Late summer links

AI to understand whales, drinking all the time, cats as co-authors, the media on consciousness science, Tasmania

[1] How artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals. “They call this Project CETI. That’s short for Cetacean Translation Initiative.” 🐋

[2] When did people stop being drunk all the time? Including this 1796 eyewitness account from England:

Beer and ale are not only brewed unreasonably strong; but the quantity allowed to workmen is unnecessarily great. In hay and corn harvest the customary allowance is a gallon of beer a man (in hot weather they drink more)…With some difficulty I got turnip hoers to accept of two quarts of beer and one of ale: they demand two of beer and two of ale! enough to stupify any man, and to make a sober man drunk from morning to night.

Mattheus van Helmont. Old Man Drinking ~1650

[3] “How did you first find yourself in a bush suit scaring passersby on the San Antonio River Walk?” and other questions for the Texas Bushman. “Jones is friendly with other bushmen, including the Florida Bushman, going so far as to invite him to Texas and take him to Whataburger”.

[4] Peli Grietzer recommends this “insane” Letterboxd as some of his favorite writing on the Internet right now.

[5] There is no shortage of things to write about: "In general, life is full of problems, and even where there are no well defined problems there's a near infinite amount of detail. Almost all of that detail you can just look at and go ‘Huh. What's up with that?’ and write something about it."

[6] Scholar's Stage on writers who have added phrases to the English language, and how poets don’t do this any more.

One of the most enduring literary legacies a writer can have is to add a phrase to the language. Shakespeare is the G.O.A.T. here: “vanish into thin air”, “method to my madness”, “the world is my oyster”. Rudyard Kipling added “law of the jungle,” “the unforgiving minute” and (infamously) "the white man's burden." T.S. Eliot added “not with a bang but a whimper” and “April is the cruelest month”. But poetry is not a source of new phrases any more, one of many signs of its fall from cultural relevance. The two last poems to definitively add a phrase to the popular lexicon were in 1951:

• Langston Hughes' “Harlem” with "What happens to a dream deferred?"

• And Dylan Thomas’s "Do not go gentle into that good night" / “Rage against the dying of the light”

Did Scholar’s Stage miss any? Are there more recent ones than those? The essay concludes by positing that our replacement source of new catchphrases is not music, but movies: “we're not in Kansas any more”, “an offer he can't refuse”, “that escalated quickly”, etc.

[7] See also "Longfellow and the decline of American poetry"

[8] Matthew Sitman, reviewing a memoir about depression, discusses the inherent inadequacy of writing about depression:

Memoirs are written by survivors, and survival imposes a retrospective sense of resolution on a person’s depression that the actual experience of it entirely lacks. Scialabba agrees with William James’s classic formulation: depression is an anguish “unknown to normal life,” because, as Scialabba puts it in the book’s moving introduction, no other pain feels “unlimited in both intensity and duration.” Depression seems like it will never end; life becomes an eternal, excruciating present. Your life no longer has a narrative, which is precisely what a memoir needs.

[9] The state of consciousness science and why the media got it wrong, by neuroscientist Steve Fleming, about the recent meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and how it was covered. The ASSC meeting itself left Fleming feeling bullish about consciousness science—it is “moving into a new, more mainstream era” and benefiting from “cross-fertilisation between mechanistic/computational neuroscience and consciousness science”. But he contrasts the growing rigor of the field with sloppy and sensational reporting on consciousness, and in particular on a recent adversarial collaboration that tested global workspace theory (GWT) and integrated information theory (IIT). This adversarial collaboration was a painstaking and impressive effort. As you might have expected it was not especially conclusive on GWT versus IIT; it was “provisional, preliminary – another brick in the wall of data” as Fleming puts it. But the the experiments were widely reported as if IIT had “won” is now the clear leading theory of consciousness, which was wildly beyond what the experiments actually showed.

[10] Similarly, cognitive scientist Megan Peters uses the increased media attention to highlight the broader field of consciousness science and “the massive effort and enthusiasm of people working in this whole field”.

[11] Ten Thousand Years of Solitude. When Tasmania was cut off from Australia 10,000 years ago, did its inhabitants gradually lose the cultural knowledge of how to start fires and fish?

[12] Yuri Knorozov, a Soviet linguist who deciphered the Mayan script, had possibly the best author photo of all time. “He had a habit of listing his Siamese cat Asya as a co-author to many of his works; however, his editors would always remove her.”

[13] William Buckner on the dangers of forcing anthropology to give us politically convenient narratives: “human beings everywhere are neither inherently freedom loving and peaceful, nor inherently coercive and violent, but can be either or both depending on their socioecological and cultural context…The idea that we must restrict ourselves to some simple narrative about human nature to offer hope for the future is not only an unreasonably simplistic notion but a historically unjustified one.”

[14] Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei is unsettled by potential AI sentience: “Let's say we discover that I should care about Claude’s experience as much as I should care about a dog or a monkey or something. I would be kind of worried. I don't know if their experience is positive or negative. Unsettlingly I also don't know I wouldn't know if any intervention that we made was more likely to make Claude have a positive versus negative experience versus not having one.”

[15] 2012 as turning point: “if we were forced to pinpoint a year, 2012 appears to be a good choice for when the modern world was invented, and we’ve been living in it now for a little over a decade”

[16] Increase your ambition slowly.