It was while watching the third loop of a video of Jack Callaghan, a 28-year-old man from Newcastle, running a steamer back and forth over his bedsheets that I realised I agreed with one of the commenters: yes, this also brought me “peace and joy”.

So begins a (paywalled, sorry) FT article on people earning a good bit of money from posting housekeeping tips to social media: #cleantok, #cleanfluencers, apparently. It reminded me of Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts, my favorite book to pick up and read at random, and for the same reason all these people are watching a guy clean out a microwave with half a lemon and some water: peace and joy.

The article goes on to describe some spring clean routines for homes of various sizes, including — it is the Financial Times, after all — some they euphemistically call big and stately. This spring we will be moving house, not cleaning it, but I’ll keep browsing through Home Comforts for peace, joy, and some semblance of a plan for spring cleanings to come.

Nothing beats repetition for reinforcing concepts. This week’s episode of EconTalk began with Megan McArdle describing the Oedipus trap, but ended with a discussion on science and policy that echoed concerns raised in Against Method.

Science is a good servant but a vicious master, and “just following the science” is a recipe for all sorts of disasters.

Finished reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚

A well-made case for why capital-s-Science is not the answer to all of the world’s many ills, and why it should be separated more from politics and policy, and less so from church. Pair it with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

On the off chance anyone reading this also knows the language formerly known as Serbo-Croat, now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin… or simply naš (“our”) language: the few writings I have, going back to 2010, are now on micro.blog.

Consolidation FTW!

Currently reading: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend 📚, and I will post about it soon as it is at least a thought-provoking if not a great book, but I came across this biography of Imre Lakatos who was Feyerabends frenemy and to whom he dedicated the very book I’m reading, and I have to say it is one of the most entertaining encyclopedia entries ⊕ Being a nerd kid in the 1990s without broadband internet, that is a lot of encyclopedia entries! I have laid my eyes on.

About their collaboration in particular:

It is quite clear that Lakatos and Feyerabend were engaged in a self-conscious campaign of mutual boosterism, leading up to a planned epic encounter between a fallibilistic rationalism, as represented by Lakatos, and epistemological anarchism, as represented by Feyerabend. As Feyerabend put it “I was to attack the rationalist position, Imre was to restate and defend it, making mincemeat of me in the process”

Fun!

“How to Achieve Digital Mindfulness”, you ask?

Step 1: install an add blocker.

Stephen Wolfram is at it again, posting a massive (15,000 words, 5 figures) article about ChatGPT. This is too daunting for me to read on a weekday, but Bing(!) had this helpful summary in its Insights pane:

The document discusses the implications of ChatGPT, an AI system that can write human-like essays based on textual prompts. The author argues that ChatGPT is a result of exploring the computational universe and finding systems that align with human-relevant examples. The author also claims that there will always be more computations to do that cannot be reduced by automation, and that humans will still have a role in defining meaningful goals for AI.

This was nice, but I wanted something more in-depth, so I asked the ghost in the Compose pane to write me a summary of the page. Quoth the robot:

The page https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/ is a blog post by Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist and physicist who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. In this post, he explores the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) will take over all human jobs and end human history or not. He argues that it is not a simple yes or no answer, but rather a complicated one that depends on many factors, such as what we mean by AI, what we mean by jobs, what we mean by human history, and what we value as humans. He also discusses some of the implications and challenges of AI for society, ethics, economics, politics, and culture. He concludes that AI will not end human history, but rather create new opportunities and possibilities for humans to explore and create.

A good effort, but feels too short for such a massive amount of text. How about 1,000 words?

The page https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-all-our-jobs-and-end-human-history-or-not-well-its-complicated/ is a blog post by Stephen Wolfram, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. In this post, he explores the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) will take over all human jobs and end human history, or not. He argues that it is a complicated question that depends on many factors, such as what we mean by AI, what we mean by intelligence, what we mean by jobs, what we mean by history, and what we value as humans. He also discusses some of the implications and challenges of AI for society, ethics, law, education, creativity, and culture.

He uses several examples to illustrate his points, such as GPT-3, a powerful natural language processing system that can generate text based on textual prompts. He explains that GPT-3 is not really intelligent in the sense of understanding or reasoning about the world; it is just following the patterns defined by human-written text from billions of webpages and millions of books. He also compares AI to other technologies that have changed human history, such as writing, printing, electricity, computers, and the internet. He suggests that AI is not fundamentally different from these technologies; it is just another way of automating certain tasks that humans used to do.

He concludes that AI will not take all our jobs or end human history; rather it will create new opportunities and challenges for us. He says that we should not be afraid of AI; instead we should embrace it and use it to enhance our capabilities and enrich our lives. He also says that we should be aware of the potential risks and pitfalls of AI; such as bias, misuse, regulation, accountability, education, creativity, and culture. He calls for a constructive dialogue between humans and AIs to ensure a harmonious coexistence.

Is this correct or is Bing(!)/Sydney/ChatGPT/whatever it is just painting a rosy picture, inserting its hopes and dreams for mutual coexistence whereas Wolfram is actually calling for an all-out ban on AI research?

I guess I’ll find out Saturday!

Did you know that the T in DST stands for Torture? Just ask people with school-age children. It also doesn’t save anything, it shifts hours around, so the S is for Shifting. Only, to be more precise, you should really swap the f with another t.

That’s more like it.

Swatch Internet Time may have been a gimmick, but having a universal time with shifting opening hours (why not wake up at “midnight” and have school and work start at “2am”) would be preferable to… this. That is what, in effect, the strange beasts who like DST are doing, their jobs allowing them to sleep in and start their days whenever the sun actually comes up. No such luck form farmers, bakers, doctors, and most other professions that have to deal with the physical reality.

Science can do many things, but until we all move to an indoor habitat and bask in artificial sunshine it cannot increase the number of daylight hours. Pretending that it can — and codifying it into law — is a triumph of stupidity.