Trismegistus

What I finished:

+ More than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI by John Warner, which I LOVED. When I say I recommend this book to everyone, I mean that I am following you around your house or place of employment with the book in my hand trying to push it into yours. That kind of recommendation.

This book just bursts with humanity, which is the highest compliment I can give a book. I love all the different things it's doing, weaving lots of strands together while still being fairly short, incredibly clear, and very readable.

The premise is, "People are saying that AI has killed the English class essay. How should we react to that?"

Warner's answer, "Good riddance to the English class essay!" (He has written an entire book about how terrible the 5-paragraph essay is that I can't wait to read.)

He starts with the question: "What is writing for?" To communicate, obviously, but that's not all. Writing is a way of thinking and feeling, and he talks about how important experience and context is to writing. He's very clear about how what AI does is not writing in the way that humans do and he's pretty forceful about how we need to stop anthropomorphizing a computer program that is incapable of anything like intention. He discusses what AI does and what it doesn't do, asking, "What are the problems it's trying to solve? Which of those problems is it capable of solving? Which can it definitely not solve?"

And he also asks, "Why do we teach writing to students? What do we want them to learn? And are our assignments actually teaching them that?" Warner, a long-time writing teacher and McSweeney's-adjacent dude, hates the way writing is taught and he's very persuasive in convincing you that we're going about it all wrong, teaching to the test, prizing an output over process, when the process is every bit as important as the output. He has lots of ideas about how to teach better that made me want to start teaching a writing class immediately (I should not do that, I would not be good at it, but he's so good at it that it energized me!) and I am convinced that if we followed his guidelines, the world would be a better place.

He also talks about the history of automated teachers and why they don't work and spends several chapters giving us ideas to approach AI with. He's like, "Look, if I try to speak to specific technologies, by the time this book is published, it'll all be obsolete and I'll look silly. So instead I'm going to give us a few lenses through which to look at AI that I think will be helpful as we make choices about how to implement it into society." He is a fierce opponent of the shoulder-shrugging inevitability approach; he wants us--and by us, he means all of us, not just tech bros--to have real and substantive discussions about how we are and aren't going to use this technology.

He's not an absolutist in any way; he thinks that LLM can be useful for some kinds of research and that other, more specific forms of AI could be really useful in contexts like coding and medicine. I agree! It's mostly LLMs that I'm skeptical of. He's very fair to the pro-AI side, steelmanning their arguments in ways that the hype mostly doesn't bother to do. (Most of the people hyping AI are selling it, after all.)

Throughout, he insists on embracing our humanity in all its messiness, and I love him for that. Basically this book is a shout of defiance and joy.

Here's some quotes I can't not share!

"Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things. No one was stunned by the interpretive insights of the ChatGPT-produced text because there were none. People were freaking out over B-level (or worse) student work because the bar we've been using to judge student writing is attached to the wrong values."




"The promise of generative AI is to turn text production into a commodity, something anyone can do by accessing the proper tool, with only minimal specialized knowledge of how to use those tools required.. Some believe that this makes generative AI a democratizing force, providing access to producing work of value to those who otherwise couldn't do it. But segregating people by those who are allowed and empowered to engage with a genuine process of writing from those who outsource it AI is hardly democratic. It mistakes product for process.

"It is frankly bizarre to me that many people find the outsourcing of their own humanity to AI attractive. It is asking to promising to automate our most intimate and meaningful experiences, like outsourcing the love you have for your family because going through the hassle of the times your loved ones try your spirit isn't worth the effort. But I wonder if I'm in the minority."



"What ChatGPT and other large language models are doing is not writing and shouldn't be considered such.

"Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we're trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.

"Writing is also feeling, a way for us to be invested and involved not only in our own lives but the lives of others and the world around us.

"Reading and writing are inextricable, and outsourcing our reading to AI is essentially a choice to give up on being human.

If ChaptGPT can produce an acceptable example of something, that thing is not worth doing by humans and quite probably isn't worth doing at all.

"Deep down, I believe that ChatGPT by itself cannot kill anything worth preserving. My concern is that out of convenience, or expedience, or through carelessness, we may allow these meaningful things to be lost or reduced to the province of a select few rather than being accessible to all."




"The economic style of reasoning crowds out other considerations--namely, moral ones. It privileges the speed and efficiency with which an output is produced over the process that led to that output. But for we humans, process matters. Our lives are experienced in a world of process, not outputs."

et cetera

As I said on GoodReads, this should be required reading for anyone living through the 21st century.


+ I've also started a Narnia reread for the first time since I was a kid. I have now read the first two and I had opposite experiences with them: I remembered almost everything from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and almost nothing from Prince Caspian. This is no doubt the result of a combination of a) having reread one way more than the other as a child and b) one being much more memorable than the other.

There were a few tiny details that I hadn't remembered from TLtWatW, like the fact that Jadis is half-giant, half-jinn or that it's textual that the Turkish Delight is magicked so that anyone who eats it craves more. But everything else was very clear in my mind: the big empty house, the lantern in the woods, Mr. Tumnus, the witch in her sleigh, the conflict over whether Lucy is telling the truth, the Beavers, Father Christmas, the statues, Aslan and the stone table, the mice and the ropes, waking the statues, etc. This book is so chock-full of vivid images and delightful details that truly it's no surprise that it's a classic. Jack, your imagination! Thank you for sharing it with us!

PC, on the other hand, is much less memorable, imo. Truly the only thing I remembered going in was the beginning where the kids go from the railway platform to Cair Paravel and slowly figure out where they are. That is still a very strong sequence! Oh, and Reepicheep! Reepicheep is always memorable! But there aren't nearly as many really good images in this one as in the first one.

That said, there were a few that came back to me as I read: Dr. Cornelius telling Caspian about Narnia up at the top of the tower, the werewolf (it's "I am death" speech is SUPER chilling), everybody dancing through Narnia making the bad people flee and having the good people join. And Birnam Wood the trees on the move! Tolkien must have loved that bit! I'd forgotten that Lewis did it too!

It seems really important to Lewis that there be frolicking and dancing and music as part of joy, and I love that. Both books include extended scenes where the girls and Aslan and various magical creatures are frolicking. There's also a very fun bit where Lewis describes in great detail the different kinds of dirt that the dryads eat which adds nothing to the story but is so weird and fun that you don't mind. He clearly had a blast writing that sequence.

But still, this book just isn't nearly as compelling as the first one, imo. It's fine! I don't dislike it! But it doesn't fill me with warm fuzzies the way the first book does.

Both of the books are told in a style that is very storyteller and not novelist. The narrative voice is absolutely that of an adult telling a child a bedtime story, which is charming and also absolutely the reason so many people have so many formative memories of being read these books aloud. They lend themselves to that so well!

But of course the down side is that there's very little real characterization. On the whole, this is fine, because that's not the point. But it does make me appreciate writers who can do both even more. There is character conflict (should we believe Lucy? Edmund's whole arc; etc.) but the characters are very loosely sketched. What do I know about Caspian except that he thinks Old Narnia is super cool? Not much! Frankly, the dwarves in book 2 are, besides Reepicheep, the strongest characters.

I actually think the Aslan dying for Edmund bit is not as heavy-handed as it could have been as an allegory. Like, yes, it's very much matches up the Passion story, but the idea of a character dying in another's stead is universal enough that I can see how those who weren't familiar with the New Testament just totally accepted it and didn't find it confusing.

I found the sequence in PC where Lucy is the only one to see Aslan much more heavy-handed in a "you must be willing to follow Jesus even if no one else will go with you" kind of way. There were a few lines that made me say, "Really, Jack? You could have dialed that down a notch." I do super like that Edmund was first to see him after Lucy though!

So yeah, I look forward to seeing how I feel about the coming books. I remember the most of Dawn Treader and am looking forward to Silver Chair more than the others. The only one I'm dreading is Last Battle, for obvious reasons.

What I'm currently reading:

+ Voyage of the Dawn Treader! The painting of the shiiiiiiiip.