Love, compassion, attention, David Lynch, and the finest of modern Finnish cinema

i. 

 

Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.

Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: I do?

Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.

Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: I was just describing it.

Sister Sarah Joan: Well it comes across as love.

Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: Sure, I guess I pay attention.

Sister Sarah Joan: Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?

 

 ii. David Lynch is not someone whose work I've really appreciated, in that I have watched most of most of everything he's done and it leaves me, universally, pretty cold. But he's very clearly an artist making art. The thing that keeps him near the front of the mind is the very sincere humanity that comes through in all the work he does: it's dark and macabre, it focuses so much on what is evil and bad, and somehow in the end there's hope, humanity, and good people who never stop being good in the midst of all of it. A person can be morally compromised and come through it, and be a good person again.

One thing that strikes me is the presence of a lot of odd-looking people amidst all the beautiful people, but that might be just the same: you have to get beyond your initial reaction and actually look at them. Log Lady is a joke, except she is very much not, and great benefits accrue to the people who treat her like a human being, but you must first treat her like a human being without expecting anything in return. Well.

iii. Aki Kaurismäki's The Other Side of Hope is a great movie even amongst his many great movies because of the very simple premise operating in the background: why not just do the right thing when given the opportunity? We can make the question of what to do very complicated, if we want to, but it's actually quite simple to do the right thing when it comes down to it.

Studying cheapness when cheapness is no longer a strict requirement

Phoebe worth reading as always. Two or three considerations:

1. "So of course this plus a lack of sleep (what they say about little kids and sleep is true) means that rather than solving major world problems or whatever in my downtime, I have been researching wool coats." 

Kids plus early starts to the day (I worked for a European country for a bit because I could take 7:00 am meetings; I'd already been up for an hour, why not?) produces ends of the day that require cognitively undemanding tasks. This has remained true even as my kids have aged up--we went through a multi-year period where I had to change around the bedtime routine every six months, and bedtimes got later. Even on those nights where we watch something like an arthouse movie, that's about the absolute limit of what my brain can do.

2. There's something broken in clothing these days. I think Menswear Guy gets to this point with some regularity: there was a consensus on how things worked for a large part of the 20th century, but it ended in the 80s and was replaced by nothing. I remember distinctly feeling around 2015 that I could no longer shop where I did before, but had no clue what I could replace it with. I still don't. 

3. But what I did realize from Menswear Guy and scrolling through a bunch of different stores is that I'm really not a suit-wearer, despite cosplaying as one in my academic years. (This is downstream of not liking the skinny trend which never really washed out after the 00s.) So there are varieties of casualwear that I cycle through, that I like, find comfortable, and (because middle aged white man) still convey that I am to be taken seriously. My winter outfit this year (good down to 20°, as low as it gets here) is Homefield t-shirt, LL Bean flannel, Aran Sweater Market Guernsey, lined work coat, Levis, and Oboz hiking boots--and makes me look more like the adult I am than wool slacks, a dress shirt and thin solid color merino sweater ever did.

Forgetting

The older I get, the more it seems the real essence of the human mind is forgetting, not learning or retaining: the sense-data that is immediately discarded, the dulling and forgetting of emotions, the omissions in memory, the substitution of a fabricated version of the past--the fabrication itself unconscious, random inspiration and so many Hobbesean roman pennies.

Slow reading: an attempt

Without ever quite intending it, I have spent 30 or so years reading literary fiction and general writing for adults as quickly as possible. For a while there I did it intentionally: Mike Munger promised at our grad school orientation that we would eventually give a book an hour or two (at most) of our time and come away understanding it in total, and lo that was true for my academic career. It remains true in private industry, where an hour for a business book is likely more time than it deserves.

More than once someone has noticed the pace that I read (about one page a minute for your Prousts and Tolstoys, faster for things that don't deserve that amount of attention) and asked if I am speed reading. The reply is always: no, I am actually reading: but 1. I have read a lot in my life and I am very good at it, this is not the same skill as the one I learned in kindergarten and 2. I know when I can skip repetitive detail, especially in nonfiction.

But while academic and professional reading have their own weird place, the same general principles have also been true in my private 'fun' reading: get through everything as quickly as possible; concentrated reading is the best way to read, the better to take on the whole meaning at once; the list of things to read is still long and vita brevis longa ars, gotta get to it.

It's only recently that I have rebelled against this, in pieces, and over a long time: the dream of reading an author's entire oeuvre comes up against the fact that everyone has juvenilia and stinkers (thus raising the question: "what is gained by reading everything that is not similarly gained by reading 80% of everything?"); changing tastes and interests (once someone pointed out the multi-timeline historical novel is pretty easy to organize in Scrivener, it lost a lot of its appeal, and one can see them everywhere); just missing out on the right time for some things (alas, Don Quixote, I would've loved you at 17, but I pledged myself to Dostovesky instead); a willingness to accept that I simply won't live long enough to read everything no matter how long I live; and a decaying sense of what the "everything" I want to read might even consist in.

(Leaving aside also the variety of what gets published: I spent 2021 heavily invested in modern poetry and dozens of collections and chapbooks later I have no better sense of how that market functions than when I started)

So now we're just trying something different: a few things read slowly in discrete pieces every day.

Some initial thoughts on LLMs

 Dan Davies on ChatGPT and AI as a conversational partner:

In many ways, even “autocomplete” or “the motorised prayer wheel” seem to be giving the artificial intelligence too much credit. The way that people seem to be using it is more like the technology that used to be called “talking to a pillow”. We’ve created a cybernetic teddy bear; something that helps to sustain an illusion of conversation that people can use in order to facilitate the well-known psychological fact that putting your thoughts into words and trying to explain them to someone else is a good way to think and have ideas. (That this would be a big use case ought to have been obvious to anyone who knew the history of ELIZA).

I genuinely don’t know how revolutionary this might be, even if this is all there is to it. A machine that doesn’t get bored listening to you could be an incredible boost to a lot of people. It’s actually quite hopeful in my view; although it is nowhere near as science fictional and glam as “AGI”, this could be a very relevant use case.

We know that the human need for attention is almost insatiable. A lot of social problems have at their root the fact that some children learn that although negative attention isn’t as nice as positive attention, it’s still attention and it’s a lot easier to get. A low-quality substitute for human attention that’s much easier to produce could do a lot of good, although I feel like it might need to be carefully regulated in the way that most other low-quality mass-market products that mess around with your brain chemistry are.

 

Any LLM is just a probabilistic solution to "which word is most likely to follow the last one?" And not surprising on that basis that it proliferates on LinkedIn and in work emails, since both are places where there is a lot of standardized boilerplate that needs to be there but should be written to attract minimal attention. But I can write my own boilerplate, I don't need software for that. 

For a lot of other uses, it requires the ability to tell what is specifically correct, but more importantly, it requires the ability to know that a detail is wrong and why it is wrong. In corporate contexts, this is a concern about "governance"--a chatbot that offers products below cost or misrepresents a policy. That is, where there's a right and a wrong answer, probability doesn't work--we need the correct answer every time.

Nor does it work when there's a real asymmetry of knowledge and experience, when you are presenting to the person with the knowledge. It's hard to know what's wrong, if anything, but your audience will absolutely know. There was a thing on Bluesky the other week where Christopher Nolan announced he was making a version of The Odyssey and a bunch of people were amazed that he had found something so obscure. My audience, should it still exist, is disproportionately made up of people who know what The Odyssey is and understand the implication of not knowing what it is. That's the risk of going up against expertise when you don't have it yourself.

Ah, but a conversation with yourself on a matter that's mostly one of opinion? That's an instance where an LLM could work--but it's working as any other kind of parallel thinking, brainstorming, or free association--the purpose is to dislodge yourself from your current track of thinking and consider it from another perspective, and there are a lot of ways to do that.

Digital and Analog

One of my long-term beliefs is that everything digital is impermanent, and everything analog capable of being permanent. 

I recently cleaned out some old stuff I'd be keeping for no particular reason; the third grade lit magazines and kindergarten reading assignments were intact and in basically the same condition as when they were first put into storage. The pencil writing hadn't even faded yet.

I have few to no digital files of older age than my dissertation because of storage, program and backward compatibility issues: the floppy disks with my junior high and high school writing are long gone, as are AIM transcripts, college papers (the printouts are fine), and many ages of digital pictures. Blogger only seems to still exist because Google has forgotten about it.

Having spent a bit of time on the programming side of things, it's not difficult to understand why this is: the move to continuous deployment and microservices is better for engineers (less testing and less worry about one change breaking everything) and sales (charge monthly or annually for the theoretical possibility of new and improved features), but it can make for a mess of code with lots of dependencies and somewhat capricious decisions about when it's no longer worth supporting something. It can be an environment where conserving (backward-compatibilizing) becomes a tremendous strain or resources and planning; better not to mess with it.

A Brief Contribution to the Burrito Taxi Discourse

From my perspective as a man who does all of the cooking in his house:

1. Meal planning and prep is the single thing I think about most, and that's been true for ~10 years. Everybody has to eat every day, there are no exceptions. On any given day, there are many things I think about more, but work, hobbies and friends ebb and flow over time. Eating does not.

2. As a result of vertically integrating planning, buying, and making, I have picked up certain efficiencies that cannot be replicated by people who don't have that experience: I know what can be bought of good quality and inexpensively and where to make shopping trips quick and efficient, I know how long it will take to actually make something regardless of what the recipe says, I know without looking how much time produce and leftovers have left.

(For this reason the kids love my shopping lists--if it's on the list it will get bought--and dislike going shopping with me, because we only buy what's on the list, and there's very little wandering around the store, just the most efficient path from shelf-stable to fresh to frozen)

 3. The single best thing that ever happened to me in this area was cooking through Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty when I was newly married. At some point I realized that all the recipes were "the same" with allowances for aromatics, vegetables, meats, and knife cuts. That's been the key to efficiency and enjoyment--seeing the pattern behind each recipe--and I suspect that's the difference between people who think cooking is easy and people who don't.

That is to say that I can:

• look at a list of ingredients and know what a recipe will taste like (without actually reading the recipe)
• eyeball measurements from uncut ingredients, judge proportions when adjusting on the fly (e.g. is the ratio of onion to garlic stable?), and tell just from looking what will affect the final flavor and what won't
• look at a list of ingredients and know whether I have everything I need and how complex it would be to get what might be missing
• understand the logical flow of almost all recipes and be able to note when it asks you to do something unusual

and so I can cook on the fly with only what's in my house and be reasonably sure it will taste good without a recipe. But it took ~5 years to get there.

4. My enthusiasm for cooking has taken two big hits over the years: one when my kids started eating solid food, and one in 2020. The thing about kids is that there's pretty much always some working at the margin since they rarely eat only what the adults eat, change their tastes and interests rapidly, and usually require some modifications even if they're eating the same thing as the adults. So instead of making one thing you can, if you're not careful, find yourself making two or three (or more). You can fight this or accept it, and for a variety of reasons I prefer to accept it.

2020 was, among many other things, a reminder that you have to eat every day, no really you have to. When everyone's together all the time it's hard to get mental space and time alone and it really becomes clear how much of cooking is something that you have to do. Not great for creativity or inspiration, and then you might begin to notice how much time this all can take up.

5. So, burrito taxis: it's true that on a cost basis (even with labor factored in) cooking at home is cheaper, usually by a lot; it's true that cooking is a skill that it is possible to learn and excel at, or at least be decent at; it's true for someone like me who likes cooking that pulling off something new or something beloved is a very good feeling indeed. All that's in the "cooking is good" column.

But it's also true that building all of those advantages takes time, and if you want to enjoy cooking enough to tolerate it, it's a skill best begun not under duress, and resolving today to do something that will pay dividends in five years is not for everyone. 

6. Even if you do cook, there might still be limits: my baking phase began in 2021, and I remember making hamburger buns for the 4th of July that year. I was pleased with how they turned out, but I also remember thinking "I could've just bought these at the store, they're not that expensive". I don't deep-fry, the learning curve is a bit too steep for how often I'd want to do it. I can't reliably source Thai ingredients, and there are three very good Thai restaurants near me.

7. There are other emotional and mental needs one might want to maximize besides "pays very little for dinner" or "can make anything one wants". Rough day at work, family member sick, kids on a very long break from school, etc etc.

8. The thing about dinner is that it's at the end of the day. Sometimes you're just tired.