Antonym: The Perplexities Edition
The main thing is that this doesn't seem like some asshole's newsletter.
Dear Reader
The past couple of weeks we’ve been grieving – and still are – the loss of my wife’s father. This isn’t the place for a eulogy, and we’re not ready to give his yet. The funeral date is yet to be set as there needs to be an inquest, as the cause of his illness was in all likelihood related to being exposed to asbestos as a young man. For now I will say he was a very special man to his family, and someone I admired deeply for his resolute determination, kindness and sense of humour. Rest in peace, Phil.
And now on with to our normal service of fact, fripperies and froth…
Fact of the week: Coca-Cola inspired an H G Wells novel
H G Wells wrote a satire of early twentieth-century wellness products pushed by canny marketing:
First published in 1908, Tono-Bungay is set largely in the booming Britain of the Victorian era, when a vast empire feeds the growing factories of the home country with raw materials, and the owners of new business fortunes must be accommodated by an entrenched aristocracy. The tale is narrated by young George Ponderevo, who by a stroke of fortune finds himself sent to live with his Uncle Edward, a small-town pharmacist. “Oh! one rubs along,” Edward says of his little business, in which he’s forever experimenting with schemes to boost sales. “But there’s no Development—no Growth. They just come along here and buy pills when they want ’em.... They’ve got to be ill before there’s a prescription. That sort they are.”
He was inspired by the invention of Coca-Cola, which was marketed first of all as a health drink.
Source: PWC’s Strategy + Business
Embrace your hummingbird-ish procrastination
Author and journalist Clive Thompson shared his technique for dealing with procrastination by seeing it as “focus fatigue”, just needing to do something different for a while, and keeping a few side projects, as different as possible from his main work, that he can switch to. Thompson credits the prolific engineer, Saul Griffith, for the technique:
Well, to start off with, Griffith notes that he too is a terrible procrastinator. He can’t stick to his to-do list. He’ll beaver away at his work attentively for a while, but then “focus fatigue” will creep in — and he’ll drift away.
But here’s the thing: Rather than fight these hummingbird tendencies, he works with them.
Thompson says that his own projects have included learning different kinds of coding and starting a paid-subscription newsletter including getting to grips with the technical and advertising elements, things that complement his main work of writing, but require very different modes of thinking.
I’ve done similar things in the past – learning to use Affinity Designer, and different generative AI platforms for instance – but in a haphazard, undirected way. Bookmarking these things as side projects and organising them a little seems like a very good idea.
Medieval marginalia breakdance
I love this AI-assisted animation from Brighton-based artist Eric Drass. See more in this vein on his website or the whole thing on YouTube:
Won’t someone think of the children’s boring homework
In Ancient Egyptian mythology, the god Thoth invented writing, and was immeidately told by a fellow deity that it would ruin men’s memories and ability to understand things properly. The lesson, according to one 19th century scholar:
…not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it. The husbandman will not seriously incline to sow his seed in such a hot-bed or garden of Adonis; he will rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. The natural process will be far nobler, and will bring forth fruit in the minds of others as well as in his own.
(Stop giggling at the back about the hot-bed of Adonis, this is a serious newsletter.
There are uncanny parallels with some reactions to generative AI, the technology that can write things for you, though not always reliably, originally or accurately.
With the rise in access to text generation AIs like ChatGPT, there’s a mini-moral panic around students using such platforms to “cheat” by writing their essays and homework for them.
Anti-AI AI
One way to fight back against the imagined deluge of AI-written homework is a tool called GPTZero, which detects “perplexities”, a lovely word in itself which is the term for the randomness of the language chosen to make a sentence, and “burstiness”, a less lovely word which describes the variation in perplexity. (No, me neither.) The strapline for GPTZero is:
No copyeditors or designers were harmed in the making of this Helvetica on brown website. The “Accurately” is begging for a full-stop. Also “plagiarism” should be a contentious word in this context. If I write a forecast using a spreadsheet am I plagiarising Microsoft Excel? If I process a digital image am I plagiarising Adobe Lightroom?
Is there a better frame for thinking about how AI might be used in learning? Probably. When I was at school calculators were banned in maths exams and then they were allowed and then certain models of scientific calculator were banned. I’m not sure of the current state of play, but I am pretty sure that calculators are a necessary tool of maths.
GPTZero detects AI-written text sometimes. In some tests I ran it spotted the AI copy about half the time, which is not that different to a human in my experience so far. Stanford AI scientist Dr Jim Fan tweeted the other day about the suggestion that ChatGPT would “watermark” its generated texts to make them easier to spot.
I don’t know why they’d bother. A ChatGPT watermark would be a gesture, a feature which students will find ways around, by:
Using another AI platform – ChatGPT is hugely popular but not the only one out there.
Using ChatGPT and then using another AI / app to re-write the tone of voice.
Essay vendors will use it to generate better / more essays then re-write them / edit them in human style.
Might being able to write an essay with AI well and accurately end up being a useful skill, like using a calculator to do advanced mathematics. A way of speeding up the cognitive drudgery of essay writing and skipping straight to the thinking conceptually or exploring ideas. How to spot “cheating” in the meantime may well be a distraction?
All of this is reminds me a little of Mouse Jiggler Syndrome (see Antonym: The Mouse Jigglers Edition): a surveillance arms race between employers and employees to check that they are using their computers as a proxy for being present and doing work. It’s the wrong thing to measure, the wrong response to the challenges and opportunities of a new technology.
Watching my two children go through the UK’s secondary school examinations in recent years, it seems as much focus and effort goes into being good at exams as being adept at using the skills and knowledge that they gain in their chosen subjects. To some extent this has always been the case, but now the social media and web infrastructure around this is mind-boggling. For example, and this is typical not exceptional, within an hour of one of GCSE exam (the UK’s 16+ national exams) last summer there was an hour long YouTube video analysing the questions, the marks distribution, what successful tactics would have been, and commentary on errors that the exam board had made in issuing advice ahead of the test.
Stories…
Image: An icy morning parkrun in Preston Park, Brighton
We’re natural born storytellers and seekers of stories. But sometimes we forget.
Last Brilliant Noise had one of its regular team gatherings. One of our objectives for 2023 is around telling stories, both to clients and internally so we themed the session around stories.
Looking through my notes for some choice quotes about telling stories I found three that were from sources I’d not expected.
Senior journalist at The Economist, Ken Cukier wrote a book about how we use different frames to understand the world. Stories are everything to framing:
Salt and sugar light up the human appetite in a primal way; stories do the same thing for our minds. – Kenneth Cukier et al, Framers
In the team day you could see it on in the faces and body language of everyone there. As soon as a story started to be told – whether an anecdote about lost dog or a tear-jerking sequence from a Pixar film – once the story was a few moments in we were immersed in it, pulled in, locked on to it.
Stories, good ones, ones that have the right signals are clues that there is useful new information to be gained, or old information of which it will be useful to be reminded. To extend the food metaphor, stories smell good, and new stories smell irresistible. As Chantel Prat, neuroscientist and author of The Neuroscience of You puts it: your brain decides before you’re even aware of it that there’s something valuable here. The dopamine kicks in and you are all in for the story.
In Framers, Cukier describes stories as tools for trying out different frames and possible realities:
They are a platform to contemplate scenarios of alternative realities and how humans act within them. They help us evaluate options and prepare decisions. In this way, they expand and improve our framing skills. As we create or listen to stories of alternative worlds, we use our imagination to act them out in our minds. We think about what follows in a particular situation, about what to do, or not do. When we say that a story “pulls us in,” we really mean it: our mind is absorbed by the imagery of an alternative world, sensing it almost as if it were reality itself. Just a few sentences can conjure up a rich mental image.
We often see good stories in our minds eyes, and the more attractive the theme and deft the descriptions we are immersed in the story within moments. This doesn’t just hold true for fiction or anecdotes – a formal article can be be story-like. One of the best compliments I ever heard from a copyeditor I respected was “I’m getting lots of visuals”. It was an opinion piece about business operations, a dry subject in some ways, but imagery and metaphor activated the story senses. This is always possible.
This week I’m…
Watching
Three-Body (Tencent/YouTube): This Chinese TV adaptation of The Three Body Problem trilogy of books by Ciu Xin Liu, has arrived eleven whole months before the Netflix version (scheduled for December 3rd) developed by the show runners from Game Of Thrones (some attribute their distraction with this project as the reason GoT lost interest in its own plot during the final season). But even these two may not be the only versions to come out:
According to Variety:
Tencent nabbed the rights to adapt the story into a TV series way back in 2008. Now, its version is entering a crowded playing field.
There are at least two other “Three-Body Problem” adaptations in the works in China, including a film backed by IP rights holder Yoozoo Group that may have fallen permanently to the wayside and an animated take from Gen Z- and anime-leaning platform Bilibili.
The Tencent version was described to me as “very faithful to the book”, which it did seem to be in the half an episode I endured before needing a bit of a break (I’m not sure I will carry on). Staying close to the text may not be such a good thing in this case.
The Three Body Problem trilogy of books by Cixin Liu is an incredible epic, but works as a series of incredible, mind-bending concepts playing out on the largest possible scale. Just when you have adjusted to him turning your understanding of the world on its head, he does it again. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a fairground waltzer – throwing you first this way and then that with no pause to draw breath in between. But similarly with so many sci-fi writers, what he doesn’t do so much of is character development and dialogue.
It’s presentation on YouTube may not help either – there’s effectively a double layer of ads: the irritating locally targeted ones from YouTube and then regular Chinese ad breaks break up the action. I hate ads on TV anyway, but this level of interruption is severely off-putting. You can apparently subscribe for an ad-free version via the Tencent app (new to me) which I may have to try out.
The Last Of Us (Sky / HBO / NowTV): It will be interesting to see how the Netflix commissioned The Three Body Problem version handles the story and makes it into something that can be enjoyed on TV. The Last Of Us, gives hope that something interesting can be achieved. Despite being about zombies (yes another one) and being adapted from a video game (which rarely works) it is great fun and doesn’t lose the thread of its story among big ideas and nods to the source material.Women At War (Netflix) has had blockbuster national TV money lavished on it (similar, but after a snappy start fails miserably to be hold attention. It’s like a modern propaganda film, with weeping families waving heroes off to war for long sequences over-dressed with massive orchestral pieces, which is weird for a first episode when we have yet to develop much depth of feeling for the characters.
Succession: Faced by so many duds, I returned to the modern classic Succession’s third season and my favourite episode “Too Much Birthday”.
Key quote from a character’s obscenely lavish 40th birthday party:
It feels like an asshole’s birthday party and my thing from the very first meeting was that it shouldn’t feel like an asshole’s birthday party.
It’s a good time to rewatch Succession – homework for its fourth season which starts March 27.
Bonus link: check out this short making-of video about the “Too Much Birthday” episode.
Listening…
My latest regular podcast listen is strictly for the media and marketing types, as it gets fairly technical at times. People Vs. Algorithms takes the form of a friendly but spiky chat between three grizzled veterans of tech, advertising and media. It’s unpretentious and fresh in its skeptical pragmatism about the industry and how the money and algorithms wend and warp. Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting newsletter was my gateway drug for this podcast, so if you like that or are in its niche audience, it’s absolutely excellent.
Elsewhere, my usuals Pivot and The Rest Is History are off to a strong start in 2023. Kermode and Mayo’s The Take is good, but something’s been lost in its translation from BBC to independent podcast.
That’s it for this week…
Thank you for reading — let us know if you liked it or… oh, you’ve gone.
Antony
I’m watching Three Body on the Viki app on AppleTV which is a much nicer viewing experience! I’m six episodes in and it is just as slow as the book but finding its stride.