03/07/2023: Getting off your Phone is just the first step
Thank you to The Dispatch for the link to this article by Rhiannon Williams in MIT Review:
“The problem isn’t necessarily the amount of time you’re spending scrolling on the phone as much as what you’re looking at.” The piece touches on something I wrote about in this piece for The Atlantic, which is about how to develop a system for replacing the automatic go-to device scrolling that can take over our lives. I got there by essentially working through a process similar to the one that Williams describes in this article.
More Notions
03/25/2023: A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion
The Met has a wonderful write-up of all that is going on in this etching: James Gillray’s famously brutal caricature of George, Prince of Wales encapsulates the effects of uncontrolled self-indulgence upon the heir to the British throne. Sprawled in his chair after a lavish meal, the prince picks his teeth with a meat fork; […]
03/25/2023: A satisfying GPT exchange
A lot of the coverage of change GPT has been about the learning and development of artificial intelligence. What I wonder is how we, as humans, are going to slowly learn and acculturate to the kinds of exchanges with ChatGPT and its cousins. What I’m thinking about is the psychological closeness that will accrue in […]
03/24/2023: We Have Three Questions on Prime Time
https://johndickerson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/CN-PT-JOHN-DICKERSON-_17_16x9_JD_SOCIAL-DELIVERABLE.mp4
03/24/2023: Chat GPT on the difference between how to think about important issues.
There is a gap in American public conversation between what gets covered and what is objectively important. Presidential campaigns exacerbate this gap. I asked Chat GPT to list the important stories and then I asked Chat GPT to list the stories about issues that impact the greatest number of Americans, which is a rough proxy […]
03/24/2023: This is how we beat the robots
I’m not kidding. When artificial intelligence becomes so good at copying human behavior, we will need to get really good at head fakes. Remember this simple rule: head fakes beat deep fakes. This is how we will beat Chat GPT. https://t.co/CZoZUpjYBk — John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 24, 2023
03/23/2023: Beethoven's Grit and Gut
You’ve probably seen the stories about how scientists used strands of Beethoven’s hair to examine his DNA. They did so in the hopes of trying to learn more about the cluster of illnesses that troubled the composer throughout his life. He was a mess. I knew that he was afflicted–most notably by a loss of […]
03/22/2023: John McPhee on reading out loud.
From The Paris Review. INTERVIEWER Is reading your work aloud still important? MCPHEE Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. […]
03/22/2023: Historical Shade and political anti-intellectualism
Governor Ron DeSantis gave this response to Donald Trump’s nickname “Ron Sanctimonious” in a recent interview: “I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine.” The nickname thing is […]
03/21/2023: How Imprint helps me beat the morning and makes the day richer
For those of you who have read my Atlantic essay on recapturing my day, you know about my daily fight to beat the morning. I have found an extremely useful tool: The Imprint app. I have developped a pretty good routine for keeeping focus while at my desk (thank you Calk Neport, Marshall Goldsmith, David […]
03/18/2023: Writing: The leaving out
I’ve written a lot in this space about the space in which art takes place. In the writing I’m working on now I’m working on that puzzle. How to say what you need to say, and how to evoke and how to carry along a reader without giving them too much. I don’t want to […]