Fire And Fury
A 2018 book by Michael Wolff, detailing the behavior (and hatred) of U.S. President Donald Trump, the staff of his 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House staff.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
6mentions
5people
2018–2025years
17% recommend67% neutral17% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Factfulness (2018) by Hans Rosling is fantastic about the real state of the world.
How the Internet Happened (2018) by Brian McCullough is a fantastic read about the history of the internet from first internet bubble to the iPhone.
Educated (2018) by Tara Westover is an amazing autobiography.
Enlightenment Now (2018) by Steven Pinker is pretty good, even if he doesn't know that much about the actual enlightenment.
Autonomy (2018) by Lawrence Burns about self-driving cars is well worth a read.
Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff is good about the very strange world inside the Trump administration.
- Apparently not all 'leaders' ...
~ Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury“He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/america...
- I think it's important to distinguish between content and presentation. Most books don't offer entirely new content, but (at best) give some novel way of presenting old content. Consider a modern retelling of Greek Mythology. The stories weren't the original contribution by the author (but by the Ancient Greeks), but the particular way they tell it may be. So ChatGPT telling people about its "content" is unproblematic if it's just telling people how the story goes, and only potentially problematic if it's effectively quoting from the book or mimicking its presentation. (And we all know that if ChatGPT is good at one thing, it's paraphrase or re-expressing the same ideas in substantially different ways, so even if ChatGPT literally copies a book's presentation/wording, that would probably have happened by accident rather than necessity)
The vast majority of publications (especially those of a explanatory nature) do not contribute original content/information. The exceptions are things like research articles/monographs, historical records, government reports. But copyright infringement doesn't apply here because these things weren't published with a profit motive but precisely to publicize the information as widely as possible. The only problem area I can think of involves books published by commercial publishers which promise 'exclusive peek' into the life of some famous person (think biographies of celebrities or books like Fire and Fury). In that kind of case there is indeed original content, and revealing it in detail will arguably mean less sales for the authors/publishers.
- > Human authors who wrote original creative content, or wrote in a style that is personal and widely recognized, their rights to trade and commerce are in peril
I see what you're saying, but I fail to see how ChatGPT merely copying their style (not: content) might impact "their rights to trade and commerce". Suppose I ask ChatGPT to "tell me some jokes in the style of Louis CK". Would that make me less likely to stream a Louis CK comedy special?
(By contrast, if I ask ChatGPT to summarize the key revelations from a book like Fire and Fury, that probably would make me less likely to buy the book, because if I buy the book it'd be for the novel information contained in it, but ChatGPT already divulged it to me.)
- Fire and Fury asserts in the first chapter that Trump and just about everyone else involved thought he wouldn’t win, and that Trump himself didn’t want to win. I’m not saying that book is reliable, but you can find a lot of detail there if you want to understand the claim.
- Fire and Fury is also almost entirely fiction. The author had no access whatsoever, is known for just making shit up, and has admitted that he made shit up _in this particular book_. Yet some people continue to treat it as a documentary account of some sort.
