sycamoretrees

Paris - the city itself - is actually surprisingly high density, almost as high as Manhattan if you do not include the two very large 'Bois' (woods) that are technically part of the city.

I think it’s fine to not be into poetry, but at its core the Divine Comedy is a long poem, and I’m not sure what’s left after you remove any and all “poetic” elements. The Wikipedia page I’m sure could give you the basic characteristics of the circles of hell, if that’s all you really want to know. By the way, the book is a chore in many ways, despite the many nuggets of gold you’ll find within it. It’s long, and the number of references is overwhelming. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that it will never be light reading, no matter how you cut it. Why not look at it as more of a personal project or challenge (poetry and all)?

why are we using image generators to represent actual history? If we want accuracy surely we can use actual documents that are not imagined by a bunch of code. If you want to write fanfic or whatever then just adjust the prompt

Haha, thanks for the insightful comic

Oh… my bad. Didn’t know that was a term. Sorry

American born Chinese dumplings.

Why do people go to see movies when they could just watch the trailer on YouTube?

If that’s what the article is about, then I just don’t really see the point. Literally who cares what SBF and his ilk have to think about literature.

If the article is simply an appeal to common sense, or an effort to convince others to educate themselves, maybe there are better ways to get the message across than regurgitating five hundred words on theAtlantic.com. They publish this stuff for their self-conscious “literati” audience to eat up.

I read quite a bit, actually. But I don’t go around making others feel bad for being supposedly intellectually inferior to me.

> is it the vocabulary? Because it’s a grammatically-simple sentence.

Yes, the vocabulary. Throwing a bunch of low-frequency words together doesn’t make a sentence more refined or its content more insightful. It’s just pomp, really.

As someone else mentioned, yes this is an ad hominem attack (although, maybe this is forgivable insofar as I’m calling out hypocrisy and claiming he’s in no place to put down other people - which I believe is the sole purpose of the article. If it’s just to say that reading is good, well, uh, duh. No need for a whole article about the benefits of education.)

Little more than an article for Atlantic readers to pat themselves on the back with. By the way, I get the sense the author isn’t as wise as he imagines himself, either. His catty obsession with Kanye West’s mental break and his seeming Twitter addiction makes me think he himself is certainly “wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility” (his words, not mine). (What an incomprehensible sentence - perhaps reading too much has turned him into a walking thesaurus?)

Quite simply, they’re saying that all those things can be done on a laptop if necessary. Duh.

I see. Thanks for the reply. But I wonder if that’s not a bit too optimistic and not concrete enough. Alignment won’t solve the world’s woes, just like “enlightenment” (a word which sounds a lot like alignment and which is similarly undefinable) does not magically rectify the realities of the world. Why should bad actors care about alignment?

Another example is climate change. We have a lot of good ideas which, combined, would stop us from killing millions of people across the world. We have the research - is more “research” really the key?

Is more research really going to offer any true solutions? I’d be genuinely interested in hearing about what research could potentially offer (the development of tools to counter AI disinformation? A deeper understanding of how LLMs work?), but it seems to me that the only “real” solution is ultimately political. The issue is that it would require elements of authoritarianism and censorship.

Good comment.

Not to be nit picky, but I think you might be wrong about the psychologist part. A core principle, perhaps the most important principle of all, in talk therapy is that of transfer between the patient and the therapist. I don’t think it’s possible to achieve that with a machine, to achieve any real transfer without vulnerability.

A lot of talk therapy today is of questionable quality, in that the therapist or analyst is simply soothing the patient without actually confronting real problems. Machine-based therapy would only exacerbate the problem.

For things like CBT, I’m sure a machine could be helpful. But then again, CBT self-help books already exist.

Art, or creativity, is the part of the movie that is not toil.

Art being made purely for the enjoyment of all is purely commercial, and so it is in some ways equivalent to toil: it is something whose sole purpose is to be consumed.

Yes, being “tricked”, in your words, by human creativity is precisely the appeal. If art were simply an equation, it wouldn’t have any meaning to it - it would simply be fact.

I’m sorry, but I think we’re talking about two diametrically opposite conceptions of art here.