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owenversteeg 1 days ago [-]
I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless.
>So, what of the two cultures today?
Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world!
>Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life?
To me this comes to mind: feeling, intuition, thinking, active, moving, creative, danger, the highs and the lows. Not-Life is the efficient modern world, the commoditized, reactive, standardized, efficient, safe, low-risk, smooth featureless extrusions of a massive system.
>It involves, in the Laurentian manner, life, lived, with intensity, experienced with full consciousness in a real, a very real, organic and intense way.
ai_critic 23 hours ago [-]
For anybody who hasn't had the pleasure of this delightful bit of English:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes —gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Levitz 22 hours ago [-]
English is my second language, with that in mind, I felt it may be interesting or amusing to some the parts which were "hard" for me to understand.
>Michaelmas term lately over
I had no idea that "Michaelmas" was even a thing. Nor do I think I have ever encountered the formulation of "term lately over"
>As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth
This puzzled me, as I'd imagine, if there's no water, there surely would be no mud. Apparently a reference to the great flood which makes it make sense.
>and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus
This one was funny since I properly understood (I think?) that it's meant to give a feeling of the savage, untamed, natural feel of the elements taking over London. But then I thought a reference to a Megalosaurus couldn't possibly be that. And it seems it is?
The rest was way easier, although I had to make sure what "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire" meant.
butvacuum 11 hours ago [-]
It's not presently on scihub (also, $25 for access? fuck off...), but the whole study stinks of "dickens scholar checks modern reading comp, vastly overestimates familiarity with victorian england and dickens' prose.".... .... here's the bio of the first author of the paper
> SUSAN CARLSON is a professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature,
jimbokun 22 hours ago [-]
Delightful indeed, and shocked that an English major would struggle with that text.
kurthr 22 hours ago [-]
Exactly, what exactly is an English major going to do, if YA novels are the pinnacle of reading achievement? I'm baffled, and reading more about it, concerned.
mock-possum 21 hours ago [-]
I guess I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for being able to easily read through this aloud. What exactly would people struggle with here?
amiga386 21 hours ago [-]
Most people outside the UK, and a good portion inside, would not know:
- what Michaelmas is (it's a somewhat archaic Christian festival in September)
- what Michaelmas term is (and that it's specific to the upper courts of the UK, along with Hilary term, Easter term and Trinity term)
Did you know all of the above while reading the second sentence?
andrewf 18 hours ago [-]
I knew very little of this. I know about the Inns of Court, but I didn't know this was such an Inn; I know what a chancery court is (Delaware has them!) but similarly not that it applied in this case. I've no idea what Michaelmas is, but like Christmas, I assume it's an event and/or season which occurs periodically.
I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.
amiga386 10 hours ago [-]
I just wanted to get across that there's more detail to be wrung out of even the first line. You don't need to get all nuances on first read, but they're there. Dickens was known for his observational detail, and also he'd spent a lot of time in London courts on account of his father so knew all these terms well.
Everyone has their own comfort level with reading, and we do just skim things we think unimportant... I often do that until suddenly the book stops making sense, and I have to go back some pages and re-read things which I'd skipped that were clearly important. Different authors have different densities of load-bearing words.
I think it's forgivable if you gloss over this first line and think it might be set in a hotel during a holiday, with some random high-ranking person, because the next 800 pages will make it pretty clear it's about a court. But I am worried that these students, hoping to get an degree in English, would rather guess what's being said, when they had the opportunity to look things up. An afternoon on Wikipedia would do them a world of good.
psychoslave 14 hours ago [-]
LOL no. But I'm sure I would be just unable to read many online forum topics build on its own intimate subculture without as much clarification from insiders.
Court esoterism is just as blatantly bland in its behavior as in any other human group carrying nothing but prestige and a will to mystify outsiders. Elaborate vocabulary to fill the space around a void core. Much ado for nothing.
kurthr 22 hours ago [-]
I've talked to a few high school and young college students in the last few years to get a feeling for what pandemic and LLMs have done to education, but this seems near apocalyptic to me. An inability for a majority of English majors to read 19th century literature, or for their teachers to even bother teaching with books? I think the students I've been talking to have given me a false sense of hope.
the "soft bigotry of low expectations" has come for AP classes and college curriculums.
amiga386 21 hours ago [-]
> What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably?
Yeah about that, that was a tiny study. 85 undergrads from two Kansas universities. Kansas isn't renowned for its universities. And this study was done in 2015 (11 years ago!), only published 2 years ago.
"58%" is 49 undergrads. "5%" is 4 undergrads. I think it's massively unrepresentative of students at large.
It's a very entertaining paper, as it goes into the juicier parts of the subjects' think-alouds, and analyses why the problematic readers were problematic readers. What's especially infuriating is they were told they could look up the internet if they wanted, and many chose to guess wrongly what something meant, rather than look it up. Perhaps they're not only bad at reading but also bad at searching. Today I suspect those people would be heading straight for the AI to tell them what to think.
herodoturtle 1 days ago [-]
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
Loved that.
shermantanktop 1 days ago [-]
He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
linkregister 1 days ago [-]
The scientific method is inherently introspective. Studies seek to affirm or falsify the null hypothesis. Those studies are subject to peer review. Verification and falsifiability are baked into every step.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
JoshTriplett 1 days ago [-]
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.
There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.
> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.
AlexandrB 1 days ago [-]
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
Maybe this was true at one point but I don't think modern literary culture has much capacity to be introspective. The politicization of academia hit the liberal arts harder than anywhere else[1], and when it comes to politically charged topics there's little room for disagreement left. Introspection is not possible if questioning the status quo can be a career-ender[2].
Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.
juancn 1 days ago [-]
I think his anger was just a wounded ego. He reduces his argument to an ad-hominem and sleight of hand mostly.
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power of his station.
pdonis 1 days ago [-]
I sympathize to an extent with Leavis's anger, but also with Snow's reaction. As you note, Leavis represents bad aspects of the humanities as much as Snow, in Leavis's view, represents bad aspects of science (or perhaps "scientism" would be a better word). Neither of them, to me, comes off looking very good after this exchange.
vixen99 1 days ago [-]
> Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them
As in 'Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow "is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity", and ‘portentously ignorant’. This must be an example of what Wikipedia reports from one critic 'the passionate advocate degenerated into the hectoring bigot.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis
jareklupinski 1 days ago [-]
> ... otherwise Britain will sunset before its time, like the decadent Doges of the long-lost Venetian Republic ...
i love it when history rhymes
culi 23 hours ago [-]
Except for this empire, the decadence was extremely concentrated. By Gini coefficient, even Rome was more equal
jimbokun 22 hours ago [-]
That’s a bracing statement and wondering if you have a citation for it?
jruohonen 1 days ago [-]
And his actual book on the two cultures is worth reading too (and only 54 p.).
1998! Almost 30 years later, we're living in a Third Culture world. Look at Tesla door handles, addictive consumption apps, Flock cameras, LLMs... the consequences of elevating the incurious, impatient, and output-obsessed.
tropdrop 1 days ago [-]
It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
watwut 1 days ago [-]
There just might be an empirical fact that when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all scientist" or "all intelectuals", that person is just full of it.
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
bilbo0s 1 days ago [-]
>when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all [ anyone ]", that person is just full of it.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
TheOtherHobbes 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
1 days ago [-]
brianritz 1 days ago [-]
Michael Boland writing in New Polity recently pinned down this difference to a modern “forgetting” of Aristotle’s Final and Formal causes in favor of a flattened, horizontal worldview that only sees material and proximate (efficient) causes. The way Leavis went ad hominem didn’t help him make his point, but he had an important message: to philosophically reduce everything to concepts addressable by a scientific worldview is to produce a kind of death. It is to produce what C.S. Lewis called “Men without chests”—-men lacking zoe, life.
Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that it doesn’t quite make sense that things have intrinsic “being” and “ends” to which they are objectively and irrevocably oriented. It’s ultimately all raw material to be fashioned to purpose. This was demonstrated in a small way in a recent thread on Magnifica Humanitas.
The dichotomy is particularly important at this moment given that many of Leavis’ disposition see AI as the final technological embodiment of Snow’s worldview. If you see only efficient and material causes (and I’d argue even material causes are on their way out given cultural developments towards trans humanism), then AI is a smarter, more capable person (person being defined by what they can do, or effect in the world). If we leave out form and ends, then we will have birthed the first creation that surpasses the creator, on his own terms, in all ways. Someone of Leavis’ persuasion might say, “AI is a facsimile intelligence. Worse, a fraudulent intelligence. One that is missing the very essence of what it means to be intelligent, because “to be intelligent” entails relationship, and care, and ultimately love of the other who shares in your intelligence. The very meaning of intelligent “output” relies on this relationship being present, which is impossible for a cold, formless machine that renders tokens instead of words.”
Levitz 17 hours ago [-]
>Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that it doesn’t quite make sense that things have intrinsic “being” and “ends” to which they are objectively and irrevocably oriented. It’s ultimately all raw material to be fashioned to purpose.
But it's not? Technology has progressed, sure, and with that material reality changes. It enables stuff, doesn't dictate the use it gets.
I can absolutely understand a defense of the humanities based on human appreciation, life, subjective beauty, whatever you want to call it. Life is more than an optimization game.
...But then it should adhere itself to that. This simply is not the case, under this pretense, the social sciences are an exhaustive argument in favor of Snow's position.
It is no coincidence that in academia there's problems in one side that are much less prevalent in the other. Nor that it was the humanities who started taking the name of science for credibility.
jimbokun 22 hours ago [-]
The accelerationists are the ultimate result of taking Snow’s argument too its ultimate conclusion.
lo_zamoyski 1 days ago [-]
Thomistic and Catholic intellectual tradition in general has long recognized this strange intellectual fragmentation which it does not itself suffer. It is not a matter of mere difference of temperament, because reality is what it is. One may take one perspective or another, but there remains one reality. The fragmentation is rather the result of intellectual error and error that is historically rather recent.
Each special field or domain focuses on a particular aspect of reality. Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is not merely an available and defensible stance in the ring, but an incoherent position to begin with. The central claim of scientism—that empirical science is the only source of knowledge—is itself not a scientific claim and not one that empirical science can demonstrate. To establish the correctness of this proposition requires us to step outside or above empirical science in order to make empirical science itself an object of study. But as soon as we do that, we have by that very act disproven scientism. One can only wonder how such a basic philosophical error fails to figure into the reasoning of scientism's advocates, especially given the failure of logical positivism which crashed and burned for very similar reasons.
So, to reject scientism isn't to reject science for what it truly is. It is to reject sola scientia.
The solution to the problem must occur on a philosophical plane. Only on a philosophical plane can we ask (and answer!) "what does empirical science actually tell us?" or "what is the knowledge the humanities give us?". Only on a philosophical plane can be talk about metaphysics and the nature of being (where metaphysics is the general science, while all the others are special sciences). Only philosophy allows us to relate and to locate the fruits of every field in the larger patchwork of human knowledge.
nyeah 1 days ago [-]
>Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is [...] incoherent
Snow seems like a deep thinker to me. I think it's a mistake to attribute scientism to him. (Fair disclosure, I'm a bit of a CP Snow fan boy. But at least I've read a lot of his stuff.)
BoingBoomTschak 1 days ago [-]
Interesting article. While there's a lot to criticize about Snow's talk - that techno-optimism has aged very badly, after all - I think he's right that too many scientist types lack true artistic interest and thus insight going beyond a "neat!" while reading Herbert or listening to prog rock.
But I don't think the problem concerns scientists much more than the general intellectual class; yes, even amongst so-called literature or philosophy intellectuals. Learned but not wise is the recurring motif and I doubt anything can be done about a "problem" that's always been.
Levitz 17 hours ago [-]
>that techno-optimism has aged very badly, after all
There is no way that the kind of progress that happened in the last 60 years doesn't make it into the history books for centuries, very probably millenia.
I'm just utterly lost as to how someone can actually say this, I could bring up numbers on hunger, or child mortality, or the enormous, mind-boggling in degree, improvements in the quality of life of the average person, or how absolutely crazy the concept of taking progress for granted is.
It'd be easier to convince me that grass is blue.
juancn 1 days ago [-]
Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
...his confrontation between Snow and Leavis – two dramatically different thinkers, representing traditions long in tension – gets at something more fundamental than
the worn phrase that survived it: our deepest and conflicting temperaments towards life.
Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers
Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.
According to the English novelist Anthony Powell, C P Snow was affable, and rather humourless, the sort of man who gladly recognised a joke in conversation...
bluGill 1 days ago [-]
I have long had the policy that I close the window as soon as those pop up. I'm hoping that enough people join me that eventually somebody finds data that a significant (minority) of people just close them and so they are not worth it.
jaggederest 1 days ago [-]
I have a similar policy - tab closed on 2nd nag, so if there's an inline subscribe box and the overlay pops up, I'm out. Fighting the good behavioral fight, but I don't expect us to win, it's just about saving myself the brainpower. Same for dark patterns - they're clearly unserious, so I'll take my business elsewhere.
BeetleB 1 days ago [-]
Same here. If it's really interesting I'll try Reader Mode. Otherwise I close the tab. I'm not going to waste my time figuring out where to click to get rid of it.
nelsonfigueroa 1 days ago [-]
Maybe I've been desensitized by all the "Subscribe now" pop ups that take over your entire browser, but seeing the subscription box inline with the rest of the text didn't bother me too much.
juancn 1 days ago [-]
I kinda am for shorter, shallower content that I'll likely skim over, but this article is a properly written essay and the contrast is just jarring.
satvikpendem 1 days ago [-]
They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. People have been complaining about these sorts of popups for nigh two decades now and it still continues to happen.
JoshTriplett 1 days ago [-]
And cigarette companies wouldn't have manipulated the levels of nicotine in their cigarettes if it didn't work.
satvikpendem 23 hours ago [-]
Correct, however one is a physically addictive substance incomparable to being mildly inconvenienced by a popup.
culi 23 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of dark patterns rampant throughout the digital world that are comparable to physical addiction schemes.
In fact WCAG 3.0 might address them head on as an accessibility issue
>So, what of the two cultures today?
Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world!
>Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life?
To me this comes to mind: feeling, intuition, thinking, active, moving, creative, danger, the highs and the lows. Not-Life is the efficient modern world, the commoditized, reactive, standardized, efficient, safe, low-risk, smooth featureless extrusions of a massive system.
n.b. Dresser has things mixed up here about Jimi Hendrix. Interesting read which, of course, gets to Life: http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/5/confessions-of-a-lapsed-l...
>It involves, in the Laurentian manner, life, lived, with intensity, experienced with full consciousness in a real, a very real, organic and intense way.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes —gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
>Michaelmas term lately over
I had no idea that "Michaelmas" was even a thing. Nor do I think I have ever encountered the formulation of "term lately over"
>As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth
This puzzled me, as I'd imagine, if there's no water, there surely would be no mud. Apparently a reference to the great flood which makes it make sense.
>and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus
This one was funny since I properly understood (I think?) that it's meant to give a feeling of the savage, untamed, natural feel of the elements taking over London. But then I thought a reference to a Megalosaurus couldn't possibly be that. And it seems it is?
The rest was way easier, although I had to make sure what "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire" meant.
- what Michaelmas is (it's a somewhat archaic Christian festival in September)
- what Michaelmas term is (and that it's specific to the upper courts of the UK, along with Hilary term, Easter term and Trinity term)
- where Lincoln's Inn or its hall is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%27s_Inn#Old_Hall)
- what an "inn" is in this context (i.e. the Inns of Court are not hostelries)
- what position the Lord Chancellor holds in UK law and politics
- that the name of the role derives from being head of the Court of Chancery (which at the time sat in Lincoln's Inn hall)
- what a chancery court does (it awards equitable reliefs)
- why such a court is needed (equitable remedies provide what legal remedies cannot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equitable_remedy)
Did you know all of the above while reading the second sentence?
I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.
You read the paragraph a lot better than most of the students being referenced by the GP (https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-92234...) but there was still more to be had.
Everyone has their own comfort level with reading, and we do just skim things we think unimportant... I often do that until suddenly the book stops making sense, and I have to go back some pages and re-read things which I'd skipped that were clearly important. Different authors have different densities of load-bearing words.
I think it's forgivable if you gloss over this first line and think it might be set in a hotel during a holiday, with some random high-ranking person, because the next 800 pages will make it pretty clear it's about a court. But I am worried that these students, hoping to get an degree in English, would rather guess what's being said, when they had the opportunity to look things up. An afternoon on Wikipedia would do them a world of good.
Court esoterism is just as blatantly bland in its behavior as in any other human group carrying nothing but prestige and a will to mystify outsiders. Elaborate vocabulary to fill the space around a void core. Much ado for nothing.
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/struggles-with-bleak-ho...
the "soft bigotry of low expectations" has come for AP classes and college curriculums.
Yeah about that, that was a tiny study. 85 undergrads from two Kansas universities. Kansas isn't renowned for its universities. And this study was done in 2015 (11 years ago!), only published 2 years ago.
"58%" is 49 undergrads. "5%" is 4 undergrads. I think it's massively unrepresentative of students at large.
abstract: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 full paper: https://www.scribd.com/document/868947219/project-muse-92234...
It's a very entertaining paper, as it goes into the juicier parts of the subjects' think-alouds, and analyses why the problematic readers were problematic readers. What's especially infuriating is they were told they could look up the internet if they wanted, and many chose to guess wrongly what something meant, rather than look it up. Perhaps they're not only bad at reading but also bad at searching. Today I suspect those people would be heading straight for the AI to tell them what to think.
Loved that.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.
There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.
> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.
Maybe this was true at one point but I don't think modern literary culture has much capacity to be introspective. The politicization of academia hit the liberal arts harder than anywhere else[1], and when it comes to politically charged topics there's little room for disagreement left. Introspection is not possible if questioning the status quo can be a career-ender[2].
[1] https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoli...
[2] https://www.fire.org/research-learn/sanctioned-scholars-pric...
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power of his station.
As in 'Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow "is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity", and ‘portentously ignorant’. This must be an example of what Wikipedia reports from one critic 'the passionate advocate degenerated into the hectoring bigot.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis
i love it when history rhymes
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that it doesn’t quite make sense that things have intrinsic “being” and “ends” to which they are objectively and irrevocably oriented. It’s ultimately all raw material to be fashioned to purpose. This was demonstrated in a small way in a recent thread on Magnifica Humanitas.
The dichotomy is particularly important at this moment given that many of Leavis’ disposition see AI as the final technological embodiment of Snow’s worldview. If you see only efficient and material causes (and I’d argue even material causes are on their way out given cultural developments towards trans humanism), then AI is a smarter, more capable person (person being defined by what they can do, or effect in the world). If we leave out form and ends, then we will have birthed the first creation that surpasses the creator, on his own terms, in all ways. Someone of Leavis’ persuasion might say, “AI is a facsimile intelligence. Worse, a fraudulent intelligence. One that is missing the very essence of what it means to be intelligent, because “to be intelligent” entails relationship, and care, and ultimately love of the other who shares in your intelligence. The very meaning of intelligent “output” relies on this relationship being present, which is impossible for a cold, formless machine that renders tokens instead of words.”
But it's not? Technology has progressed, sure, and with that material reality changes. It enables stuff, doesn't dictate the use it gets.
I can absolutely understand a defense of the humanities based on human appreciation, life, subjective beauty, whatever you want to call it. Life is more than an optimization game.
...But then it should adhere itself to that. This simply is not the case, under this pretense, the social sciences are an exhaustive argument in favor of Snow's position.
It is no coincidence that in academia there's problems in one side that are much less prevalent in the other. Nor that it was the humanities who started taking the name of science for credibility.
Each special field or domain focuses on a particular aspect of reality. Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is not merely an available and defensible stance in the ring, but an incoherent position to begin with. The central claim of scientism—that empirical science is the only source of knowledge—is itself not a scientific claim and not one that empirical science can demonstrate. To establish the correctness of this proposition requires us to step outside or above empirical science in order to make empirical science itself an object of study. But as soon as we do that, we have by that very act disproven scientism. One can only wonder how such a basic philosophical error fails to figure into the reasoning of scientism's advocates, especially given the failure of logical positivism which crashed and burned for very similar reasons.
So, to reject scientism isn't to reject science for what it truly is. It is to reject sola scientia.
The solution to the problem must occur on a philosophical plane. Only on a philosophical plane can we ask (and answer!) "what does empirical science actually tell us?" or "what is the knowledge the humanities give us?". Only on a philosophical plane can be talk about metaphysics and the nature of being (where metaphysics is the general science, while all the others are special sciences). Only philosophy allows us to relate and to locate the fruits of every field in the larger patchwork of human knowledge.
Snow seems like a deep thinker to me. I think it's a mistake to attribute scientism to him. (Fair disclosure, I'm a bit of a CP Snow fan boy. But at least I've read a lot of his stuff.)
But I don't think the problem concerns scientists much more than the general intellectual class; yes, even amongst so-called literature or philosophy intellectuals. Learned but not wise is the recurring motif and I doubt anything can be done about a "problem" that's always been.
There is no way that the kind of progress that happened in the last 60 years doesn't make it into the history books for centuries, very probably millenia.
I'm just utterly lost as to how someone can actually say this, I could bring up numbers on hunger, or child mortality, or the enormous, mind-boggling in degree, improvements in the quality of life of the average person, or how absolutely crazy the concept of taking progress for granted is.
It'd be easier to convince me that grass is blue.
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
In fact WCAG 3.0 might address them head on as an accessibility issue