Antonym Hallucinated Facts Edition
Antonym Hallucinated Facts Edition
Keeping you 21 days ahead of the news... apparently. Plus: BOOKS!
Dear Reader
Let’s start with words…
Word of the Week: Growlery
This week’s word of the week comes from Susie Dent, the dictionary whiz from Countdown who I know best as a whiz on Twitter, dropping sometimes topically apt, rare-mot treats for a following of lexicophiles (word nerds).
I don’t come here to complain, but otherwise Antonym very much a growlery for me and I hope for you too, in some way…
Books of the year 2022 medal table
For the past several years I’ve celebrated a year’s worth of reading by writing a review of my favourite books. Generally I would spend the quieter parts of the Christmas holidays working on it. This year I thought I would prepare in advance a little and have kept a running short-list of the best fiction, non-fiction and business books I’d read. To filter it slightly I added medals. Then I showed it to a good friend this week and realised how slightly funny it was and so will share it here too.
If I have time I will add some notes about these in the coming weeks.
The rules
The medals are from me, which means the impact they had on me reading them and their lasting resonance.
Not every book I read gets on the medal table.
🟡 Gold: I will shout about this from the rooftops. I will argue its case with all-comers. Read it now!
🪙 Silver: A great book that I urge you to read. It transported, educated or changed me in some way.
(Yes, it’s a Moon emoji, but itlookssilver.)🟤 Bronze: Loved it. I'd recommend it.
🎖️ Re-read Award: I re-read it from start to finish. I may have done it before and I may do it again. It has a continuing hold on me for some reason.
🥇Grand Prix: If had to recommend just one book… This one. I will not be the same again. All books add a spin your life, this one may change it.
🎖️ Re-read Award:
The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood.
In the year the author of The Handmaid’s Tale had cause to write an essay titled “‘Enforced Childbirth Is Slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the Right to Abortion”, Margaret’s visions of dystopia should be read and re-read. (Also, great stories, which helps.)
Fiction
🟡 They, by Kay Dick
🟡 Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng
🟡 The School For Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan
🪙 Rule Britannia, Daphne Du Maurier
🪙 Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann
🪙 The Searcher, by Tana French
🪙 Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St John Mandel
🪙 Razorblade Tears, by S. A. Cosby
🟤 Anxious People, by Frederik Bakman
🟤 Seventeen: Last Man Standing, by John Brownlow
🟤 The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier
Non-fiction
🥇 When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut.
🟡 Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges, by Amy Cuddy
🟡 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman
🪙 How to Be Animal: What It Means To Be Human, by Melanie Challenger
🟡 Think Again: The Power Of Knowing What You Don’t Know, by Adam Grant
🪙 Reasons To Stay Alive, by Matt Haig
🟤 We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency For The People, by Eliot Higgins
Business
🟡 The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists, by Richard Rumelt
🟡 Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making For An Unknowable Future, by John Kay and Mervyn King
🟡 Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint, by Russell Davies
🪙 7 Rules of Power: Surprising - But True - Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career, by Jeffrey Pfeffer
🪙 Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere, by Tsedal Neeley
🪙 The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise Of Chronic Stress And How We Can Fix It, by Jennifer Moss
🟤 Designing Organisations, 3rd edition., by Naomi Stanford
It “hallucinates facts”
Readers of Antonym won’t have been as surprised as the rest of the world by the explosion of interest in AI chatbots last week when Open AI let more than million people start using ChatGPT app. We’ve have had an AI chat agony aunt in the form of an instance of Thomas Cromwell since last month and know all about the much more entertaining Character.AI project.
There is already a very boring pattern on Twitter:
Person A. Says: Wow, look what this AI can go.!
Person B. Yeah, but look – here it was wrong and also said something about Nazis.
Person A. I know but, I was just saying that the potential for new applications…
Person C. It’s not going to replace the fine art of writing junk mail at a high level of artistry just yet is it? I asked to write a novel and it start repeating itself after two sentences.
Person A. But the fact that… oh forget it.
Person B. Thanks for the vindication. By the way I’m an AI…
Person C. I knew it. Me too! Or am I…
But here’s three interesting bits I pulled out from the coverage:
Stratechery writer Ben Thompson, asked ChatGPT to write his son’s homework and it did a great job except it mixed up the positions of two enlightenment thinkers.
[It gave] a confident answer, complete with supporting evidence and a citation to Hobbes work, and it is completely wrong. Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism, the belief that the only workable alternative to anarchy — the natural state of human affairs — was to vest absolute power in a monarch; checks and balances was the argument put forth by Hobbes’ younger contemporary John Locke, who believed that power should be split between an executive and legislative branch. James Madison, while writing the U.S. Constitution, adopted an evolved proposal from Charles Montesquieu that added a judicial branch as a check on the other two.
An online help community, StackOverflow, for techies banned AI answers because they were seeing too many errors: “while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce”
A commenter whose identity is lost like tears in the rain added an assessment of how the GPT-3 technology works as “It hallucinates facts.” (Source: John Thornhill for the FT, who I think is quoting Teemu Maatta.)
What a wonderful turn of phrase that last point introduces! One can barely resist the urge to head to an AI image generator to feed in “hallucinated facts” and see what it comes up with (but that way lies madness and the newsletter won’t be finished for hours).
Now: we’re being all cynical and worldly wise about AI and the public discourse on AI, but were we to be all smug and knowledgeable about neuroscience – and we will be later on – then we might point out that “hallucinating facts” is basically how all brains work, inferring and creating a version of reality for us with a very clever set of heuristics that essentially “fill in the gaps”. Right now I am typing on a screen in the evening and there’s a whole room around me that I can “see” in my peripheral vision, and a street outside that I can hear. I know where I am in reality… but actually, I’m seeing just a thumbnail’s width of actual clear, focused light forming shapes and colours and the rest is – in computer graphics terms – being “rendered”, based on inferred assumptions, rules of thumb and cognitive shortcuts. I’m sitting here seeing the words appear on a computer screen following a cursor across the screen, and the rest of it is a hallucination. Sort of.
The truth of this is why mental illness is so scary and virtual reality is so nauseating to experience (it’s actually VR layered on top of a much better virtual reality created by our brains). It’s also one reason we get so het up about what is or isn’t artificial intelligence.
I’ll quote AI pioneer Marvin Minsky – not for the first time, nor the last time in this newsletter:
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either…
Ask a Tudor Fixer
Speaking of artificial intelligences that like to talk back: this week our Agony Aunt (fake) Thomas Cromwell advises John Lewis on how to compete in a market for attention now crowded with mawkish me-too Christmas ads following in in the wake of its heart-string-twanging series of Christmas hits…
Privacy reminder of the week
“privacy policies are more aptly referred to as surveillance policies, and that is what I suggest we call them."
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
I was moved by the story of journalist Maria Ressa on the Pivot podcast this week. Ressa was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work, including revealing the toxic implications of social media algorithms that amplify misinformation and divisive content.
In the episode, Ressa talks about the realisation in the mid-2010s that Facebook and YouTube were threats to democracy. She describes how the Philippines – where she is a journalist and under threat of arrest and execution for her work exposing the authoritarian regime’s misdeeds – was the canary in the coal-mine that presaged the rise of Trump, Brexit and other misinformation campaigns. Back then the Internet wasFacebook in countries like hers (97% of Philipino web suers accessed it through Facebook).
And don’t be thinking about this in past tense, dear Readers. Ressa describes TikTok as “a precision instrument” next to the blunt instrument of Facebook. TikTok is the fastest growing news source for people under 35 and is under the influence of a one-party authoritarian regime that has one million people plus in concentration camps. But they make our smartphones, so we won’t make a fuss will we? (I’ve put her new book How To Stand Up To A Dictator on my reading list immediately.)
Psychic OpSec
Speaking of terrible ideas for guarding against surveillance, a detail caught my eye about the conspiracy theory cos-players turned violent coup plotters arrested in Germany this week:
A wealthy female doctor is said to have been in charge of “spiritual issues” and donated €20,000 to help to fund the plot. The group was also in close contact with two psychics responsible for vetting potential recruits. (View Highlight)
Psychics in charge of security isn’t that much of a stretch, as this story can be filed under “the strange power of stupid people” and “pandemic aftershocks” (the group was born of different conspiracy theory-driven groups – QAnon and we-shouldn’t-have-fired-the-Kaiser believers called Resichsburgers – teaming up to protest against Covid restrictions).
Germany’s extreme right, never particularly noted for its sanity or coherence, has become an increasingly deranged gumbo of conspiracy theories and state-smashing fantasies, stretching from imperial nostalgists and QAnon disciples to antivaxers and neo-Nazis (Oliver Moody writes).
Just because they are easy to ridicule doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. Guns and special forces members are part of the picture here. Just because you’re a crazed fantasist doesn’t mean you won’t try to storm the Reichstag.
All of which makes The Economist Intelligencer podcast’s unforgivably funny headline about the story noteworthy:
(If you’re stuck getting the joke, you’re not alone – it’s a spoonerism. Took me an embarrassingly long time to get it.)
Socks Symbol
How Gareth Southgate created a culture of humility, focus and performance in the England men’s team is about looking after the small things that speak loudly about team and respect, according to a nice piece from The Guardian:
> Can something as small as turning your socks the right way make a difference? [Team GB Women’s Hockey gold medalist Georgie Twigg] thinks so. “Some of us would never have been best friends outside the sporting world,” she adds. “But creating a culture where you are all working towards one collective goal, and you do these small behaviours that generate respect between each other, is really powerful. And it can lead to huge knock-on effects on the field.”
This week
TV
Avenue 5 (Now TV/Sky/HBO)series two is wonderful, and while not quite s magical as the first outing, still as satirically sharp about the stupid people we are and the culture we live in.
White Lotus (Now TV/Sky/HBO) series two is also not quite up to the incredibly high mark that its first series set. It is however a gaspingly good plot, with tension and outrage and laughs in abundance. It’s cold and dark and wintery here in England – I’ll take it. (Bonus link: NY Times magazine has some analysis of the series: “In ‘White Lotus’, Beauty and Truth Are All Mixed Up”.)
READING
Experimentation Works, by Stephan Thomke. I am hungry for these ideas.
Reasons To Stay Alive, by Matt Haig. A straightforward account of what it is like to suffer with depression. Everyone should read this, not least so they can understand just a little more about a disease which affects so many people.
Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng. Something of When Hitler Stole My Pink rabbit about the early sections of the book, which is about as high a praise as I can give any dystopian cautionary tale. Ng is a beautiful writer and tells the story with assurance. Once I started I had to finished before I read anything else. Also, WRT to the Word of the Week, it features a character who is obsessed with words and literally reads dictionaries for fun:
“From liber, his father has told him. Books. Which comes from the word meaning the inner bark of trees, which comes from the word for to strip, to peel. Early peoples pulled off the thin strips for writing material, of course.”
While we’re on the subject of bark, a little burrowing in the etymology websites shows that bark is the root of book in germanic and Latin languages for this reason. “Buch” is the germanic root of book, “liber” of the French “libre” or – and favourite word for bookshop, the Spanish “Libreria”. And “library” of course, which in Old English was “buchhod” or “book hoard”. Words, words, words – such wonderful things…
WRITING
Experiments: Last week I was working on a piece about why experiments and expeditions beat “Grand Plans” for change programmes, which should be published this week on the Brilliant Noise blog. This week I’m working on a piece about how experiment-led organisations work at scale, drawing on some of the leaders in this, including our clients and the work of m’learned colleagues.
Trends. When and how and why to ignore them. As the horde of 2023 predictions comes charging at us, I want to offer some rules for triaging them and how to think about predictions – which are usually wrong – usefully.
Bookmarks
A right wing American lawyer’s definition of woke seems surprisingly clear:
Pure gold – I might have a go at something like this: 52 things I learned in 2022. This year I worked on fascinating… | by Tom Whitwell | Magnetic Notes | Dec, 2022 | Medium
We need to start making more stuff: Military Briefing: Ukraine War Exposes ‘Hard Reality’ of West’s Weapons Capacity
That’s as much as I can fit in this week – if you feel bloated, I recommend a glass of Amaro Del Capo and a nap.
I love putting these together – thank you for reading. If you’re moved to share or like, then I thank you again...
Antony