From the metalingual function of language to self-reference

In 1960 the linguist Roman Jakobson published an essay entitled “Linguistics and Poetics,” in a volume edited by Thomas Sebeok, Style in Language (MIT Press, pp. 350-377). In that essay he laid out the six functions of language: referential, emotive, phatic, conative, poetic, and metalingual. Jakobson introduces the metalingual function in this way:

A distinction has been made in modem logic between two levels of language: “object language” speaking of objects and “metalanguage” speaking of language. But metalanguage is not only a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and linguists; it plays also an important role in our everyday language. Like Moliere’s Jourdain who used prose without knowing it, we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e. , glossing) function. “I don’t follow you-what do you mean?” asks the addressee, or in Shakespearean diction, “What is’t thou say’st?” And the addresser in anticipation of such recapturing question inquires: “Do you know what I mean?”

This metalingual function turns out to be extraordinarily powerful. For it is this that allows us to bootstrap self-awareness into the mind. And for that matter, it is what allows us to define abstract concepts, as my teacher, David Hays, argued, and allows us to define such things as chess and arithmetic, which can be seen as very specialized forms of language.

I recently explored some of these issues in conversation with Claude 5.4 Sonata Extended. At the end of that conversation I asked Claude to prepare a summary. I’ve appended that summary below, followed by the full conversation. Note that the conversation assumes some familiarity with the cultural ranks theory that David Hays and I developed in the 1990s. It also alludes to Tyler Cowen’s recent book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026).

* * * * *

Summary: The Metalingual Function of Language

The central claim of this discussion is that the metalingual capacity — the ability to use language to talk about language — is not a mysterious self-referential capacity of mind but is grounded in a simple physical fact: the speech signal is a sound in the environment like any other sound, detectable by the auditory system exactly as a footfall or a thunderclap is detectable. The loop that makes language self-referential closes through the physical world, not through some inward turning of consciousness. This matters because it demystifies metalingual cognition entirely: it requires no special cognitive faculty, only that the organism's auditory system be capable of treating its own linguistic outputs as inputs.

Jakobson identified the metalingual function as one of the six functions of language in his 1960 paper, and Hays adopted the term to name the mechanism underlying Rank 2 cognition — the explicit definition of abstract concepts using language itself as the definitional medium. The rules of chess and arithmetic notation are paradigm cases: purely metalingual constructions whose objects are constituted entirely by the definitions that specify them.

An important asymmetry in preliterate cultures illuminates the boundary of this capacity. Many such cultures have a term for utterance — the bounded burst of speech with a recognizable prosodic shape, a perceptual gestalt directly available to the auditory system — but no term for word. The word is not a perceptual unit in the same sense as the utterance; it is an abstraction from the continuous acoustic stream, and a non-trivial one. Writing is what produces this abstraction, by spatializing language — spreading it out in a stable, inspectable array where units are individuated by spaces and boundaries are marked. The word becomes visible as a unit because it is surrounded by white space. This is the physical basis of metalingual definition as a cognitive mechanism: the written signal, like the spoken signal, is an object in the environment that can be inspected and categorized, but unlike the spoken signal it stays there, making sustained metalingual attention possible. Grade-school grammar — parts of speech, grammatical cases, syntactic relations — is the practical Rank 2 elaboration that writing makes possible and that social institutions require and transmit. It looks easy in retrospect because it is taught in childhood, but it took centuries to develop in every culture that undertook it.

This analysis opens onto the question of human self-reference, which the standard philosophical tradition treats as cognitively primitive — the Cartesian bedrock from which all other knowledge is built. The discussion argued instead that self-reference in the robust, articulable sense is bootstrapped through language rather than presupposed by it. The cat licking its fur has practical self-involvement — its own body is an object of its perceptual and motor engagement — but this requires no special reflexive faculty, only that the body be included in the environment the organism can detect and act on. Human self-reference in the philosophically weighty sense is a different and later achievement, constructed through the acquisition of the pronoun system rather than expressed by it.

The empirical evidence for this bootstrapping account is the phase in early child development when children refer to themselves in the third person. This is not a mistake or a developmental lag but the natural and correct generalization from the input data: others refer to the child by name, so the child uses its name. The first-person pronoun presents a harder problem because "I" is a moving target — it marks the speaker-role regardless of who occupies it — and acquiring it correctly requires connecting awareness of the speech stream as an environmental event with awareness of one's own speech apparatus as its source. That inferential construction, worked out in detail in Benzon's 2000 paper, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction, through cognitive network modeling of the pronoun system, is precisely the physical loop through which self-reference is assembled. The Cartesian subject — the self-transparent, self-referential knowing mind — is on this account a Rank 2 cultural product, not a pre-linguistic biological given. The third-person phase in child development is a small but precise empirical trace of the construction process: there is an observable stage at which the human being exists, acts, and communicates without yet having assembled the first-person self-reference that Descartes thought was the indubitable foundation of knowledge.

* * * * *

The physical basis of the metalingual function

I believe that Hays first published about metalingual definition in 1972. When I first met him he had just finished a paper where he used the idea to investigate different concepts of alienation. When I wrote my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” I used metalingual definition as the mechanism for building cognitive ranks. That is to say, at that time that was the only mechanism we had for dealing with abstract concepts. By the time we did the cognitive evolution paper a bit over a decade later, by that time we had adopted a different view, with metaphor as the Rank 1 abstractive mechanism. Metalingual definition would have been the mechanism used, not only to rationalize abstract concepts, but to define the rules of chess and of arithmetic.

Hays chose the term because Roman Jakobson had defined the metalingual function as one of the six functions of language in his 1960 paper. The metalingual function is the ability to use language to talk about language. It’s worth thinking about how that’s possible. It’s possible because the speech signal is a sound out there in the environment like any other sound, a footfall, a thunderclap, an animal cry. Whatever. It’s a sound and can be detected by the auditory system like any other sound. So it’s the speech signal that is the object of the metalingual function, at least initially. I think it’s worth nothing that many (most?) preliterate cultures don’t have a word that means word, but they have one the means utterance. It’s writing that forces a recognition of words vs longer strings. And written language is, like speech, another signal that’s out there in the environment. It takes quite a bit of cognitive elaboration to construct a grammar from the simple ability to see and hear language. And I’m not talking about the kind of grammars that linguists construct. I’m talking about the kind of grammar that can be taught in grade school, or that you find in ancient texts of rhetoric.

This is a rich cluster of observations and they fit together in a way worth making explicit.

The metalingual function and its physical basis

Jakobson's insight, which you're extending here, is that the metalingual function is grounded in something remarkably mundane: the speech signal is a physical event in the environment, detectable by the auditory system exactly as any other sound is. This is what makes language able to turn on itself — not some mysterious self-referential capacity of mind, but the simple fact that linguistic output is also sensory input. The loop closes through the physical world.

This has an important implication that your observation about "utterance" versus "word" brings out precisely. What the auditory system initially detects is the acoustic stream — a continuous, flowing signal that doesn't come pre-segmented into words. The unit that's directly perceptible is something like the utterance: a bounded burst of speech with a recognizable prosodic shape, a communicative gestalt. The word is not a perceptual unit in the same sense. It's an abstraction from the stream, and a non-trivial one — which is why preliterate cultures have a term for the former and not the latter.

What writing does

Writing performs an operation on language that perception of the speech stream cannot perform on its own: it spatializes language, spreads it out in a stable, inspectable array where boundaries are marked and units are individuated. The word becomes visible as a unit because it's surrounded by spaces. The sentence becomes visible as a unit because it ends with a mark. The paragraph, the chapter, the argument — all of these become objects of potential inspection and manipulation because writing fixes them in space and time in a way the acoustic stream never does.

No Kings! [Don't forget.]

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Tyler Cowen thinks highly of the work of Harold Bloom. In particular he recommends Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), which is a one-volume conspectus of Western literature from Dante through Samuel Beckett. As skeptical as I am of Bloom (see my remarks on Bloom in The Discipline of Literary Criticism) Cowen’s got me there. I don’t know of any other comparable one-volume introduction to Western literature, though I imagine that, with a bit of care, you could have your favorite top-of-the-line chatbot do something comparable for you.

But if what interests you is not so much the sweep of Western literature as the sweep of the Western mind, then you might consider Bertrand Russell’s one volume History of Western Philosophy. The emphasis is different, obviously, but philosophy is literature-adjacent. And the sweep is grander, from the Pre-Socrates to the 20th century. It has been criticized for its, shall we say, idiosyncratic emphasis and judgements,  but the same can be said for Bloom. Neither man pretended to take stock of their respective domains as a neutral observer.

Moreover Russell was arguably one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century. His early contributions to mathematical logic and analytic philosophy are foundational; he was also a public intellectual of considerable influence, writing God knows how many essays collected into dozens of books, and a political activist as well, collaborating with diverse figures in opposition to nuclear weapons (Albert Einstein) and the war in Vietnam (Jean-Paul Sartre). (Alas, he was also a eugenicist in the first half of his life.)

And, I suppose, roughly the same chatbot strategy that would allow you to displace Bloom from your reading list would also work with Russell.

* * * * *

FWIW, I’m only four degrees of separation from Bertrand Russell, and all the links are strong, none of them mere acquaintance. Here’s the chain:

(1) Bertrand Russell taught Ludwig Wittgenstein;
(2) Wittgenstein taught Margaret Masterman;
(3) Masterman was a colleague of David Hays;
(4) David Hays was my teacher and then colleague.

Given my teachers at Johns Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo I’m likely no more than two links from Bloom in two or three directions. For example, I audited a graduate course on the Victorian novel taught by J. Hillis Miller, who also wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school. He became Bloom's colleague at Yale as one of the infamous “Yale Mafia.”

Pink Panther down low

Enjoy this interpretation of Henri Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme“ performed by our double bass players Christoph Wimmer, Filip Waldmann, Alexander Matschinegg, and Valerie Schatz at the wonderful Brahms-Hall of Musikverein Wien.

Flowers from March

NAMC: The New African Music Collective and the Magic of the Bell

It was 1982 or ‘83, perhaps ‘81 or ‘84, I don’t remember exactly. I had gone to Daisey Baker’s, a restaurant in downtown Troy, New York, with Margaret, my best friend’s girlfriend. She knew Don Dworkin, leader of Doc Scanlan Rhythm Boys, a local swing era jazz group. She introduced me to him and he invited me to sit in on a tune, “Sunny Side of the Street.” As I was taking my solo I noticed a group of RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) administrators sitting at a front-row table. I recognized the VP for Student Affairs, whose name I forget, one or three others, and most especially Eddie Knowles, Assistant Dean for Minority Affairs.

Eddie had toured with Gil Scott-Heron for seven years as a percussionist. After my solo I went over to their table and introduced myself. He seemed a bit surprised that I recognized him. It’s not as though having played with Scott-Heron was a secret identity, but I suppose he wasn’t used to people thinking of him in that context. Now he was a university administrator. Anyhow, he introduced me to his fiancé, Druis Beasley; we chatted a bit, and I returned to Margaret, which, BTW, is what she called herself. Not “Peggy.”

Dance Class

Anyhow, as they were leaving, Ade came over to me and said that he was playing drums for a class in African dance that Druis was teaching. Would I like to join him? Yes.

At least that’s how I think it went. But maybe he and Druis made the invitation while I was chatting with them at their table. I don’t really remember. What I actually remember is: me and my trumpet, Margaret, Daisy Baker’s, “Sunny Side of the Street,” Eddie with RPI administrators at a table, introduction, chatting, invite. I’m just trying to turn that into a plausible sequence of events.

A couple of days, a week, later I showed up at the class. There was Druis, in a leotard? a half-dozen to a dozen dancers, and Eddie. He had a conga drum, a djembe, some cowbells, perhaps claves, and perhaps a shekere (a West African instrument made from a large hollowed-out gourd covered with beads in a loosely strung netting). That is to say, that is likely what he had. Congas and djembes for sure, the rest is highly plausible conjecture. I had my trumpet and flugelhorn.

Druis would tell Eddie what she had in mind, he would play a rhythm on either the conga or the djembe, Druis would lead the students in some dance move, and I would play my trumpet or flugelhorn, whichever seemed appropriate for the rhythm. No one told me what to play. They assumed that I’d know what to do. Which I did. Not that I’d ever done this particular thing. I hadn’t, but I’d played a lot of music, and listened to a lot; I was an experienced improvisor. I could handle it.

Surprisingly well, considering. Yes, Ade played African and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and I played jazz, which has African roots. But the rhythm is not the same. The basic pulse, the groove, is different. The patterns you play over it are different. I couldn’t just take my jazz chops and lay them on those African rhythms.

African rhythm is polyrhythmic, based on multiple interlocking rhythmic phrases. Afro-Cuban rhythm is based on a rhythm called the clave, which consists of five beats in a fixed pattern, but they’re not equally spaced. Depending on the particular dance – for these are fundamentally dance rhythms – various other interlocking phrases will be repeated over the clave. In contrast, Western rhythm is monometric, based on a single regularly recurring pulse, generally in groups of four (e.g. marches) or three (e.g. the waltz). More complex patterns are created through either adding beats together or dividing them in two or four, and sometimes three. Jazz rhythms reflect a negotiation between the two systems. I was trained in “legit” music and in jazz. Afro-Cuban rhythm was new to me.

But by no means completely new. I had some Latin (e.g. Afro-Cuban, Salsa) records which I listened and enjoyed a great deal. And I’d play along with them. I’m thinking particularly of Eddie Palmieri’s Lacumi, Macumba, Voodoo, with the legendary Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros on trumpet. I hear it now, “Colombia Te Canto,” the drums, Palmieri’s percussive piano figures, and Chocolate floating over the time. I had to be Chocolate with Eddie, Druis, and her students. We worked well together. I particularly remember playing flugelhorn over a samba rhythm. Liquid.

We Form a Band

So we did that a couple, three, four, half-dozen times, I don’t know exactly, and we decide to form a group, Eddie, Druis, and me. We called ourselves the Afro-Eurasian Connection (AEC). Eddie on drums, bells, and other percussion; Druis on vocals, bells, and other percussion; me on trumpet, flugelhorn, occasionally bells and other percussion. We were the core. Druis also took on the all-important function of fronting the group, introducing the tunes, chatting with the audience. Her sister Fonda would come up from New York City on a regular basis and join Druis on vocals, and bells and other percussion. Also Eddie’s old compatriot Kehinde Donaldson on dundun, and other percussion.

From left to right: Fonda Beasley (holding a shekere), me, Eddie Knowles (congas), Druis Beasley (balafon)

We had to create a repertoire. Percussion, vocals, and trumpet is not a standard musical format. There is no standard repertoire for it. We adapted songs: Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue,” Druis sang the lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr.) in a rich, full alto (and I played high harmony on flugelhorn, Eddie on percussion; “Signifying Monkey” (Oscar Brown’s version), with Druis on vocal, me on balafone, and Eddie on Percussion; “Wade in the Water” (traditional), Druis on vocal, Eddie on slit drum, me on muted trumpet. And so forth. And of course we created our own stuff.

We played various local and regional gigs: a cultural fair in downtown Troy, some pep rally at RPI, a student union gig at Alfred University in Western New York. I had to drive the van because the others were worried about being pulled over for DWB (driving while black; it happens). We played a party that RPI put together to showcase local (RPI) talent on the side. As we played one tune the hall went stone cold silent. A local arts center asked us to put on a program. Gave us a month. Eddie was busy at work, so Druis and I had to put it together.

Friday Fotos: A long look back, potpourri

The hegemon no longer, the USA as one nation among others

I've long thought that the situation of the post-Soviet collapse, with the USA as the dominant hegemon in the world, I've long thought that situation was unstable, a mistake. For one thing, it forces the USA to devote a huge chunk of its national resources to the military-industrial complex, which amounts to burying that wealth in the sand. There are better things to do with those resources, both here and abroad. And it forces other nations into perpetual obsequiousness, which is undignified.

But, how do we get out of that situation? The answer seems to be: Trump. In the process of attempting to enforce America's will on the world, that is, Trump's will, he's forcing other nations to abandon us and stand up for themselves.

Ana Swanson, Rival Nations Seize On Choke Points to Counter Trump, NYTimes, Apr. 2, 2026.

President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries.

From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.

But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.

One such choke point is the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, which accounts for less than 1 percent of global economic output, has control over the shipping lane that transports a fifth of the world’s oil and gas. Its closure since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran at the end of February has blocked shipments of fuel, fertilizer and other goods, sending gas prices sharply higher and spreading anxiety among U.S. farmers and manufacturers.

Another experiment in retaliatory coercion began one year ago on Thursday, when Mr. Trump walked into the Rose Garden and unveiled tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day.” While many governments — even powerful economies like the European Union — complied with U.S. demands, China was a notable exception. Beijing rolled out a licensing system for exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets that has given China unparalleled control over the global manufacturing system.

Whoops! Maybe the sheer complexity of the existing world system is making Trump's hegemonic dreams utterly impossible. It's like the mythical hydra, chop one head off and three more crop up. Are we actually moving toward a really new world order?

There's more at the link.

Fanta Orange, have another sip

The Happiness Crash of 2020

Peltzman, Sam, The Happiness Crash of 2020 (March 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6465460

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

How people actually use AI

"ChatGPT is mainly for work"

Reality check: Only 27% of ChatGPT usage is work-related. 73% is personal. And the gap is widening every month.

The productivity revolution narrative completely misses how people actually use AI. pic.twitter.com/sbSa0DfNzO

— Chris Laub (@ChrisLaubAI) April 2, 2026

The whole thread is worth reading. 

More this and that from March

AI and Human Happiness

Tyler Cowen interviews Arthur Brooks:

Arthur Brooks reckons he’s on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn’t a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what’s the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like?

Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.

The AI and happiness segment from all that is below the asterisks. And I've added a coda about AI and asking the right question. Oh, and the sharp right-brain/left-brain stuff seems a bit old. 

* * * * *

COWEN: How will artificial intelligence influence politics and the political spectrum? Easy question, right?

BROOKS: It’s a good question. I agree. One of the questions I get mostly, as you can imagine, because of my work, is how is it going to affect happiness? I’ve been thinking about it an awful lot. We discussed a minute ago the hemispheric lateralization theory of Iain McGilchrist, that the right side of the brain is the mystery and meaning and why questions of life, and the left hemisphere of the brain largely adjudicates the what and how to and engineering and technological questions of life. The problem is that in modern society, we’ve been kicking everybody into the left hemisphere of the brain and walling off the right hemisphere because people spend all day on their screens, and the hustle and grind-engineered Silicon Valley culture that we live in has actually eliminated a lot of the mystery and meaning from life and the incentive to actually ask those questions.

That’s a lot of what my new book is about, is how to get back to the right side of your brain, as a matter of fact. Now, AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain. It’s a how-to and what engine, but it’s not a why engine. Any real why question that matters, you can’t put into ChatGPT and get something meaningful to you to say, “Why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life?” You put that into ChatGPT, it’ll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is, and then it’ll tell you how five different people have answered that question, and you’re left completely unsatisfied as a result of that.

The answer to the basic happiness question, which is an adjunct, which is next to the political questions, I think, is that if you use it for left brain things to free up your time and then go over to the right brain side of your life with your love and your faith and your relationships and beauty and suffering, then your life’s going to get better. It’s a very real possibility, Tyler, that this is what’s going to happen in economics and politics today.

If we went back 150 years or a little bit more, people would say, “Oh, the Industrial Revolution is going to permanently ruin society because it’s urbanizing and people don’t know each other and the traditional folkways are going away.” It had some rough transitions, to be sure, by bringing in market economics and division of labor and specialization, et cetera. The end of the day was a middle class and the weekend. That’s not the fruit of labor unions. That’s the fruit of the Industrial Revolution and the amazing largesse that it created through capitalism.

COWEN: That took a long time, right? This may be 70 years at the interim. What’s our interim going to look like? Will it be more nostalgia and more small-C conservatism?

BROOKS: Yes. I think it will be. I think this will be speeded up. I think within 20 years that we will have something like the post-industrial equivalent of the fruit that was wrought by the Industrial Revolution, that that’s what we’ll see from what’s going on today.

COWEN: Do you think the classical liberal view on AI should be that we don’t much regulate it or that we regulate it like a national security object, the way we might regulate atomic bombs?

BROOKS: I don’t know. I’m wrestling with that, and I don’t know the answer. Can you give me your opinion, please? Otherwise, I’m going to have to just go to your blog and look at it and form my own opinion on the basis of that.

COWEN: I think for now, we don’t know how to regulate it, and it’s changing more quickly than Congress can act intelligently. Maybe Congress cannot, at the moment, act intelligently at all. I’ll say hold off, but leave open the option because we might need to in some important ways.

* * * * *

COWEN: How long from now do you think it will be before an AI model with good prompting will write a better policy study than, say, the 70th percentile quality study from a good think tank?

BROOKS: That’s a good question. I think AI at not-too-distant future, will do a better job at executing policy analysis, but will do a very poor job at asking the right policy questions. I think that that’s going to be the comparative advantage, is the creativity and the human impulse, the curiosity that humans actually bring to it. The reason is because all large language models are being trained to what people have already done, ideas that people have already had.

What we’re incredibly good at using the right hemisphere, the why hemisphere of our brain, is asking new why questions, which actually leads us to the creativity that we’ll ask the best policy questions going forward. That’s what we’re going to have to specialize in—you, me, and everybody else in the space.

Anaconda (2025) is absurd and hilarious [Media Notes 177]

Two scenes had me laughing as hard as I’ve laughed in a year or three.

Wikipedia:

Anaconda is a 2025 American action-adventure comedy horror film[5] that serves as a meta-reboot of Anaconda (1997) and is the seventh installment in the Anaconda film series. The film was directed by Tom Gormican, who co-wrote it with Kevin Etten, and stars Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior and Selton Mello. The story follows a group of childhood friends trying to remake the 1997 film, only to be attacked by a giant and murderous anaconda. [...]

Childhood friends Doug McCallister, Ronald "Griff" Griffin, Kenny Trent, and Claire Simons are all dissatisfied with the way their lives have gone. When Griff, a television actor struggling to find work at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, reveals that he has obtained the rights to one of their favorite films, Anaconda, the group secures a loan and travels to the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil to make a low-budget indie version of the film.

The group are joined by Ana Almeida, a woman who claims to be the daughter of the boat rental operator they've been working with. While shooting, Griff accidentally kills Heitor, the semi-tame snake they were using. Griff and their snake handler Santiago Braga venture into the jungle to find a replacement, but Santiago is attacked by a massive anaconda that terrorizes the jungle.

And so forth. It goes downhill, round and round, from there.

AI Optimism, AI Pessimism

This is a thoughtful discussion about AI. One discussant, Mike Feinberg, is deeply skeptical. The other, Ben Wittes, is less skeptical, but still wary. Note in the first four minutes or so Wittes delivers a monologue. I’ve listened to many of them, but I’ve now lost my taste for them. Still, you might want to give it a try. It’s only four minutes.

Whale ropes to the sky [Adam Roberts]

So, after doing a bit of work this morning, I checked Facebook and saw that my buddy Adam Roberts had posted this:

Off dream: I had an unfamiliar laptop, and couldn't get the power cord to fit into its socket. I knew the device was almost out of power, and fumbled around with this wire. Eventually I gave up, opened the laptop and saw what I'd been writing: a poem. The only line of the poem I can remember from the dream is:

"The bombed city threw whale-ropes to the sky"

Then the screen went blank, and I knew I had lost whatever it was I had been writing. Particular type of anxiety dream.

I thought a bit and posted this reply:

Sounds like you're channeling STC. How's your laudanum supply holding out?

In Xanadu did Adam R
A sacred city rebuild.
Where mad cetaceans swam
Beneath the bombed walls
Tossing whale-ropes to the sky.

I thought some more, Shazaam! ChatGPT! I added this to my reply, courtesy of the good old Chatster:

When I asked Adam whether or not I could post his note along with my reply, he said:

Please do! I could say that, in the dream (so far as I remember it: the memory is already fading away) my understanding of "whale" was less cetecean and more an index of thickness: bombs resulting in fat, ascending pillars of smoke. But I accept that's not necessarily what the line itself suggests.