Box #3
The Decline of Reading, Arthur Brooks, Hieroglyphics, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Wallace Stevens, Nassim Taleb
Entertaining interview with Stanford University President. How to reconcile the fact that elite college is harder than ever to get into, yet the intellectual calibre of the students seems to be declining. Money quote: “In one of my classes, I was randomly assigned a partner to work on a presentation together. He told me that he had not read a book, cover to cover since the third grade, let alone at Stanford. In June, he will graduate with a degree from Stanford. How is this possible?”
Arthur Brooks on happiness. Makes the powerful point that Satan’s punishment, in Dante, is brooding. If I had to translate Brooks, it would be something like this: if you want to be happy, don’t pursue happiness as a selfish goal; rather pursue meaningful relationships and happiness will come as a byproduct. Rashi teaches that prayer is more effective when you pray for others than when you pray for yourself. And I’d extend the point more broadly—for anything that you want from others, try doing it yourself first. If you want to be heard, start by listening.
Olfactory Ethics. A recently minted PhD posted a selfie with dissertation, and went viral thanks to right-wing outrage. I looked at the dissertation abstract and felt that it was cringe, but not more so than most dissertation abstracts, particularly in the Humanities. Thanks to becoming a meme, this dissertation abstract has been viewed millions of times—many orders of magnitude more than most, which are read by just two examiners. The PhD uses the literary motif of smell in different novels to confirm the author’s priors about intersectionality, the vogue academic theory that expresses in the real world as sympathy for Hamas and CEO assassins. If you want to read and think deeply for four to six years in the Humanities, this is the tax you pay. And if you are fortunate, you can then go on to write many more articles and books just like it, while having a job for life. Solve for the equilibrium.
Converting to Judaism after October 7th. Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen with a fascinating and moving piece on her conversion to Judaism. I enjoyed her interweaving of personal and analytical perspectives. The question I’m left with, and which can be analogized to many forms of status-change: Is conversion like showing up to the gym already fit, or like showing up to the gym saying I’m out of shape but ready to get to work? Then again, if you told the personal trainer that you want to commit, they wouldn’t ask you to circumcise yourself. They’d just say, “Great, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Maybe the analogy, would be, pay me X dollars up front, and if you withdraw from the regimen, you don’t get your money back. But even here, the analogy breaks down, as there is no leaving Judaism.
AI is like hieroglyphics.
Wallace Stevens, “A Study of Two Pears.” The poem is about how, in poetry and painting, you often have to render something falsely to capture its truth. I.e., you need orange and purple to convey a green pear. Literalism leads to distortion. A wonderful text that demonstrates phenomenology while also being about phenomenology. And deeply relevant to the Turing Test. Ironically, a machine that makes no mistakes will appear inhuman. Nassim Taleb writes about a corollary point in Fooled by Randomness. In Nature, randomness doesn’t look random. But when you ask humans to simulate randomness by trying to produce a random sequence of heads and tails, they won’t do too many heads in a row, lest it appear un-random. A computer, by contrast, will have no such qualms.
Until soon,
Zohar