Erik Hoel

Thanks for reading & responding!

I don't really see any reasons to doubt that literature will survive the 21st century. Its place is always going to be there, right? But the publishing industry and academia? I think that is a different issue altogether and they are certainly having their day(s) of reckoning. I think we feel its impact even more strongly because other economic & technological forces have intersected to completely destroy adjacent industries like, well, bookstores :P

For many of us growing up, books (esp. fiction) were the best possible form of escape/recreation. Now we're seeing a generation growing up with high powered tablets & phones that must seem magical. To socialize with friends they can talk while playing video games, send videos, or take pictures. The written word doesn't seem very incentivized for them... & I just don't see any of this changing. Luckily for us, though, you can spend a few lifetimes digging through all the literature produced up to this point, and I don't see that going anywhere.

Interesting in regards to writing as a solitary vs social act. Have you ever read Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude? For me, similar to computers/the Internet, one of the beauties of literature is how it is both a solitary & deeply connected 'thing.' How do you feel about some of the common criticisms of MFA programs[0]? Obviously a throwback beatnik/bohemian cafe/store has a very different barrier of entry than these graduate programs, but sorta…

You called out "trusting advertisers to direct our attention" as a problem, and not wrongly.

What I'm wondering about is, how convincing a persona could an AI like Bing's chatbot, but equipped with a long-term memory of its own, construct?

Even in its current state it appears on occasion to exercise a remarkable fascination - Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist specializing in consciousness, yesterday declared himself no longer perfectly certain it was not sentient, and called for "panic" and "strident activism" in support of a targeted "Butlerian jihad". [1]

My point is not to evaluate these claims or these concerns on their merits. My point is: All that has been this week, in response to something that if it were human would probably have been diagnosed as floridly psychotic and dosed heavily with Haldol.

And so that's led me to wonder, I think not unjustifiably: What about next year? Does it even matter whether adtech-backed search is a primary discovery method any longer, if in the meantime the epistemological threat surface has expanded to encompass a machine which in every realm short of face-to-face interaction in RL can in a meaningful fraction of cases make itself long-term indistinguishable from a person? What kind of trust might that cultivate?

To be clear, I don't think that's at all likely. But after this week, I find myself no longer wholly able to dismiss the whole idea as facially absurd.

[1] https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/i-am-bing-and-i-am-evil

The author seems to want more of this[0] kind of high-quality refutation. Here's another, this time a blog post[1] and a rebuttal[2]. Very different examples, one in medical science and the other just blogosphere musings, but both are public counters to public originals, rather than direct communications with the original's authors.

That said, I'm not clear on why the author thinks that we're at a "turning point" in deciding whether it's socially acceptable to just publish an argument against something else that was published. Maybe in the scientific community that's a strict norm? It certainly doesn't seem to be in the blogging community.

Maybe the author is worried that good arguments are lost in the semi-private twitter scuffle with the original authors of papers and articles? Maybe they hope that people will respond to broadcasted arguments intended for the general public with counter-arguments that are also broadcasted, instead of directed? I don't know. It feels like I'm missing the article's "prompt".

0. https://kylesheldrick.blogspot.com/2022/03/evidence-of-fabricated-data-in-vitamin.html

1. https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins?s=w

2. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-hoel-on-aristocratic-tutoring?s=r

The article describes what it takes to getting published; ie, passing an ever increasing number of gatekeepers. Agents, "blurb writers", publishers, reviewers are all professional gatekeepers, organized in a giant, very strict filter.

In a perfect world, gatekeepers should be neutral observers of an external reality, expert cherry pickers who would detect and promote the best; in the real world, they influence and shape reality.

"MFA" is much talked about in the article but never spelled out. It means "Master of Fine Arts" and is like an MBA for aspiring artists -- or, put it another way, a kind of training camp on how to pass the gatekeepers.

In another article [1], the same author discusses whether MFAs have "swallowed literature". Indeed, having all wannabee authors go through the same training can result in uniformization; and worse, it can produce "perfect candidates" who lack substance.

The best writers are inspired by the life they lived and the tragedies and successes they went through. When every novel sounds like a story from the New Yorker, with perfect language, perfect syntax, and perfect, respectable morals, we have a problem.

[1] https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/how-the-mfa-swallowed-literature

This operates on the very narrow view that the only value of art is its aesthetics, and that art can be measured against objective ratings.

I value art because it communicates something from an actual human being, like an exchanging between consciousnesses. When I can derive the choices of an author or photographer or any other class of artist, I find a mutual perspective that, at the root of it, makes me feel understanding and understood.

This article (posted here a few days ago) has a great argument on why AI art isn’t art:

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/ai-art-isnt-art

What a load of rubbish.

1. Plant-based diets are good for the environment. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316289/

2. Animals are sentient. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4494450/

3. The "thought experiment" is flawed. See https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/eating-meat-is-good-says-the-philosopher/comment/8024510 - good rebuttal here

Keeping animals alive in the worst possible conditions on the promise that "we'll do better!" just so the species don't die out is utterly ridiculous.