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Quote of the day from Adam Mastroianni:

[L]ots of people think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking, and this is why they don’t get better at writing.

And since writing is thinking, this for many people boils down to: write more drafts and murder your darlings. Or post them online, like I do.

When “I don’t think I need to say much more” is followed by two more paragraphs of text the writer is not making the point they think they are making. The text in question is a defense of plagiarism which amounts to “what I copied wasn’t that original to begin with”. Hardy-har-har. (ᔥNassim Taleb)

A good observation from Christopher Butler: you can be a great designer and be completely unknown. I would also, as Charlie Munger suggested, invert: you can be well-known without being great at what you do.

Fame and skill do not correlate — unless the skill in question is being famous — and by “famous” here I mean famous in the field and not necessarily a widely recognized celebrity. In fact, I can think of reasons for there to be an inverse correlation, of the pick a surgeon who doesn’t look like a surgeon variety. (ᔥMatt Birchler)

A(G)I and slop

Tyler Cowen on ChatGPT’s o3 model being Artificial General Intelligence:

I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.

Jacob Silverman on internet slop:

The influx of hallucinating chatbots is just the latest sign of the wider internet’s descent into hostility. The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.

Cowen is interested in peak performance, and good for him. He showed the same trait in his conversation with Jonathan Haidt, where all he cared about was that the really smart young people can do wonders with social media, externalities be damned.

Meanwhile, the median Internet user is exposed to reams of crap made by humans and AIs alike (Silverman’s article goes into more detail on the burgeoning field of paranoid schizophrenics boosting their own X posts for no particular purpose and the paragraph describing it is the closest I have seen real life come to an M. John Harrison novel which, if you know his prose, is somewhat concerning… and this is not the first time Harrison came to mind).

Note that for all the stories of the Internet’s demise it is still fairly easy to find good things. Look at micro.blog. Look at indieblog.page. Heck, look at reddit. You may have a website or two you visit out of habit — one you likely acquired before 2016 — which have since become chumbox-laden garbage. Delete those bookmarks: people who thought having clickbait adds was a good idea will have other ideas just as good.

A few links for what will be a rainy weekend:

I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.

Andrew Gelman describes my life, basically.

Richard Feynman popularized the term “cargo-cult science” as actions of research who follow the form but not showing much if any care for the substance of science. Andrew Gelman has second thoughts about the metaphor and proposes “ritual science” instead, and for good reason: cargo-cult implies a technological gap that may be impossible to bridge, while he uses ritual here to mean mindless repetition.

The maneuver does throw rituals under the bus, as proper rituals are far from mindless. Still, this is indeed how the word “ritual” is used colloquially so Gelman is on the right track. “Mindless science” would also cover the phenomena though is too broad: science — or rather, scientists — can be mindless in other ways. (ᔥAndrew Gelman)

Happy Friday! A few links for the week’s end:

A brief Q&A:

When Tim Berners-Lee has something to say about the future of social media I listen, even if it ends up being a pitch for his next two projects. They are Solid, a standard of data sharing across platforms, and Inrupt, a “data wallet” built on top of Solid. Godspeed, and may he avoid xkcd #927.