Year: 2013

James Somers profiles Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, “the bible of artificial intelligence.” Though Hofstadter seemed poised to become a leading figure in AI research after the publication of GEB in 1979, Somers observes that “then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared”:

He would increasingly find himself out of a mainstream that had embraced a new imperative: to make machines perform in any way possible, with little regard for psychological plausibility. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,” Hofstadter says. “That’s what we’re interested in—what is thinking?” Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force. For each legal move it could make at a given point in the game, it would consider its opponent’s responses, its own responses to those responses, and so on for six or more steps down the line. With a fast evaluation function, it would calculate a score for each possible position, and then make the move that led to the best score. What allowed Deep Blue to beat the world’s best humans was raw computational power. It could evaluate up to 330 million positions a second, while Kasparov could evaluate only a few dozen before having to make a decision.

Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory?

“Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?” A brand of AI that didn’t try to answer such questions—however impressive it might have been—was, in Hofstadter’s mind, a diversion. He distanced himself from the field almost as soon as he became a part of it. “To me, as a fledgling AI person,” he says, “it was self-evident that I did not want to get involved in that trickery. It was obvious: I don’t want to be involved in passing off some fancy program’s behavior for intelligence when I know that it has nothing to do with intelligence. And I don’t know why more people aren’t that way.”

Previous Dish on artificial intelligence here, here, and here.

While reading Darrin M. McMahon’s Divine Fury: A History of Genius, Popova tracks the evolution of the notion of uncommon brilliance:

This construction of genius as “a figure of extraordinary privilege and power,” McMahon argues, began in ancient Greece, where the era’s luminaries — poets, philosophers, politicians — first pondered the question of what makes a great man. (For, as McMahon explores in a later chapter, the original concept of genius was an exercise in cultural hegemony excluding women and various “others.”) The Romans picked up the inquiry where the Greeks had left off, seeking to understand what lent Julius Caesar his military might and why Homer could enchant as he did. This quest continued through Christianity, which attempted to answer it with the image of the God-man Christ, the ultimate genius. During the Renaissance, da Vinci and Michelangelo bent this fascination with Godlike genius through the lens of art, attempting both to capture it and to further illuminate its elusive nature.

And so we get to the modern genius. McMahon writes:

The modern genius was born in the eighteenth century—conceived, in keeping with long-standing prejudices, almost exclusively as a man. There were precedents for this birth, stretching all the way back to antiquity. But that the birth itself occurred in the bright place of deliverance we call “the Enlightenment” is clear. Scholars have long recognized the genius’s emergence in this period as the highest human type, a new paragon of human excellence who was the focus of extensive contemporary comment and observation.

What remains a mystery, however, is why the genius emerged in the first place, and why it did under those specific circumstances of time and place. Tracing scholars’ attempts to answer these questions, McMahon points to several factors, ranging from the rise of capitalism to the evolution of aesthetics to new models of authorship and selfhood. But his own explanation has to do with something else entirely: The religious change described as the “withdrawal from God” — a collective pulling back from spiritual companions, which opened up a space for humans to embrace self-reliance as we came to entrust ourselves with the fate of our civilization and our individual lives. That, in turn, catalyzed the birth of the modern genius — at once a stand-in for God and a testament to the human spirit at its highest potential.

Previous Dish on genius here.

John Ganiard defends the the much-maligned teenagers of Selfies At Funerals:

Inevitably, a funeral does make you think about yourself, about being alive and about being dead. … [I]sn’t vanity a defense against death? And isn’t dismissing a selfie as purely “vain” also dismissing this form of nascent inquiry and self-preservation? In the New York Times, Jenna Wortham wrote, “Rather than dismissing the trend as a side effect of digital culture or a sad form of exhibitionism, maybe we’re better off seeing selfies for what they are at their best – a kind of visual diary, a way to mark our short existence and hold it up to others as proof that we were here. The rest, of course, is open to interpretation.”

The face you send out from a funeral is just your face again, and still, a reminder to others of our self’s current aliveness is – somehow, no matter the circumstances, and perhaps at a funeral, uniquely so – a denial of the inescapable, a refraction of the dark light of death. At the least it’s a way of saying, “If I have to see this, then everybody else has to see it too.”

PJ Vogt scolds the blogosphere for jumping on the story:

It’s obvious how you’re supposed to feel about this. You’re supposed to laugh at the kids. The joke is that they’re so relentlessly narcissistic that even the death of a loved one is just another chance to post their pictures online. Gawker published a clickbait piece grabbing the photos and appending commentary:

Selfies at Funerals is the last tumblr you see before you die because your body will simply shut down once it realizes it’s being forced to share the same plane of existence with the kind of people who think it’s completely normal to snap selfies at funerals and upload them to social media sites with the caption ‘love my hair today, hate why I’m dressed up’ and the hashtag “#funeral.”

I’m exhausted by the practice of mining social networks for supposedly ignorant or narcissistic utterances by children and then publishing them online for adults to judge. Yes, the kids are speaking publicly, and in doing so they’ve somewhat disavowed their right to privacy. But is this the kind of adult you wanted to be? A person who is completely astounded that the younger generation doesn’t share their values. A person who has no curiosity about why young people might do things in a new or different way from you.

It’s one thing to write under the influence, but Nick Richardson admires a writer who can labor while hungover:

Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon ‘when the mind is at its best’. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier. Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the following morning. He famously wrote standing up: because his leg had been injured in the war, he said, but also to stop himself drifting off. Francis Bacon used to paint hungover, though not because his mind was sufficiently numb to be able to concentrate, but because it was revved up: ‘I often like working with a hangover,’ he said, ‘because my mind is crackling with energy and I can think very clearly.’ …

At the tamest end of the revver spectrum are the dozens of maestri who couldn’t get going without a cup of coffee. There are so many variations of ‘x got up, had a cup of coffee and sat down at his desk to work’ in Daily Rituals that it can feel, at times, a bit like Queneau’s Exercices de style as reimagined by a breakfast fetishist. At the more extreme end are people like Stravinsky, who used to pull handstands to get the blood to his head; Benjamin Franklin, who used to sit naked in his room for half an hour or so each morning, taking his bracing ‘air bath’; and Sartre, who would, every day, consume twenty Corydane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin fashionable in 1950s Paris, now banned.

Previous Dish on drinking and writing here, here and here.