John Holbo

Henry’s post on the correct way to argue with Hanania was good. In light of late revelations (probably you’ve heard), revisitation, for extra emphasis, may not be taken amiss. (Or skip it, if it looks like a dead horse.) [click to continue…]

Alright, I used to perpetrate some literary criticism around this place. [Slaps wall.] Seems like I could still. This is going to be very flimsy because I’m just banging it out, because I might want some of it later, more worked out.

Over at the dying bird, Jeet Heer asks a good question: “Has anyone written about the genre of the “hippy noir”? Altman’s Long Goodbye, Big Lebowski, Inherent Vice, The Nice Guys. Are there others? An interesting little niche.”

He got good responses. Me: Philip K. Dick, Scanner Darkly, not just because it fits the bill but because of Dick himself, writing those weird letters to the FBI. He was a sad, harassed hippy noir detective. He lived the nightmare. That’s gotta count. Once you’ve got Dick, you add in others like Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music.

I’ve got further thoughts about the likes of Lethem but, first, flip it. Just as hippy noir is often good, the reason G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories are invariably bad is that they are ‘hippy puncher noir’, so to speak. [click to continue…]

It’s Sunday. It’s quiet. I’ll just clear the decks of my philosophy faux-infographics jokes. It’s not just trolleys. Some months back I considered it seriously:

“Nietzsche’s key design insight: complex, esoteric ideas, appreciable only by the few — perhaps only by the One! — can be conveyed via simple, conventionalised iconography, suitable for delivering simple, readily understandable ideas to the many.

Naturally, as this insight made no sense, no one had any notion what Nietzsche was on about …”

But that’s no reason why it didn’t happen! [click to continue…]

More AI madness! Couple of months ago there was a weird Daily Beast piece. It’s bad, but in a goofy way, causing me to say at the time ‘not today, Hal!’

But now I’m collecting op-ed-ish short writings about AI for use as models of good and bad and just plain weird writing and thinking, to teach undergrads how hard it is to write and think, so they can do better. And this one stands out as distinctively bad-weird. First the headline is goofy: “ChatGPT May Be Able to Convince You Killing a Person Is OK.” Think about that. But it’s unfair to blame the author, maybe. But read the rest. Go ahead. I’ll wait. What do you think? It’s funny that the author just assumes you should NEVER let yourself be influenced by output from Chat-GPT. Like: if Chat-GPT told you to not jump off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge? There is this failure to allow as we can, like, check claims as to whether they make sense? A bit mysterious how we do this yet we do. And ethics is a super common area in which to do this thing: so it only makes sense that you could get Chat-GPT to generate ethical claims and then people could read them and, if they make sense, you can believe them due to that. Never mind that the thing generating the prospective sensible claims is just a statistics-based mindless shoggoth.

If a shoggoth is talking trolley sense about OK killing, believe it!

Anyway, I thought it was funny. [click to continue…]

Let me try to focus my thoughts from the previous post.

Do is as do does.

Agent-like entities are equivalent to real agents. If GPT-4 can trick people into thinking it’s a trickster, it’s a trickster. If you can mimic a chess master, you’re a chess master. It’s fun to wonder whether there will be anything it’s ‘like’ to be superintelligent AI, ending us, if it does, but that’s by the by.

Is this right? [click to continue…]

To celebrate my new-found determination to do the right thing and blog I’m going to blog.

Specifically, I’m going to blog about something I’m dumb about and don’t understand – because that should be possible, among friends. We’re all friends here on the internet? That’s kind of the point.

This semester I am going to talk to students about all this new-fangled AI – LLM’s. And I don’t understand it. It’s somewhat consoling that everyone who understands it doesn’t understand it either. That is, they may know HOW to work it (which I sure don’t) but they don’t understand WHY what works works. They don’t really grok HOW what works works, or why what works works as well as it does – oddly well and badly by obscure turns. That’s kind of creepy and scifi. [click to continue…]

What’s wrong with the world wide web today?

I am. (To adapt a Chesterton line of uncertain authenticity.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great! – it’s hopeful! – we are gathered here today to celebrate 20 years of Crooked Timber; meanwhile Twitter seems to be splintering. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, we agree.

Microblogging killed blogging. Sadly, there’s no way to put blogging back together by lashing together several microblogging platforms.

To repeat, it’s my fault, not Elon’s. Nobody forced me to stop blogging and start tweeting. It was the wrong choice, overall, morally, intellectually, culturally, politically. It wasn’t even a choice, of course. A drift.

If folks were less liable to make poor choices at the margins, Silicon Valley social media Masters of the Universe wouldn’t stand a chance.

So I stand before you today resolved to do better – be better. Get back in shape. Back to the land. Back to blogging.

I’m hoping none of the new Twitter clones achieves dominance. We’ll lose efficiency – but win back autonomy, alleviation of temptation, retardation of enshittification. One may hope.

Let’s recall what was great and good about blogging in its heyday. Let’s revisit a few good ones. (And, of course, no need to exaggerate OG quality of the medium. I could start a Substack.) [click to continue…]

Russell Jacoby has a piece out in “Tablet” that got approvingly retweeted by Richard Dawkins, then by Elon Musk. So maybe it’s worth giving it a read. (This post lightly edits my tweet response.)

I’m sympathetic to Jacoby’s old line: a lot of ‘theory’ silliness got spread about in the humanities in the 80’s-90’s. There were perverse incentives – professional rewards – for doing ‘philosophy’ badly in various ways. This was not good. I’m happy to badmouth bad stuff. But honestly, as Jacoby himself used to acknowledge, it wasn’t threat-to-the-republic-grade. Anyone who pretends ‘ivory tower-types being eccentric’ = ‘barbarians at the gates of western civ’ is one more funny, bug-in-his-ear character in some David Lodge novel. [click to continue…]

The following is a lightly blog-ized version of a Twitter thread. I fear Twitter is going downhill so I really should transition back to blogging. Back to the land!

Start with a Chris Hayes tweet: “he’s a right-wing billionaire who was motivated to buy twitter because he thought it was antagonistic to right-wingers and wants, instead, to make it friendly to them. that’s it. that’s the whole story.”

And I respond. [click to continue…]

At night I just can’t deal with words no more, man, so I draw pictures. I like to have some graphics project I can chip away at – like gardening. For the past year-or-so it’s been: trying to cartoon 100 philosophers in a symmetry-ish, geometry-ish style. I think I’m up to 64 or so. Plus I did Lovecraft, Kafka, Poe. For variety. (Or you can declare them honorary philosophers.)

I’ve shown his stuff off, a bit, here at CT, but I’ll see fit to share more now. You can buy ’em on mugs and stuff, if so inclined. ‘Tis the season!

Speaking of which, I’ve posted good old “Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness”, in readable form, so you can give yourselves a shiver around the fire with that.

As to the philosophers, I like to draw ’em nice – kinda elegant, I hope – then make ’em silly in faux-retro or disco style. Also, repeating wallpaper-style patterns. I like that. So! A small sampler, for your amusement and edification. [click to continue…]

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, philosophy and science fiction. Also, it’s after Thanksgiving, so I can bring up Christmas.

Two weeks ago I attended a talk by Ted Chiang on “Time Travel in Fiction and Physics”. I teach ‘philosophy and science fiction’ and have my kids read more than a few Chiang stories. I was gratified two of my teaching ‘takes’ turned out to scoop Chiang’s lecture neatly. (I’m only slightly aggrieved he is plagiarizing me as to the meaning of his stories. I’ll let that slide.)

So here’s how I am so clever in my teaching. [click to continue…]

Welcome, new Crooked Timber members, and thanks to my colleagues who worked hard to round folks up to join us.

I will take this opportunity to mildly self-promote my ongoing series of philosopher portraits. I just added Isaiah Berlin, and was thinking about how to round him out, in my off-color 70’s ice cream parlor style. Some ‘Crooked timber’ joke? Nah, too ready-to-hand! Not punk rock. Hence:

I’m serious. It’s interesting that both Berlin and Shklar were from Riga. (And maybe there is some Crooked Timber wisdom to be derived from the fact that Berlin’s dad was one of the largest, most prosperous timber merchants in Riga. Who is to say?) [click to continue…]

You have probably heard some Dems boosted crazy MAGA Trumpists via ad buys in various Rep primaries, obviously angling for victory in November over more extremist, presumptively easier-to-beat opponents. Some of the crazies won!

Here’s a recent WaPo article about it. Quite a bit has been written elsewhere; you can google if curious. Details are colorful. (After the article appeared, Bolduc won!) These R’s who got the boost are all certifiable, whether they are electable or no. And it wasn’t just Dem candidates freelancing this on their own. The DCCC got involved among other leaders. So it wasn’t just some coordination problem where individual candidates acted in selfish, short-sighted ways against the party’s interest, never mind the country’s.

This has outraged people, D’s included. R’s (usually of an anti-anti-Trump bent) have cited it as evidence D’s don’t really believe that MAGA is a threat to democracy. Surely they would not be so cavalier as to play with fire if they thought it would burn the house down!

Maybe I’m getting flaming radical in my old age but, honestly, I just don’t see what the fuss is about. Actually, I thought I did at first. I said that I disapproved. Then I thought again and I just couldn’t see it. You tell me. [click to continue…]

I did a part 1 so I owe a part 2. (I’d like to do a series but I don’t think it will all go with this particular title.)

Right. In part 1, I considered whether D’s really believe that the R party is, as Biden suggested in his speech, a standing threat to democracy, due to Trump and MAGA. Douthat (and others) have suggested that D behavior suggests this is a bit of a put-on. D’s don’t seem to be taking the threat seriously. My counter-argument is that if you think there is, like, a 20% threat to democracy from the R’s, that’s hard to deal with coherently. Partly you want to set your hair on fire and run around screaming ‘danger!’, partly you want to just keep calm and carry on. But those responses are cognitively dissonant, which makes you look insincere – probably about the hair-on-fire part. But that’s actually not right. The dissonance fits the uncertain facts.

So let’s turn to the R’s. Do the R’s really believe that Trump and Trumpism is NOT a threat to democracy AND/OR that D’s are actually the real threat to democracy due to ‘Russia Russia Russia hoax’ perpetrating, election-stealing Dark Brandon and his illegal, student-debt-cancelling ways, plus his nefarious son Hunter? [click to continue…]