Time for another assortment of rants and rambles! Today we have a breakdown of why “oh my god” is probably OK with a Christian god, what good numbers really are, and a couple of rants about AI.
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anti-“oh my god” people need to understand vanity
In a world of unprecedented access to our own images, we’ve managed to distort what vanity actually is. An IG reel (no one will ever make me download tiktok) from a Christian influencer questioned and criticized her own use of the term “oh my god” as it “takes the name of the lord in vain.” While the distortion of vanity from social media is relatively recent, the misalignment from religion has existed at least since the crusades.
Vanity is self-serving, in service of ones own goals or achievements. I don’t see a problem with “oh my god” because it’s a figure of speech that offers nothing to its speaker other than self-expression. In contrast, using religion as a means to colonize is vain. Calling yourself a “good Christian” to gain political favor is vain. The entire point is that you do not use the image or idea of the lord in pursuit of yourself or your image. “Oh my god” does not fit the definition, though I suppose you can feel some type of way about it.
As an aside, vanity from social media-use occurs because we were simply not designed to see or think of ourselves this much. This focus on the self detracts from community and ultimately serves tech oligarchs. More than that though, rumination often leads to depression, and this sort of repetitive thinking about appearance IS rumination.
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these are my comfort numbers!!
My career in data and systems engineering classes made me keenly aware of exactly how much faith you should not have in data. When numbers are peer reviewed, the methods are studied, and the people are experienced, they can usually be trusted. Everything else is suspect.
In my days as an analyst, I realized that the way you defined a metric mattered far more than what the metric was. You can make these numbers sing or scream. Whenever I see leaders who focus on numbers in places where quality matters objectively more, like output, I know that these are comfort numbers. The vibes are bad, and they want any evidence of the contrary. Oftentimes, they twist the number to fit a decision or judgment they’ve already made. The numbers are mere comfort to assuage the doubts they’ve gathered in a rotten economy.
Look no further than the collared drones that roam the hallowed halls of consultancies like McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte. With few (if any) exceptions, these consultants will solve your problems with one of three solutions:
- Cut costs: either with cheaper materials, fewer employees, or worse benefits
- Increase revenue: either with raised prices, the illusion of a premium product, or just straight up market manipulation
- Rebrand: because obviously Facebook and Meta are completely different (heavy sarcasm)
The goal of consulting (and most businesses today) isn’t to create value; it’s to create the illusion of value that you then sell to others. This is more or less the basis of the Hype Economy. Numbers can only be as accurate as what they’re measuring is objective. If I measure the loudness of a scream based on how much it hurts my ears on a scale of 1-10, it doesn’t mean much. This is why we measure sound in decibels. The cost of something beyond labor and materials is mainly greed and figuring out how much people are willing to pay.
Anyway, all of this to say that a lot of the desire to be “data-driven” lies in the desire to feel comfortable about bad or immoral decisions. I also see a very loose thread tying the comfort numbers to manufactured consent, but that’s a post for another day.
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another anti-AI rant
Of all the things we could’ve off-loaded to machines, why did people choose expression? Art and writing are forms of self-expression, ones which require practice to hone. There is no practice with AI, especially one which you do not train yourself. The world is full of yellow and em-dashes. It’s sad, because I love em-dashes and now I’m censoring myself so that people don’t confuse me for the droids. They don’t suffer through these words like I do. They don’t reason like I do—and they may not reason at all.
As our reasoning atrophies and these models progress, we’ll continue to dig ourselves into still deeper holes. We’ll have to tackle both tough questions like what constitutes consciousness and insane discourse like if vegans can use Grok 6.7 or if you can cheat on your boyfriend with Claude. Also people will inevitably break confidentiality agreements or accidentally disclose national/trade secrets.
Of all the modernities warming the planet, this is definitely the worst. It’s over-inflating egos and economic bubbles, both of which we will have to clean up when they inevitably burst. This hype has also embedded itself in everything, even where it doesn’t belong. “AI” is more than automation. Whenever I see a product like a spam-filter marketed as “now having AI”, I think about how we had just as effective spam filters before. What is AI adding, other than a degree to our climate projections?
more reasons AI sucks
As if it wasn’t bad enough that AI is killing the environment, it’s killing our critical thinking abilities. It’s killing people’s relationships. It’s covering the world (online and physically) in graphics with a horrid yellow tint. It’s devaluing education as a whole—though that was already in a downswing for commodification reasons.
In Antarctica, I happened upon not one but TWO climate activists using ChatGPT for easily google-able questions. A gracious interpretation would chalk this up to ignorance, and a less favorable one to vanity. Still, it feels a little hypocritical. I’m far from an activist, but I’m aware of the huge environmental impact of on the ice we were literally standing on. AI is polluting the climate activists themselves!
Advocacy has always ebbed and flowed through history, but art is constant. Now, it feels like a constant barrage of terrible art by terrible people. Personally, I am of the opinion that artists have to suffer at least a little for the art. I agonize over word choice and design and hosting options on this site. This isn’t magnificent, but not all art has to be. In Florianópolis though, I met a man who told me he was an artist. When I asked his medium, he said AI. The most impressive thing in that moment was how quickly any attraction I had disappeared.
My love of learning has persisted through time, but that love is fueled by curiosity that smolders inside of me. Questions often float around my head, and there’s value in them being held and not answered. Mulling over many of those questions ended up yielding some of (what I consider to be) my best writing. Even beyond education, AI seems to be killing the last vestiges of curiosity, discernment, and critical thought. I would condemn it to hell, but I fear that’s an inevitability in this climate crisis.
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Readings from around the web
- The Contrarian: How reality TV perpetuates the myth of the American dream
- Luisa (substack): I’m smart and I need everyone to know it
- NYT: A Century Ago, Adolescents Weren’t Fully Human
- NYT: They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
- Ed Zitron: The Haters Guide to the AI Bubble
- CNN: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
