Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

Working on geoengineering and AI briefings

Last Christmas break, I wrote a detailed briefing on the existential risks to humanity from nuclear weapons.

This year I am starting two more: one on the risks from artificial intelligence, and one on the promises and perils of geoengineering, which I increasingly feel is emerging as our default response to climate change.

I have had a few geoengineering books in my book stacks for years, generally buried under the whaling books in the ‘too depressing to read’ zone. AI I have been learning a lot more about recently, including through Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord’s books and Robert Miles’ incredibly helpful YouTube series (based on Amodei et al’s instructive paper).

Related re: geoengineering:

Related re: AI:

NotebookLM on CFFD scholarship

I would have expected that by now someone would have written a comparative analysis on pieces of scholarly writing on the Canadian campus fossil fuel divestment movement: for instance, engaging with both Joe Curnow’s 2017 dissertation and mine from 2022.

So, I gave both public texts to NotebookLM to have it generate an audio overview. It wrongly assumes that Joe Curnow is a man throughout, and mangles the pronunciation of “Ilnyckyj” in a few different ways — but at least it acts like it has read about the texts and cares about their content.

It is certainly muddled in places (though perhaps in ways I have also seen in scholarly literature). For example, it treats the “enemy naming” strategy as something that arose through the functioning of CFFD campaigns, whereas it was really part of 350.org’s “campaign in a box” from the beginning.

This hints to me at how large language models are going to be transformative for writers. Finding an audience is hard, and finding an engaged audience willing to share their thoughts back is nigh-impossible, especially if you are dealing with scholarly texts hundreds of pages long. NotebookLM will happily read your whole blog and then have a conversation about your psychology and interpersonal style, or read an unfinished manuscript and provide detailed advice on how to move forward. The AI isn’t doing the writing, but providing a sort of sounding board which has never existed before: almost infinitely patient, and not inclined to make its comments all about its social relationship with the author.

I wonder what effect this sort of criticism will have on writing. Will it encourage people to hew more closely to the mainstream view, but providing a critique that comes from a general-purpose LLM? Or will it help people dig ever-deeper into a perspective that almost nobody shares, because the feedback comes from systems which are always artificially chirpy and positive, and because getting feedback this way removes real people from the process?

And, of course, what happens when the flawed output of these sorts of tools becomes public material that other tools are trained on?

Notebook LM on this blog for 2023 and 2024

I have been experimenting with Google’s NotebookLM tool, and I must say it has some uncanny capabilities. The one I have seen most discussed in the nerd press is the ability to create an automatic podcast with synthetic hosts and any material which you provide.

I tried giving it my last two years of blog content, and having it generate an audio overview with no additional prompts. The results are pretty thought-provoking.

“The Rest is History” podcast

A recent Economist article drew my attention to the “The Rest is History” podcast. I enjoyed multi-part series’ about Lord Byron and Martin Luther, as well as a one-parter about the Hapsburg monarchy.

With an eye to researching my long-term Sherlock Holmes / Isambard Kingdom Brunel pastiche, I am listening to their series on the Titanic. The first episode provides a bit of imagery that helps with understanding shipyards of the era and how they were perceived:

I saw churches of all dominations. Freemason, Orange lodges, wide streets, towering smokestacks, huge factories, crowded traffic. And out of the water, beyond the custom house, dimly seen through smoke and mist rose some huge shapeless thing which I found to be a shipbuilding yard where in 10,000 men were hammering iron and steel into great ocean liners… The noise of wheels and hoofs and cranks and spindles and steam hammers filled my ears and made my head ache.

The transcript leaves me a bit confused about the source of the quote. I think the transcript attributes it to Richard Davenport-Hines, but a full text search seems to place it in William Bulfin’s “Rambles in Eirinn.”

One of the main reasons it’s fun to have low-pressure writing projects like my Holmes pastiche and the STS-27/107 screenplay is that it both gives license and provides purpose for reading around the topic. “The Rest is History” is a nice resource for improving contextual understanding, and it’s a whole lot more pleasant to listen to during a bike ride than the news is.

The nuclear razor’s edge

I listened to the audiobook of Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War. Having followed the subject and read a lot about it over the years, it nonetheless had a lot of new information inside of a compellingly presented, plausible, and chlling story.

Our whole world can end in a couple of hours; live life accordingly.

Rate matching in personal communication

One element of human interaction which I have always found perplexing and frustrating is when people lie with the expectation that you will understand that they are lying and also what they are really trying to say. For example, there is a kind of upper class reflex to say something like: “You will have to come visit the house sometime!” when they mean: “We will never see each other again, but please keep treating me like an aristocrat”.

One place where people frequently try this “I’ll be dishonest but assume they’ll understand what I mean” trick is with regard to volume of communication. For whatever reason, people are often dishonest about hearing from you too little or too much, and will even lie about it when directly asked, even if the volume of communication is really annoying them.

What I have learned to do in this arena is to ignore what people explicitly say and focus on rate matching. If someone responds to me promptly, I speed up the pace of my messages to keep the average time between my messages similar to the average time between theirs. Similarly, if someone is slow to respond to me (or never responds), I regulate down the frequency of my communication to be more closely matched. For example, if I send a text and get an immediate response, it’s OK to write back immediately. If it takes an hour, or five hours, or a day, or three days to get a response — it’s best to copy the length of the delay when responding.

The system doesn’t cover everything. One notable consideration is the division of labour. Perhaps because I am a lot keener than most to stay in touch with most people, I tend to be the person to establish and maintain communication. Once that behaviour has become a norm in the relationship, it can produce a dynamic where they rarely or never initiate contact because they now expect me to do it. Still, perhaps even here it would be sensible to rate match; if someone never ever reaches out to you, its probably an unspoken sign that they prefer to do other things with their time.

Whose agenda are you devoted to?

I have never seen George Monbiot’s bettered as career advice, though it will not lead to an easy life. For instance:

What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution. You can do what you believe only if that belief happens to coincide with the aims of the corporation, not just once, but consistently, across the years

Also:

How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?

What he cheers for and takes satisfaction from is inspiring too:

Most countries have a number of small alternative papers and broadcasters, run voluntarily by people making their living by other means: part time jobs, grants or social security. These are, on the whole, people of tremendous courage and determination, who have placed their beliefs ahead of their comforts. To work with them can be a privilege and inspiration, for the simple reason that they – and, by implication, you – are free while others are not. All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.

Autonomy, not authority, is the only way to escape the many traps of the status quo.

Peter Russell tributes

In January, my friend and mentor Peter Russell died. His son Alex invited me to give remarks at his funeral reception: Remarks at the funeral of Peter Russell

Yesterday, I spoke at Innis College’s memorial event: Remarks about Peter Russell at Innis College

Related:

Re-writing my dissertation as a popular book

Rather than for academics, my PhD dissertation was always intended more for activists, policy-makers, and concerned citizens.

Despite my efforts to make it accessible and limit jargon, however, it seems that a document in PhD dissertation format just won’t have that broad an audience. As such — once I have a job — I think I should re-write the argument as a book for a popular audience. That would expand the readership, and also let me write it the way I want and not to meet the requirements of academics.

I will be producing a new version of the dissertation with some minor corrections, but that too will have to wait until I am employed and able to pay my bills.