Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
Do what makes you happiest.
Look upon what gives you joy.
Speak to those who warm your heart.
Listen to that which lifts your spirit.
Surround yourself with sights and sounds and people who give you pleasure.
For all the happiness you give to others all year long, give yourself a perfect day.
And then tomorrow, repeat the process.
Mohan Singh
When we are ready to make a new beginning, we will shortly find an opportunity. The same event could be a real new beginning in one situation and an interesting but unproductive by-way in another. The difference is whether the event is “keyed” or “coded” to that transition point, the way that electronic key cards are set to open a particular hotel room door. When the card code matches, the door opens and the whole thing happens as if it were scripted. When it doesn’t match, the event is just an event and you are still in the neutral zone. The neutral zone simply hasn’t finished with you yet.
What isn’t finished is the inner realignment and renewal of energy, both of which depend on your being immersed in the chaos of the neutral zone. It is as though the thing that you call “my life” had to return occasionally to a state of pure energy before it could take anew shape and gain new momentum.
William Bridges, Transitions
A follower is what he admires, or at least strives to be it. An admirer holds himself aloof, does not or will not discover that what he admires contains a demand upon him: the demand to be what he admires or at least to strive to become it.
Søren Kierkegaard
The following strategies can help you maintain a healthy balance between your expertise and AI assistance:
Generate rough drafts from notes, rather than from a blank page: It’s fine to generate drafts with AI, but do your thinking first, put together some structured notes, and treat AI-generated content as a first draft that requires critical review and substantial editing. This approach can help mitigate the risk of anchoring bias.
Rotate between AI-assisted and non-assisted writing: To develop and maintain your own writing skills, interweave AI tools into your writing workflow, rather than relying on them for chunks of text. This will also help you maintain your own voice.
Customize AI prompts: Learn to craft specific prompts that guide the AI to produce more relevant and useful outputs for your particular needs.
Ethical considerations: Be transparent about AI use, especially in academic writing, and follow any guidelines or policies set by your institution or publication venues.
Fact-check and verify: Always verify facts, citations and specific claims made by AI. These tools have a tendency to generate “hallucinations,” plausible-sounding but inaccurate chunks of information.
From The Transmitter
Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it. -Agatha Christie, born Sept. 15, 1890
When someone attempts to make you take responsible for their feelings, they are committing what psychologists call emotional blackmail. A parent uses this when telling a child, "You've hurt me so much," or when a spouse says, "You hurt my feelings.
It is placing responsibility for their emotional outcome on you—pretending you have control over something that you do not. The parent may choose to become angry or sulk or become bitter or irritable toward the child. Someone may claim your action justifies their emotion. But that person is still doing the choosing of their own emotions.
When you see a family tiptoe around the house because "we don't want to upset mother (or father)," then you have a family who has decided to make everyone responsible for a single person's feelings—taking on a burden they were never meant to carry. Each family member is responsible for his or her actions. It’s the wrong goal to aim at preventing someone from ever being upset.
Elizabeth Kenny once said, “Anyone who angers you conquers you.” To allow someone else to decide how you feel is abdicating your responsibility to define yourself. Don't allow someone else to sell you on the idea that you are responsible for what they feel. Don't blackmail those around you by threatening to unleash an emotional outburst for something you yourself created.
Stephen Goforth
Ted Chiang Is Wrong About AI Art It’s real. But it isn’t revolutionary. – The Atlantic
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art – The New Yorker
Create Better AI Images With These Expert Prompt Writing Tips – CNET
So long, point-and-click: How generative AI will redefine the user interface - ZDnet
Video game actors go on strike over AI protections – Semafor
Colin Kaepernick lost control of his story. Now he wants to help creators own theirs – Tech Crunch
The music industry is coming for AI – NPR
The AI artist who used Bad Bunny’s voice — and shot to fame – Rest of World
How to Write a Book with AI in 2024 – GeekyGadgets
AI can’t make music — but that doesn’t mean it poses an empty threat to musicians - The Atlantic
OpenAI rolls out voice mode after delaying it for safety reasons – Washington Post
India’s star audio content company is going all in on AI. Will listeners tune in? - Rest of World
New study on AI-assisted creativity reveals an interesting social dilemma – PsyPost
FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist – ArsTechnica
AI Is Coming for Amateur Novelists. That’s Fine – The Atlantic
Four rules of life: Show up, Pay attention, Tell the truth, Don't be attached to the results. -Angeles Arrien
Cults do not destroy families as much as stuck-togetherness attitudes in families create candidates for cults. When parents focus on societal influence it actually serves to increase their anxiety even though it helps them avoid personal responsibility. On the other hand, parents who accept the fact that their children are less likely to be influenced by other systems to the extent that they are comfortable in their own, while they might find the idea more painful at first, are given an a means of approaching the problem that is quite within their power, and it can, in turn, contribute to their own self-respect.
Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation
Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. -Leonard Cohen
Generative AI is currently very good at replicating parts of software programs that have been written many times before. But what if you want to create something new? This is where smart human coders will still be needed. - BusinessInsider
I think the rise of AI is going to result more in-person sales. If everyone can do it, people will not listen or read any emails or anything like that they just stop because it’s all generated. It means every email they got is amazing. They won’t believe any of it unless somebody looks them in the eye and says, ‘I’m a real person and here’s why this is true.’ - Ronan Perceval CEO of Phorest
Given that we don’t know what the lay of the land is going to be in five, ten years there are two crucial things for publishers to focus on: what do we do that’s irreplaceable? What do we do that a machine can’t do? - Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker
Studies this year of ChatGPT in legal analysis and white-collar writing chores have found that the bot helps lower-performing people more than it does the most skilled. On a task that required reasoning based on evidence, however, ChatGPT was not helpful at all. Here, ChatGPT lulled employees into trusting it too much. Unaided humans had the correct answer 85 percent of the time. People who used ChatGPT without training scored just over 70 percent. Those who had been trained did even worse, getting the answer only 60 percent of the time. In interviews conducted after the experiment, “people told us they neglected to check because it’s so polished, it looks so right.’ - David Berreby writing in the New York Times
Like an episode out of Black Mirror, the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” AI expert Leif Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships.” What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. - Tyler Austin Harper writing in The Atlantic
As machines like A.I. eliminate routine tasks what gets left behind are the human skills we deem soft. - Jane Thier writing in Fortune
While AI is very powerful at human level or even superhuman level for many tasks, there are many other things where humans continue to have a big advantage, and that's going to continue to be true for quite some time. - Kate Whiting writing in WeForum
“Prompting AI systems is no different than being an effective communicator with other humans. The same principles apply in both cases. This makes me bullish on reading, writing, and speaking as the 3 underlying skills that really matter in 2024.” - An Open AI employee Tweet
Forget the times of your distress, but never forget what they taught you. -Herbert Gesser
From bench to bot: Does AI really make you a more efficient writer? - The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives
Did an AI write up your arrest? Hard to know – Politico
AI Editing: Are We There Yet? - Science Editor
How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? - Modern Language Association
I tested 7 AI content detectors - they're getting dramatically better at identifying plagiarism – Zdnet
OpenAI says it’s taking a ‘deliberate approach’ to releasing tools that can detect writing from ChatGPT - Tech Crunch
AI is complicating plagiarism. How should scientists respond? – Nature
The telltale words that could identify generative AI text - Arstechnica
Research shows that AI-generated slop overuses specific words – Futurism
AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human – BBC
AI and the Death of Student Writing – Chronicle of Higher Ed
How AI Reshapes Vocabulary: Unveiling the Most Used Terms Related to the Technology – Every Pixel
How to tell if something is written by ChatGPT – Read Write
Coursera Launches AI Plagiarism Detector – Inside Higher Ed
I Tested Three AI Essay-writing Tools, and Here’s What I Found – Life Hacker
New study on AI-assisted creativity reveals an interesting social dilemma – Psypost
How to cite ChatGPT in APA Style – American Psychological Association
Is ChatGPT a Reliable Ghostwriter? - The Journal of Nuclear Medicine
AI Is Coming for Amateur Novelists. That’s Fine. - The Atlantic
National Novel Writing Month faces backlash over allowing AI: What to know – Washington Post
How Do You Change a Chatbot’s Mind?, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation. – New York Times
If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes: confessions of a chatbot helper – The Guardian
College Writing Centers Worry AI Could Replace Them – EdSurge
No laughing matter - how AI is helping comedians write jokes – BBC
What Teachers Told Me About A.I. in School - New York Times
The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful. - Leo Tolstoy (born Sept. 9, 1828)
The forest would be quite silent if only the most beautiful birds sang.
A driver gives way to you at a place where there is no clear priority; you don’t acknowledge him. A fellow pedestrian steps into the road for you, or holds a door; you breeze on by. On holiday, you give your smallest and most worthless coins to the woman who has carefully cleaned your room. The stroppy teenager rails at the parent who scraped and saved for her. Commuters swarming in a London street never once raise their eyes to notice the splendour of a winter dawn.
No blood is spilt in any of these cases. Nothing is stolen. No one’s life is ruined. The prick of pain passes soon enough. Yet a tiny seed of ice has been sown, formed of arrogance on one side and, on the other, a sense of worthlessness. That ice spreads, and creeps into the veins and crevices of life: so that on the next occasion the door is not held, the room is cleaned carelessly, the car does not give way and the e-mail is never sent. As the opportunity for kindness is ignored, so the chance of reciprocal kindness, in the form of thanks, never comes to be. What is never given can never be repaid.
Ingratitude is the frost that nips the flower even as it opens, that shrivels the generous apple on the branch, that freezes the fountain in mid-flow and numbs the hand, even in the very act of giving. It is a sin of silence, absence and omission, as winter’s sin is a lack of light; a sin against charity, which otherwise warms the heart and, in the truest sense, makes the world turn.
Ann Wroe, writing in Intelligent Life
It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.
Imagine that you are asked to retain a list of seven digits for a minute or two. You are told that remembering the digits is your top priority. While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits.
People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts.
The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
The sad truth is that there are some people who will only be there for you as long as you have something they need. When you no longer serve a purpose to them, they will leave. We rarely lose friends and lovers, we just gradually figure out who our real ones are. So when people walk away from you, let them go. Your destiny is never tied to anyone who leaves you. It doesn’t mean they are bad people; it just means that their part in your story is over.
You pay attention to the successes and failures of friends more than you do to those of strangers. You compare yourself to those who are close to you in order to judge your own worth. In other words, You know Barack Obama and Johnny Depp are successful, but you don’t use them to as a standard for your own life to the degree you do coworkers, fellow students, friends you’ve know since high school.
(Researchers) had students list the number of people they considered friends and then asked if the subjects believed they had more friends than did their peers and more friends than the average student. Thirty-five percent of the students said they had more friends than the typical student, and 23 percent said they had fewer. This better-than-average feeling was enhanced when considering their peers- 41 percent said they had more friends ship than did the peers they considered to be their friends. Only 16 percent said they had fewer. On average, everyone things they are more popular than you, and you think you are more popular than them.
Sure, some of your faults are just too obvious, even to you but you compensate for those by inflating what you like most about you. When you compare your skills, accomplishments, and friendships with those of others, you tend to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. IF you win, you tell everyone. When it comes to being honest with yourself and those you love, you are not so smart.
David McRaney, You are Not so Smart
The “reality’ that is left behind in all endings is not just a picture on the wall. It is a sense of which way is up and which way is down; it is a sense of which way is forward and which way is back. It is, in short, a way of orienting oneself and of moving forward into the future. In the old passage rituals, the one in transition would often be taken into unfamiliar territory, beyond the bounds of former experience, and left there for a time. All the customary signs of location would be gone, and the only remaining source of orientation would be the heavens. In such a setting and the state of mind it was meant to create, you would be (in the word’s of Robert Frost) “lost enough to find yourself.”
As with other aspects of the ending process, most of us already know disorientation. We recognize the lost, confused, don’t-know-where-I-am felling that deepens as we become disengaged, disidentified and disenchanted. The old sense of life as “going somewhere” breaks down, and we feel like shipwrecked sailors.
William Bridges, Transitions
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