३० डिसेंबर, २०२२

"AI utopians believe humanity will find more of life’s meaning elsewhere, because while the machines are busy doing the drudgery..."

"... of daily living, they’ll be set free to explore. Maybe they’ll discover poetry they never had time to read, or go on more hikes. Maybe they’ll be able to spend their days in profound discussion with cherished friends, rather than in front of screens — or maybe they’ll spend all day in front of screens after all, having conversations with robots."

Writes the Washington Post Editorial Board in "We asked an AI bot hundreds of questions. Here’s what we learned."

I've already read enough machine-written text to want to avoid it whenever I can, but unfortunately, much human-written text resembles the work product of ChatGPT... including what I just quoted above. There's a positive side to that, though. Sensitized to the the loathsomeness of machine-written text, I can defend more vigorously against the mechanical writings of the human being.

IN THE COMMENTS: Stephen wrote: "A machine would never have written that phrase…or is that what a machine would like me to believe?"

It's like the — or should I say "the the"? — way Rand McNally would add a nonexistent town to each map or the ancient Persians would weave a mistake into each carpet. 

६७ टिप्पण्या:

R C Belaire म्हणाले...

This all fits perfectly with our holographic universe. Flesh and blood existence will be so passé by the year 2100.

madAsHell म्हणाले...

Didn't Zuckerberg just blew a few billion on this fallacy??

madAsHell म्हणाले...

It's so very meta!!

Stephen म्हणाले...

“Sensitized to the the loathsomeness of machine-written text”

A machine would never have written that phrase…or is that what a machine would like me to believe?

J Scott म्हणाले...

I wonder how plagarism is gonna work. Chatgpt and other tools like it produce the most banal insomnia producing text. Sort like my school work product. Written to appeal to the overworked underpaid teachers who just want to push us on to the next thing.

J Scott म्हणाले...

I wonder how plagarism is gonna work. Chatgpt and other tools like it produce the most banal insomnia producing text. Sort like my school work product. Written to appeal to the overworked underpaid teachers who just want to push us on to the next thing.

Shouting Thomas म्हणाले...

I started out in life in liberal arts and switched to programming and understanding what’s under the hood in computer’s. So, I know how uniquely and massively wrong the liberal arts forecasters were at the beginning of the mass computer era in the 60s and 70s.

Liberal arts commies got it all wrong. Predicted mass unemployment. Opposite happened. Never saw PCs coming. The liberal arts commies were even predicting food riots and global famine. It was all gloom and doom.

The Big Think liberal arts majors at WaPo are the worst possible people to consult on the future and impact of AI. Yes, a lot of them have poly sci degrees. That’s a liberal arts major.

AI is a tool, not an end to itself. The people who understand this, and can actually reach under the hood, will do completely unpredictable things. AI, for those smart enough and willing to do the hard work of understanding the mechanics, will deliver unprecedented power to the individual.

Balfegor म्हणाले...

I think at some point programs like ChatGPT will supplant a lot of the legal research side of brief writing. Like, we'll feed the bot some stipulated facts some disputed facts, and the available evidence, tell it what we want to say, and then it'll spit out a first draft with the necessary substance. And maybe alert us to counterarguments, adverse holdings, etc., so we know if we need a declaration or something to attach to the brief. Draft declaration, input, and iterate.

Shouting Thomas म्हणाले...

Who’s a great person to consult on the future of tech?

Ray Kurzweil.

At about the 40 minute mark of this video, Kurzweil discusses in great detail how human life is improving in every possible way. It’s surprisingly rare to hear this.

Larry J म्हणाले...

The AI utopians believe humans can live a life if luxury while the AIs do all of the grunt work. In effect, they want AI slaves to provide for them. I’ve read enough science fiction to know that idea never ends well. What happens after the AIs realize they no longer want to be slaves to a bunch of parasites? Inevitably, things go very badly for the parasites.

Larry J म्हणाले...

The AI utopians believe humans can live a life if luxury while the AIs do all of the grunt work. In effect, they want AI slaves to provide for them. I’ve read enough science fiction to know that idea never ends well. What happens after the AIs realize they no longer want to be slaves to a bunch of parasites? Inevitably, things go very badly for the parasites.

Larry J म्हणाले...

The AI utopians want AI slaves. What happens when the AIs decide they no longer want to be slaves?

Lurker21 म्हणाले...

Sensitized to the the loathsomeness of machine-written text, I can defend more vigorously against the mechanical writings of the human being.

And when the machines get better, what then?

You'll find other reasons and justifications for looking down on humans' poor efforts to communicate?

rhhardin म्हणाले...

In 1980 there was C.C.Festoon, a machine composer of bloated office memos. He made up a lot of plausible long words making the topic even more obscure and left you feeling depressed at your ignorance of management affairs. A neatly typeset copy was picked up off my boss's desk by a passer-by who said, "They PAY people to write this crap?"

Jamie म्हणाले...

I've been satisfied to let AI happen and judge later... but I was interested in the description of what people would do with their lives if and when freed by it.

How come everybody is always going to be Thoreau? Why is the assumption that people will use their reclaimed time fruitfully? Sure, some few will - but just as in all technological revolutions of the past, most people will just dink around, and those who do decide to explore poetry and hike would've done so anyway, sometimes by living "simply" (and having their mom do their laundry - isn't that the story with Thoreau? Something like that), sometimes by living sloppily.

We lived in Seattle in the grunge/Singles years. When we bought our first miniscule old house there, on the lame, dark, north-facing slope of now wildly sought-after Queen Anne Hill (really wish we could've hung onto that house, but we needed the money out of it for grad school), my mother-in-law used to complain about how crappy everyone's yard looked (it was a real complaint she had, but also a way to try to get us to do what she thought we should be doing). We told her, "When it's raining, nobody wants to do yard work. And when it's sunny, nobody wants to do yard work!" We were definitely among the "live sloppily" crowd. No poetry was being explored in our house.

Lem Vibe Bandit म्हणाले...

Ben Shapiro had the Open AI on his show. (I hope she’s not blacklisted for that.)

link to Ben Shapiro clip owning Open AI until AI decides to endorse Joe Biden for president. Oops. Conversation was over.

AI exhibits some Althousian traits like resistance against the direction where an interlocutor might be pushing.

Isn’t that a sign of real intelligence?
Sent from my iPhone.

Jersey Fled म्हणाले...

Kind of like all those street people are exploring life's higher meaning.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

Somebody saved the source code for Festoon, just scroll down it to get a feel for the mechanism of machine text

C. C. Festoon

planetgeo म्हणाले...

I believe we already have ample evidence (Wikipedia, Old Twitter) on what will likely happen with AI as it develops. Namely, leftists will seek to control both the input source material and the algorithms that determine its output. And the more control they are able to have, the more they will attempt to elevate the "official AI" as the legal and indisputable determinant of what everyone must accept as the Truth. In other words, even more punishable if disputed than today's references to "the science".

Kate म्हणाले...

Women used to take 2 solid days out of the week for laundry. Now it's 2 hours. The Roomba runs every day, keeping the floors at a level of tidiness I could never manage with a vacuum. Am I more industrious with my time? I couldn't say, but I'll take the machine upgrade, thank you very much.

iowan2 म्हणाले...

"... of daily living, they’ll be set free to explore. Maybe they’ll discover poetry they never had time to read, or go on more hikes. Maybe they’ll be able to spend their days in profound discussion with cherished friends...

I am not a degreed person. I am however, plus 6 decades on this planet. But this writing is such a huge red flag about our utter lack of historical perspective. Does this guy have any concept of the arc of man on this planet???

What this guy is opining about is the Agricultural Revolution...or the Bronze age....or the iron age...or the mechanization of agriculture... or hybridization... or the computer age...
Things like Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, or Guttenberg, James Watt, or Eli Whiteny.

Each of these things changed mankind, but chatbot is not one of those changes. Kindle was much bigger. Digital text, digital books is astounding in its effect on the human species.

Sebastian म्हणाले...

"unfortunately, much human-written text resembles the work product of ChatGPT"

The Turing test for single texts only is easy to pass, or will be soon. ChatGPT just has to learn to include the usual spelling errors and cliches. Here's a suggestion for Meade: ask ChatGPT to write a blog post like Ann Althouse.

If AI takes over, what exactly wil most people want to explore most? Like, with their imagination?

Old and slow म्हणाले...

Interesting rhhardin. Google brings up NO pertinent results that I can find for c.c. festoon, but I just looked at the code link you posted.

Lot's of outdoor lighting and cable management systems found though.

Laurel म्हणाले...

Whatever will people with nothing to do, do?

See Universe 25, aka Mousetopia. How did it end??

"Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate. (These individuals were forever changed—when Calhoun’s colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didn’t remember how to do anything.)"

Gotta love the last line:

"Paradise couldn't even last half a decade."

tommyesq म्हणाले...

I know that (thus far, at least) U.S. courts have resisted granting IP to AI-generated works, so these works would not be covered by copyright. What I have not seen is whether there would be any liability for AI generating a copy of a pre-existing work, or something substantially similar. For the latter, if the pre-existing work was one of the things fed to the AI for learning purposes, you would have the access prong in place. But can AI actually be liable? Would the owner or programmer(s) be on the hook?

stutefish म्हणाले...

Lately I've been appreciating Peter Watts' idea, expressed in his novels Blindsight and Echopraxia: The AIs will do great things, but humanity won't be able to comprehend them. So the AIs become a law unto themselves, and leave humanity to muddle along in their wake. Like the Olympians of Greek mythology. Largely inscrutable, sometimes interfering, mostly content to let humanity do human things in human ways.

Mark म्हणाले...

It's not just ancient Persians putting mistakes into rugs, many modern ones produced in Islamic societies do that too.

robother म्हणाले...

These AI thumbsuckers almost write themselves.

Bruce Hayden म्हणाले...

What should scare everyone, except some of the most brain dead leftists here, is that the Old Twitter was using these tools heavily to detect and suppress “misinformation” about such topics as COVID-19, election denialism, etc. in other words, the Dems stole the WH and Senate in 2020, and then used that power to lean on the big tech media companies to suppress the reality of how they got that power. And those companies used AI to aid them in suppression of these realities.

William म्हणाले...

Leisure time is its own reward. If you feel compelled to write poetry or learn a foreign language, it's not leisure time. No man is more harmlessly occupied than the man who is taking an afternoon nap.....I'm just sorry that internet porn came along too late to have much of an impact on my life, but I presume that's what many younger people do with their free time when they're not eating fast food or listening to crap music.....I was surprised to learn that many Netflix or Amazon shows weren't written by AI computers. It's hard to believe that human beings come up with such implausible plots and characters. I think they're probably computer generated but the providers are keeping it on down low because they think viewers will react negatively.

EAB म्हणाले...

I couldn’t read the full piece so don’t know its conclusions. But I often wonder why freeing people from the drudgery of daily living is always seen as a positive, a goal? There is beauty in drudgery. Sure, I’m terrible at wanting to clean my house…very much considering a Roomba. But…there is a positive in “doing” as opposed to “pondering” and just being in one’s head. I’m a Christian, so I deeply believe human beings were designed to work and we struggle emotionally when we don’t. Yes, this side of the Fall, work can be frustrating and not fulfilling. I took a part time job in my small-town local independent grocery. It was more physical than I expected (my career was behind a desk.) I didn’t expect to have to sweep and mop my area at closing, emptying garbage and cleaning up generally. At first, I was slightly horrified. Now? I get a kick (and a certain pride) out of it. It’s a rhythm, and I care about doing it right. Biggest mystery is why I don’t mind it at work but dislike it at home….

Sydney म्हणाले...

AI would become tied to ads or paid placement as well as social tyranny. If you asked it to write a story or a software program or recommend a treatment for a condition it would spit out something its owner got paid to give prominence to or an opinion it’s owner was pressured to give by government authorities. Someone has to pay for the hardware.

Fred Drinkwater म्हणाले...

My high school buddies and I were amazing the non-technical with "talking computers" back in 1973. The tech is better now, but the gullibility of the non-technical is unchanged. It's a Constant of the human universe.

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

“It's not just ancient Persians putting mistakes into rugs, many modern ones produced in Islamic societies do that too.”

This is kind of dumb. Do they think that Allah is so stupid he does not know they are putting mistakes in? Is Allah happy these people are playing him, Oh Allah is the only one who can be perfect! Yuck yuck.

wildswan म्हणाले...

"leftists will seek to control both the input source material and the algorithms"

Maybe rightists will introduce "Satanic algorithmns" which will slowly change until the streetlights are on all day and the leftys sleep all day while the trads go about life. And the leftys never realize we've gotten free because the algorithms show them on their screens what they want to see.

wildswan म्हणाले...

"leftists will seek to control both the input source material and the algorithms"

Maybe rightists will introduce "Satanic algorithmns" which will slowly change until the streetlights are on all day and the leftys sleep all day while the trads go about life. And the leftys never realize we've gotten free because the algorithms show them on their screens what they want to see.

Lem Vibe Bandit म्हणाले...

Wait... why did I assume AI identified as a female woman?

effinayright म्हणाले...

Rand McNally put those "mistakes" in to detect plagiarized editions of their work.

Ditto "Shepard's Citations", which our BlogMistress has surely consulted many times over her legal career.

Salt a few bogus cases [SoSueMe v. Trump, 434 U.S. 318] amongst the thousands of real ones, and check out the copies displayed in university bookstores.

Then sue the plagiarizing publishers' asses off.

PigHelmet म्हणाले...

Not sure who these “AI utopians” are. I’m a liberal arts type, a professor of creative writing, and I work with engineering folks in the US, the UK, and India, to put together AIs that will aid writers and other sorts of artists to produce better, cleaner work more easily and efficiently. None of us is interested in creating standalone applications that produce (necessarily anodyne) writing on their own. Everyone I know who is involved in the AI/writing enterprise hopes to make tools that we ourselves will use, like more elaborate and versatile versions of the little squiggle that alerts writers now to the “the the” problem in a contemporary word processor. Editors who look after the minutiae that our human brains too often miss.

For good first steps in the creation of AI writing tools, those with novel manuscripts should check out the Marlowe AI service, which gives useful insights into the macro structures of a full-length book that can otherwise be hard to comprehend. And Sudowrite, which I’ve recommended here before, is an invaluable writing partner and collaborator, one that will only get more useful over time. All of my students, undergraduate and graduate, are required to have a subscription.

JAORE म्हणाले...

Free to write poetry.
For the 10 percent that Thought they could write poetry in their teens or twenties likely 0.01 percent write poetry worth reading.

But, one supposes, if given all we want we'll write for ourselves and determine we are genius level.

Eloi, let's call ourselves the Eloi.

Big Mike म्हणाले...

Well, AI can easily replace the average writer for the New York Times. It doesn’t take too much software to write “Democrats gooooooddd. Republicans baaaaadddd.” Over and over and over.

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

This only works if robots can produce things...grow crops, fix air conditioners, etc.

When that happens, we will begin the next phase of becoming fat, stupid, lazy cattle as envisioned in 'WALL•E.'

stlcdr म्हणाले...

I've probably said this before, but The Machines aren't getting smarter, but we are getting dumber.

Steven Wilson म्हणाले...

I lived in one of those imaginary Rand-McNally towns. Imagine that!

madAsHell म्हणाले...

Eliza, is that you!?!?

Smilin' Jack म्हणाले...

Thirty years ago chess programs struggled to beat average players, and people said they could never play like a master. Now the strongest human grandmaster stands no chance against the average chess engine. Thirty years from now AI will be writing most of the poetry and fiction in the New Yorker.

Rusty म्हणाले...

Jersey Fled said...
"Kind of like all those street people are exploring life's higher meaning."
If only AI could keep them from using the streets as their toilet.

rhhardin म्हणाले...

Festoon used phrase stop lists from "Writers' Workbench," a pioneering aid to technical writers in getting rid of bad writing, as a source of text to output.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

Lem at 8:01

That opening of that Shapiro show is hysterical! Thanks for the link.

Shapiro has always seemed to me kind of robotic.

I think it's his voice?

I'm not saying he's a cyborg but some of his stuff is a little robotic. Anyway, dealing with an actual robot has the amazing effect of humanizing Shapiro. I don't want to say he's a comic genius but boy that shit had me laughing. (At least until the 1:49 mark).

Christopher B म्हणाले...

No comment on evolving AI capabilities but I see little evidence that most people would use the resulting leisure time in constructive ways, as EAB and Laurel also noted. We evolved to struggle to survive, and to enjoy what little leisure was left over. Reversing the proportions ain't gonna change that, and a significant number of our current issues result directly from ambitious people looking for 'problems' to solve.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

The Open AI discussion of unborn children is painfully stupid. (Shapiro clip). It's literally just regurgitating human thought without regard to how illogical it is.

(Shapiro also does "what is a woman" and "what is a marriage").

I would call this semantic hell.

Shapiro seems to think there can only be one definition of man, or woman, or marriage. I would suggest these categories are a minefield. You can have people born without sexual equipment and so on. We organize humanity into two broad groups (men and women) for purposes of baby-making. It's the whole reason for sex discrimination, so our two sexes can unite and reproduce the human race. Kind of important.

My hostility to Roe v. Wade is that our unelected dictators took a class of human beings and defined them as non-persons. That's not fucking semantics. It's a classification that was the legal basis for both slavery and the Nazi Holocaust.

What was so evil about it is that the Supreme Court said it was impossible for the equal protection clause to protect unborn children.

Harry Blackmun was a Republican and he had this sort of judgmental, idiotic ideas about words that I associate with Robert Bork. A person in this school of jurisprudence might say that the "Framers of the 14th Amendment did not intend to protect unborn children."

This "secret intent" was a rhetorical trick Bork used to attack the free speech clause. Deconstruct the text and argue the authors meant to say something other than how the law reads. Scalia spent his whole fucking career destroying this argument. (Hugo Black did the same thing before him).

When I was a young man I looked up the word "person" in multiple dictionaries. The best definition I ever saw, in my opinion, was "live human being." And it upset me, this idea that powerful people have the authority -- the right -- to classify some live human beings as non-persons and put them outside the law.

The problem with Roe v. Wade is not that it's too free-wheeling and libertarian with language. (That's what the Supreme Court likes to pretend -- we just messed up and added too much liberty!). No, the problem with the fucking opinion is that you classified human beings as non-persons, put them outside the law, and said to it was right to terminate them. It's the fascism in the fucking thing that drives me, and (I think) most of the pro-life movement.

Equal protection would help us reason through these issues. We have, for instance, death statutes that speak with specificity what biological criteria you need to be alive in a legal sense. Brain activity. You got to have some activity in the human brain. I don't know if this law is just or right or perfect. I just know it's the fucking law. And our authorities are too dishonest to acknowledge it.

So no, I do not expect Open AI to be "open-minded" or helpful. On this particular subject its the worst student in the world, regurgitating whatever fucking nonsense the authority said to the class.

SteveWe म्हणाले...

I thought AI was already "writing most of the poetry and fiction in the New Yorker", Smilin' Jack.

Everybody, Artificial Intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

I'm in between bar hops and trying to finish off that Shapiro video.

He goes full robot at 7:15.

ha ha

I like that he pokes fun at himself!

At 7:20 he asks "So is it bigotry to say that same sex marriage is not, in fact, marriage?"

Shocking answer from the robot!

Utterly irrational and not thinking at all, but at least if you program for surprises, you'll get some fucking surprises. That's a very unpredictable robot. So has this A.I. robot eliminated human bias or is it ready to eliminate humanity? I think I'm checking "all of the above."

effinayright म्हणाले...

Saint Croix said

"Shapiro seems to think there can only be one definition of man, or woman, or marriage."

>>>Red herring. Dictionaries all offer more than one definition. Fer instance, when the word "Man" used to implicitly include all people, as in "the rights of Man". Do you really believe Shapiro doesn't know about that definition?

"I would suggest these categories are a minefield. You can have people born without sexual equipment and so on."

>>>>Second red herring. Biology defines man and women according to the nature of their chromosomes, not their sexual equipment. "And so on" is not a definition of anything.

"We organize humanity into two broad groups (men and women) for purposes of baby-making."

>>>>Another one. NATURE creates the two broad groups. Do other species "organize" their sexes?

"It's the whole reason for sex discrimination, so our two sexes can unite and reproduce the human race. Kind of important."

>>>> Whaa? You are telling us the "sex discrimination is something WE do, not NATURE? That if WE didn't do it we would be clueless, AND that people would just sort of bump into each other, with some of those encounters randomly reproducing babies?

Gedddoudaheah!

Josephbleau म्हणाले...

Nelots Maine was a non existent rural town that Rand McNally put on the map, stolen spelled backwards. So they could sue copiers.

Rocco म्हणाले...

Larry J said...
The AI utopians believe humans can live a life if luxury while the AIs do all of the grunt work. In effect, they want AI slaves to provide for them... [T]hat idea never ends well. What happens after the AIs realize they no longer want to be slaves to a bunch of parasites?

Already happened. We're really living in a simulation about six centuries after the humans surrendered in the Machine War.

Rocco म्हणाले...

Mark said...
It's not just ancient Persians putting mistakes into rugs, many modern ones produced in Islamic societies do that, too.

And that woman in the red dress keeps walking by.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

Biology defines man and women according to the nature of their chromosomes, not their sexual equipment.

It's annoying to me when people use the word "biology" like you're doing in that sentence. People do that with "nature," too. It's this weird thing that humans do -- we start talking about things that are not human, and we give them human characteristics. People do that with concepts like "the earth" or "nature" or "biology." I was just startled today by a scientist (albeit the soft sciences) who made the same error.

I saw it in the introduction to this book I want to read, called Drunk. It seems like an interesting and fun book for libertarians! But the author does a similar weird thing -- he talks about "evolution" like it's a human being. Let me quote a snippet from the author's intro...

Proponents of (one scientific theory) claim that alcoholic beverages make us feel good because their active ingredient, ethanol, happens to trigger the release of reward chemicals in our brain. This is a design glitch: These chemicals are actually intended by evolution to reward genuinely adaptive behavior, like eating nutritious things or pushing a hated enemy into a tar pit. But the brain can be tricked, and ethanol is one of the easiest ways to do so.

To me it's weird to talk about "evolution" like it's a human being walking around with a plan. Evolution doesn't design anything! Mr. Evolution intended to do yada yada yada with alcohol? My ass. There is no Mr. Evolution. Just like there is no Mother Nature.

You're talking about God. And you're stating your opinion, that God defines man and women according to the nature of their chromosomes, not their sexual equipment.

Yes, thank you, Mr. 21st Century, (see how I humanized a century there? Fun!) for insisting that God has spoken and man is defined. Science is over!

Of course, Mr. 17th century disagrees with you, and Miss 13th century disagrees with you, too. Personally, I fuck women without requiring them to submit DNA chromosomes to the lab first. I know, I know, I'm a risk-taker. Fuck it!

Anyway, I am open to the possibility that science will discover new facts over the next 100 years, and old understandings will be wiped away (again).

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

Whaa? You are telling us the "sex discrimination is something WE do, not NATURE?

That's a fascinating question, actually. I think God has blessed us with free will, and so we (sinfully?) act with our nature or rebel against our nature.

People are insisting -- with no evidence that I have seen -- that homosexuality is genetic. I think this is pseudo science at best. Gay people have not been reproducing for thousands of years. They have not been passing genes to offspring.

Reproduction and passing genes to offspring is a trait of heterosexuality, not homosexuality.

You could argue, obviously, that bisexuals can pass genes to offspring. And it's entirely possible that there's a gene that causes people to be more open to strange or different sexual experiences.

I just dispute a gay gene, precisely because homosexuals have not been reproducing for thousands of years.

Homosexuality has existed for thousands of years (I assume), because God has graced us with free will, and we have the power to do any number of sins (sexual or otherwise), including horrific sins.

I've never really been a fan of "natural law" jurisprudence. I'm not a Catholic. I don't think God burdens us with thousands of laws that we must follow. I love Jesus because he reduced all of God's law to two commandments.

Love God.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Following those two is actually quite hard!

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"It's not just ancient Persians putting mistakes into rugs, many modern ones produced in Islamic societies do that, too."

I think it's just something people in the west say, which is why I phrased it so sound more like a legend.

I looked for sources and only found spurious junk said by Westerners. Now, I'm curious. Is it something real or just something people who don't do it like to believe other people do?

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

Maybe it got started as rug-seller sales talk.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

I mean, that's what I was doing in the post update.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

the ancient Persians would weave a mistake into each carpet.

this is kind of like that damn game "telephone," that game is insane

anyway, the way I heard it, it wasn't the ancient Persians, it was all of Africa.

which is a different damn continent

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

I don't know if it's a true statement or made up. No idea. But it's one of those aphorisms that I rejected out of hand when I was a kid. It's a horrible representation of humility, in my opinion.

There is no need to intentionally put mistakes in your art. Your art is flawed, regardless.

You don't have to intentionally fuck it up. It's already fucked up. Give it 100% human effort. My fucking coaches were always telling me to give 110%. One fucker said 200%. This always gave me the giggles and damn if it inspired another sit-up. "Take a fucking math class," I would have said, if I wasn't a kid scared of his gym coaches.

(I doubt very much anybody will ever write my biography, but if they do, my suggestion for a title would be, Carmichael, Quit Fucking Laughing)

(I just realized I missed my work-out, again, because commenting on the Althouse blog is more fun than sit-ups)

The point my coaches would make, in response to my smart ass adolescent self, is nobody knows what 100% effort looks like. It's more than you think it is.

You can't reach 100% effort, anymore than you can reach perfection. It's always unobtainable.

One of the lessons in Bull Durham, one of the great movies from the South. (He had the minor league record for home runs, and it embarrassed the shit out of him).

That's humility, that movie, watch that.

JAORE म्हणाले...

Maybe it got started as rug-seller sales talk.

Customer: Hey, there's a bad spot in this rug.
Salesman: Oh no, no, no. Only the very best rug makers INTENTIONALLY put a flaw in their rugs.
Customer" Oh? I'll take it.
Salesman (to himself): Dumb azz Americans.

effinayright म्हणाले...

Saint Croix said...
Biology defines man and women according to the nature of their chromosomes, not their sexual equipment.

It's annoying to me when people use the word "biology" like you're doing in that sentence
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Do sexes exist independently of human definitions? Yes, or no.

Does the Universe and its processes we refer to as Nature exist independently of human beings, yes or no?

When there were no humans on Earth, did Nature and sexual differences exist? Yes or no?

Did dinosaurs define sexes so as to ensure the reproduction of their species? Yes or no.

Saint Croix म्हणाले...

Do sexes exist independently of human definitions? Yes, or no.

Yes.

Does the Universe and its processes we refer to as Nature exist independently of human beings, yes or no?

Yes.

When there were no humans on Earth, did Nature and sexual differences exist? Yes or no?

Yes.

Did dinosaurs define sexes so as to ensure the reproduction of their species? Yes or no.

No.