Weekend Reading / Listening 05.12.2023
I’ve got a few drafts in the works that may or may not complete their journey out of my head. In the meantime, I thought I would share some things I’ve enjoyed in recent days…
Maintenance, at its best, disappears. Maintenance is visible only when it fails: no gas, no milk, no clean underwear. A rupture in the flow. Maintenance doesn’t earn praise or appreciation; it tends only to invite criticism… But maintenance is also a function of the Life Instinct, she wrote: unification, endurance of systems and civilizations, equilibrium. Maintenance was unsung but essential | Mierle Laderman Ukeles, care work, time impoverishment & Sustaining Your Life as an Artist
I slept under the overpass that night, and in the morning, I wrote a review: “Reasonably good bridge. A little loud for sleeping.” I gave it four stars. | The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Reading Google Reviews
Just because you’ve written a book about something, doesn’t mean you’re done thinking about it,” she said. “My job is not to arrive at a final answer, and just deliver it. I see my job as holding doors open, or opening windows. But who comes in and out the doors, what you see out the window, how do I know? | Ursula K. LeGuin’s Revolutions
Life is long and improbable, with plenty of time in it for both glory and squalor, and there is no “ending up,” except for dead. So my joy for Madeline is both wholehearted and provisional; my worry for Judith is the same. | Protégé
We throw around the term the banality of evil often, but this is an actual example. For the most part, these are normal, boring, everyday people, not possessed of extraordinary demonic or sadistic tendencies, but yet they are engaged in evil. What the public reaction to this killing reflects is a loss of the actual meaning of words and actions. So very few people seem to have even a basic understanding of right and wrong. | With Malice Aforethought
When the physicists are saying, ‘We’re spending our careers looking for what’s beyond spacetime; spacetime is doomed,’ it’s really time for the cognitive neuroscientists who are studying consciousness to catch up with what the physicists have already said. | Professor Donald Hoffman — The Case Against Reality, Beyond Spacetime, Rethinking Death, Panpsychism, QBism, and More (Tim Ferris Podcast #585)
No one today can supply a simple reason for the invasion of Iraq that stands up to the slightest moral or factual scrutiny. Every attempt to provide a rationale for the war is patent sophistry or self-justification. This groundlessness, this inability to situate the war in anything tangible or concrete, is simply because it was based on a lie. More than a single lie, it was based on thoroughgoing hostility towards reality itself. | How Start
When interacting with these systems, it doesn’t take long to stumble into a conversation that gives you goosebumps. Maybe you’re caught off guard by a moment of uncanny humanity, or left awestruck by the sophistication of a response. Now that we understand how these feats are actually performed, however, we can temper these perceptions. A system like ChatGPT doesn’t create, it imitates. | What Kind of Mind Does ChatGPT Have?