There’s a pleasure in being told what we already know, in a way we’re already used to. That’s why so much human writing and storytelling does exactly that. We go to a Hollywood movie or pick up a romantasy novel or attend a Sunday sermon knowing what to expect, and our expectations are almost always met.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic
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Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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Canadians may be intellectually curious about the prospect of European Union membership and angry at Donald Trump’s America -— which, according to a recent Pew poll, they now view more negatively than they do China —- but they may not be eager to accept the sweeping transformation of their country’s laws and regulations that E.U. membership would entail.
~ Ishaan Tharoor via The New Yorker
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Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.
~ David Foster Wallace
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You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.
~ Iain Banks
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Since well before the pandemic, we’ve lived in a world of low-friction digital communication, where passing an obligation to someone else is extremely easy.
~ Cal Newport via The Atlantic
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Japan in the 1980s pioneered the type of export-led, low-consumption development model later adopted by China and other Asian nations. A heavily managed financial market steered cheap financing toward manufacturers, and an extensive web of explicit and implicit subsidies and industrial policies directed taxpayer funds toward the promotion of exports. This was the institutional background for Japan’s high savings rate, which in the postwar period initially financed Japanese corporate investment in rebuilding domestic productive capacity, then financed Japan’s sizable budget deficit in the 1970s.
~ Michael Starr via American Affairs
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In the E.R., interactions between patient and doctor rarely unfold neatly and logically. A patient starts with a description of chest pain, circles back to a fever, remembers a medication he stopped taking, mentions a family history of heart disease only after his wife prompts him, then adds one more symptom as the encounter is wrapping up. But the A.I. scribe converts that wandering, stuttering exchange into a tidy clinical synthesis — a miracle, it seems! The messy human sprawl of the visit returned to me clean and perfectly punctuated in less than a minute.
~ Helen Ouyang via The New York Times Magazine
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One of the pleasing facets of plagiarism is that it doesn’t exist—not in the eyes of the law, that is, and especially not if those eyes are American. There is intellectual-property law, and a law that prohibits the trafficking of counterfeit goods. There are laws against copyright infringement. If plagiarists are sent to prison, however, it will not be because they have filched a slice of poetry, or half a juicy ballad, and passed it off as their own.
~ Anthony Lane via The New Yorker
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In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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