johngossman

The reviewer, Philip Terry, is himself a very good, very clever poet. His "Dictator" is an absolutely brilliant translation into Globish, a simplified English designed for commerce. He reasons that cuneiform had a similar role in cross-language understanding. Terry refuses to use words outside Globish's 1500-word vocabulary, resulting in Gilgamesh being translated "Dictator", but also imposes a bizarre prose form, leaves out holes in the original tablets, and "translates" some idioms literally...all with great humor. The result looks like this:

Then day | light break | …… [And] WILD | MAN make | of he | mouth a | shape… he say | to DIC | TATOR ‘Listen | to the | dream I | dream in | the night The sky | god | + + + the | war god | the god | of know | ledge and | the sun | god all | meet to | gether | in the | great court | of the | sky… And the | sky god | AN + + + | say to | the war | god… “Because | they kill | the MAN | COW of | the sky | + + + and | because | they kill | TREEGUARD the one* | who cut | down the | hard wood | tree on | the moun | tain side | must die”

It shouldn't be your first read of Gilgamesh, but its a fun, insightful second.

I see Joyce was already recommended. How about Borges then?

How far are you willing to go? If you want a novel that really emphasizes language over plot and character, read Ulysses.

Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented by AI. But look up cognitive offloading. It doesn't take centuries of research to show evidence for that, and in fact the benefits of writing for thinking have been known long before AI writing became available (the alternative being just talking or thinking without writing).

Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantages of AI writing for the impaired and non-native speakers, we make allowances all the time for this today: handicapped parking, special sporting events, and allowing dyslexics more time on written exams for example. The existence of these does not justify parking in a handicapped spot when you don't need it.

From the title, I expected a different argument, that it's going to be increasingly difficult to determine. Many people have demonstrated that careful prompting can already produce prose that passes as human, and this will only increase as models get better and inevitably are trained to bypass checkers. Maybe someday we'll have novel-writing rooms where, like grandmasters coming into a tournament, the writers must relinquish all their digital tools at the door. Because it's difficult to imagine any other system that will guarantee human authenticity.

Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.

I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the purpose of programming is to have a bunch of unit tests.

Ironic that you should question if the commenter talks to regular people and then cite people who work on laptops from the coffee shop, use Slack etc.

They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers

According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.

<quote> One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications. </quote>

Fwiw, in 1900 my grandfather taught school in Washington State. He was 16 years old.

I don't know how good he was, just saying it wasn't so long ago.

Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.