories. Initial sight words. Introducing early reading materials that are actually engaging and fun.
Tier 4. The necessity of managing the child’s growing knowledge graph and the (simple) tools you need for that. Introducing the rules of phonics wherein the order of the letters next to one another transform the sounds (like the SH and CH in “fish” and “chips”). Then more advanced rules, like when an E at the end of a word changes the vowel sound (e.g., “sit” vs. “site”), along with more sight words and patterns (“all” as in “tall,” “ball,” etc).
Tier 5. Take-Off, when you transition to just sitting with them helping as they read aloud, all in order to speedrun mastery. Essentially, you build their reading foundation with phonics but eventually begin to favor simply pure reading practice. This is because at a certain point the phonics rules get too complex and specialized so as to be useless vs. just practice.
This installment covers Tiers 1-3, as those are the basic steps to getting a child reading sentences and stories. If you want to get kids started on phonics, what follows below is what I think the best method is. Tiers 4 and 5, which continues all the way to advanced independent reading and the world beyond phonics, will come soon.
What I found is that process of teaching reading is about establishing cognitive training wheels and later discarding them for the real thing once they slow you down. It’s the exact same way kids learn how to ride a bike now-a-days, starting with balance bikes, except instead of the mechanics of wheels and pedals complexifying underneath them as they try and try again, they become little pilots of language itself.
Note: If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This full guide is turning into a ~15,000 word monograph and it’s paid subscribers who enable ambitious longterm projects like it. If you are already a paid subscriber, know you’re why this exists at all. Even if you don’t use it, others will, so thank you for helping small people buzzing with a new technicolor consciousness expand their horizons.
2024-11-27 00:16:27
With the news having been broken that around 10% of Substacks have some AI-generated content in them (and probably plenty of bigger outlets as well, this problem isn’t specific to Substack) I’d like to tell a tale.
It began earlier this year, when someone I respect and like reached out to me. Their offer? Do a book club version of a Master Class (get interviewed, write some commentary) about any book I want. The payment—notably high since it required only a few filming sessions and a little writing—was a hefty $20,000.
Truth be told, I don’t quite make enough money here on Substack yet to be financially on budget. I make tantalizing close enough, enough to be the main support for my family, and I cobble together the rest through other means, like the occasional book deal or speaking fees, and also from being a surprisingly savvy (or perhaps just lucky) investor. Thanksgiving is coming up, so I’ll note that I’m lucky in general to make as much as I do from writing and thinking. We all choose what to maximize in our lives and careers, and I made a conscious choice to have quiet flexible time for reading and research and writing and being a parent, rather than trying to make a lot of money, which is why I moved out to Cape Cod. Kurt Vonnegut also moved out to Cape Cod when he started writing full-time (he wrote Slaughterhouse Five just a town over from me) but he had to moonlight at a Saab dealership. I don’t have to do that, so I’m lucky.
All to say, an easy $20,000 is not nothing for me. Additionally, I was excited by the idea of a book club, for it immediately popped into my head to do it on Michel de Montaigne.
In the late 1500s Michel de Montaigne became the delight of the Parisian aristocracy with his Essais; he was the first to truly popularize the essay as a literary form, and, through his musings on daily life, became one of the great practical philosophers of the Renaissance. One might go so far as to say Montaigne invented the modern narrative consciousness you recognize in contemporary writing: that searching, doubtful, analytic voice. My voice, like so many other writers, is some linguistic evolutionary descendant of his voice.
But while I was initially excited, there was another aspect of the project: I learned that this book club would be with not me, but rather an AI version of me; one based on a bit of original commentary I created about the book (not a very long précis, in my understanding), then repackaged through a chatbot.
Furthermore, the app possessed something else I couldn’t get onboard with: the option to use AI to translate the text into “contemporary versions” that are supposedly more easily digestible. In other words, to rewrite the classics to be more modern, which I guess means simpler. Shorter. Keep in mind: Shakespeare is an option. What, precisely, is an “easier to digest” Shakespeare version? I have little confidence that an AI-simplified version of a classic contains the same nuances, the same emphasis of style. That doesn’t seem in line with the original author’s intent, and I am an author, and I feel I must respect the dead.
To the company’s credit, they are upfront about the AI usage. I’m not here to besmirch their intentions. But it struck me as antithetical to the point of a book club—both the contemporary translation aspect, as well as the AI-likeness.
Now, I’m no great Montaigne scholar. I’ve read a biography, and I occasionally return to him just to drink deep from that original well. In a real bookclub, I would talk about Montaigne and newsletters, and what the essay meant then and what it means now, and why I think of Montaigne as one of the great first champions of agnosticism, and how this agonistic uncertainty was at the heart of the rise of humanism and even democracy, and how his brand of agnosticism is ultimately what essays should aspire to; how they should be a consideration of a thing, a turning over of an idea like you are a baby physical handling an object for the first time. I would say all that, and maybe I’d be correct, or maybe not, but I’d be me. There’d be a social connection too, hearing the experience of what Montaigne triggered in others, what they themselves thought, or brought to the table, or how they read him differently.
But with this proposal, I couldn’t get over the thought that I would not only be expanding amount of AI-generated slop in our culture, but essentially selling the AI-girlfriend experience of a book club. You wouldn’t be reading Montaigne with me. You’d be reading Montaigne with some ersatz knockoff. Already porn stars are doing this: prompting an AI on their sexts and images and selling them; in fact, apparently companies now reach out to non-porn-associated people (like those with large Twitter followings) asking if they can make a NSFW version of them in return for payment. Of course, the AI girlfriend you’d be buying in this particular case would be based on a balding middle-aged man who lives on Cape Cod. But hey, at least the conversation is good, right? And yes, obviously there’s a higher-minded purpose for an AI-based book club, compared to the smutty nothings of an AI girlfriend. But is the content the only thing that matters? It would still be an illusion of intellectual connection. You’d not really be reading the book with me as a “companion,” nor having a “conversation,” nor having a “discussion”—which is how it was described. No, the personalities of any AI clone are very much still that same bland butler, that same Reddit-commentator voice, but given a thin veneer of outside personality and someone else’s portrait in the chat window. It’s just putting lipstick on ChatGPT. The real thing shines through. In other words, even with all other considerations aside, at this stage in the tech the illusion of connection—even if it’s known explicitly by the consumer—necessarily is the product. And I’m not comfortable with that.
So I said no to the $20,000. Meanwhile, a host of famous and successful authors, names you assuredly know, all said yes. Here are the only two people who said no: Me, and Andre Dubus III.
(For those who don’t know, Andre Dubus III is the author of House of Sand and Fog, among many other wonderful books like his memoir Townie. He’s a great writing teacher, an entrancing public speaker, and happens to be one of the most stand-up ethical people I know. Andre hosted the book launch party for my first novel, The Revelations, and was my first—and last—writing instructor, back when I was a young boy. Our refusals were not coordinated, merely a coincidence stemming from a shared Yankee stubbornness.)
I know many people will say they don't care if I sell an AI-likeness or support AI-rewrites of classics; they may even think me prudish at the refusal. That’s fine. I had to make a choice that I could stand behind, and one way to reason about ethics is to imagine the kind of world that you'd like to exist, and the world that I want to exist has more grounded notions of authenticity and more careful use of such a powerful technology. Even if something is a moral gray zone now, what is the directionality of the choice? Something like Taylor Swift selling an AI-likeness for $9.99 a month to teenage girls. No thanks, our culture is already solipsistic enough. And I'll point something else out. Even if I’m wrong, and selling your AI-likeness is fine and dandy, and AI-rewritten classics are just par for the course in the future, I’m still shocked that 95% of the writers asked said yes. For I don't think that this is a 95% clear issue, even if I'm personally wrong about it. Many of the yeses self-style themselves not only as writers, but important voices of morality and ethics—including about AI’s threat to human art! Yet none of that showed through.
The incentives here, near the peak of AI hype, are going to be the same as they were for NFTs. Remember when celebrities regularly shilled low-market-cap cryptos to the public? Why? Because they simply couldn’t say no to the money.
Please note: I don’t think all use of AI is morally dubious! That’s not what I’m saying and not what I believe. There are a myriad of things I’m excited by, like how AI can help us understand whale speech or how proteins fold or better target transcranial ultrasound. In terms of LLMs and chatbots, I think they can be used in education to extreme effectiveness. They’re great for voice dictation, and far better than Google as a first-stage for research and search—I use them for that myself! I don’t begrudge anyone who uses AI as a sounding board for their ideas, nor to get feedback on their writing, nor to query at whatever springs into their heads, nor those who use it to overcome the professional disadvantage of English as a second language. But the second you click “generate draft” and one appears like magic, no matter how much prior fine-tuning or prompting you’ve done—that’s not your writing nor your speech nor your commentary and certainly not your side of a discussion. And I don’t want our civilization’s culture to be produced by ChatGPT with lipstick on. I think it’s sad and depressing and sort of the end of the story of human creativity. Even if the products at first seems of equal ability, I think there are very negative longterm effects downstream.
As with any new technology, we all have to take a stand, and mine is that I will never feed you AI content slop under my name, be it via a chatbot-wrapper with my photo on it on some other platform, nor here on Substack, nor in my books. My writing will always be the authentic me, the one that is sometimes wrong, the one that occasionally fucks up links, the one who makes mistakes, the one who once wrote “yolk” when he meant “yoke” and everyone got in a pedantic huff, the one that never manages to write a post under 1,500 words; but the one that is trying, really trying, to produce stuff that’s authentic and artistically and intellectually worth your time. I believe the broadcast-based connection between the consciousness of the writer and the reader is a sacred trust, I’m honored it exists between me and so many people, and I don’t plan on swapping it out with an artificial replacement.
So with that tale told, consider this my annual plea to become a paying subscriber of The Intrinsic Perspective to support this choice—and if not to me, then to your other favorite writers/artists/thinkers/creators. Because there are going to be wild, absolutely wild, financial incentives to use AI to scale content creation in ways that slip easily, thoughtlessly, into the harmful and illusory. Most of the big outlets will do it, if they haven’t started already. Subscriptions and connections to real humans you trust are the only way to combat it. We will be what remains of the internet when this is all over.
2024-11-23 01:28:39
Table of Contents:
Red vs. blue digital town-squares.
2012 continues to be a fulcrum year.
Mainstream media incompetence made prediction markets look good.
Why did AI companies stop competing in e-sports?
No conscious oversight over who gets liver implants is bad.
Selling out, artists, and writing on Substack.
God-shaped holes hungry for content.
From the archives.
Ask Me Anything.
1. Last year I warned in “The internet's "town square" is dead” we would end up with a “blue” Twitter and a “red” Twitter—tailored echo-chambers reinforcing their own political views. At the time, I thought the blue-team competitor to Twitter (now X) would be Threads:
To put it very simply: there is a good chance (not an inevitable one, but a good chance) that Threads becomes the “blue” Twitter, while Twitter becomes the “red,” well, Twitter—following the same sort of politicization, red or blue, that has happened to the smaller Twitter clones, and that you can find almost everywhere in our culture.
I’d say this has pretty much come to pass, except it’s been BlueSky lately that’s overtaken Threads.
Why not Threads? To explain this, I think people need to understand that writing or producing content about politics is the short and easy path to engagement, but in doing so you strike a dark bargain. You have to be comfortable being hated. I think Zuckerberg, with his ongoing rehabilitation of his image, and in the wake of how much he was blamed for Trump's 2016 victory, was honestly just tired of politics. And so anything heavy or political was openly banned or shadowbanned on Threads. This, along with some differences in structure (e.g., an Instagram-like emphasis on visuals and connecting users to brands) opened the space for BlueSky to become the “blue” digital town-square.
Personally, I think having a blue and a red town-square is a significant net negative as an outcome. For it's important to have a culture which is not entirely about politics—to have topics, writing, thinking, ideas, discussion, that spans the aisle. But you can imagine how difficult that is if there's no one big shared platform that crosses political lines and instead all the discussion is split into pieces.
Science (outside of IQ graphs) is increasingly absent from X; same for literature (outside of scandals). All the non-political content of our civilization has been fundamentally nerfed by the splitting of the digital town square post-2022. And it sucks.
