Once again my brain is all jammed up so I’m having trouble getting anything done. Why? Because there are these things I want to do, things I know I should do, and they keep colliding into one another whenever I attempt to actually do something. So it’s time to ramble on through to see where I am.
Report on ChatGPT
That’s still hanging over my head. I’ve been working on it since December and it’s still not done. Most of it, 90%, maybe 95%, but it’s still not done. Why haven’t I done it?
I don’t know. Maybe at this point it just bores me. But maybe I’m afraid to finish it. It’s not like that’s the last thing I’m going to do on ChatGPT. I’ve already done a fair amount of work since the cutoff point for research-to-be-included. And maybe I don’t want to finish because I know that when I’m done it will likely end up in the same bottomless pit everything else does. It’ll be out there on the internet, but who cares?
That’s always the question: Who cares?
Anyhow, I need to say something about metalingual definition of Anthropic’s idea of Constitutional AI and something about prompt engineering and barriers to entry. Alan Kay thought we made a mistake in the promulgation of computing by making everything so “user friendly” that too few people learned to program. I suspect that may have been a barrier-to-entry problem. Some professionals learned to program because it was a useful skill, though they otherwise had little interest in programming. That’s mostly in technical disciplines. For the rest of us, low-to-moderate programming skill simply didn’t get us enough to be worth the opportunity cost. Does the utility of prompt engineering change that. If all you want is to look up stuff, then the answer is “no, it isn’t.” But maybe some skill in prompt engineering might be more widely useful.
The discipline of literary criticism
I’ve been working on this thing since December as well. This is my series on the greatest literary critics (Greatest of All Time, Literary Critics, aka GOATLiC). I’m still hung up on Howard Bloom, which is where I was the last time I rambled, back in March. This time, though, I may have found a way out: Susan Sontag. I want to use her early essay, “Against Interpretation,” as a fulcrum on which to lever my treatment of Bloom.
Why? In the first place, that essay is very well known, and justly so, and it seems people are still thinking about it, a half century after it was originally published in 1964. In a way, then, it’s current, whereas I’m not sure that anything by Bloom is. In that essay, to put it crudely, she says that criticism – for she’s talking about art, film, and literature – is divided between interest in form and interest in interpretation. Interpretation is evasion and dismissal. We need to pay more attention to form. In particular (p.8):
What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary—a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary—for forms.
YES, of course. That’s what I’ve been working on. And the profession may be waking up to that.
Thus, in writing, or attempting to write, an obituary for Theory and Critique (Bloom’s School of Resentment) Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski and say (from their introduction to Critique and Postcritique, 2017, p. 6):
In what might appear to be a reprise of Susan Sontag’s well-known argument in “Against Interpretation”—a stirring manifesto for an erotics rather than a hermeneutics of art—critics have questioned the value of reducing art to its political utility or philosophical premises, while offering alternative models for engaging with literary and cultural texts.
What’s this have to do with Bloom? On the one hand, as far as I can tell, he’s made no contribution a critical “erotics,” if by that one means attention to description and form. Interestingly enough, though, he wasn’t very interested in interpretation either, at least not since The Anxiety of Influence in the early 1970s. He was doing something else, something which, I need to argue, or more likely, merely assert, hasn’t proved to be very fruitful.
The other thing is that in The Western Canon, he keeps asserting that he’s doing all this in the name of “the aesthetic.” But he says next to nothing about what that is. We’d all have been off if he’d channeled his “inner Sontag,” if I may, and said explicitly just what that is and then used that as a means of examining his chosen texts. Note that I don’t mean he should have adopted Sontag’s ideas, but rather he should have adopted her mode and intellectual register and said something intelligible about the aesthetic. That would have been valuable. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he stuck us with his ex-cathedra pronouncements.
But in the end, why should anyone care about Bloom’s pronouncements? That he’s a very smart guy, perhaps as brilliant as any literary critic of the last half-century, that’s not enough in itself. He didn’t use his brilliance in a fruitful way.
Chess, Language, and AI
Here’s another on-going project that’s left over from March’s ramble. The idea is to think about what intelligent does, where I’m interested in the processes of search and evaluation. I’m thinking of this as case studies in the operation of intelligence. The history of science, and intellectual history more generally, is full of such material. But I want to reflect on work that I’ve done for the simple reason that I have better access to records of process: What have I had to do in the course of my work? Thus I’ve just sketched out one potential post:
Seven discoveries I’ve made in literature [form]
- Kubla Khan
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- The Cat and the Moon
- Shakespeare Triad
- Metropolis
- Heart of Darkness
- Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney
We’ll see how that does.
Finally...
Metalingual definition, constitutional AI, and interpretability
That’s a post about large language models that needs to be done, real soon now.
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