I started to wonder how much time passes, on average, across a page of a novel. Literary-critical tradition suggested that there had been a pretty stable balance between “scene” (minute-by-minute description) and “summary” (which may cover weeks or years) until modernists started to leave out the summary and make every page breathlessly immediate. But when I sat down with two graduate students (Sabrina Lee and Jessica Mercado) to manually characterize a thousand passages from fiction, we found instead a long trend. The average length of time represented in 250 words of fiction had been getting steadily shorter since the early eighteenth century.
Measuring the average length of time described in 250 words of narration was:
some days, in books written in the 1720s e.g. Gulliver’s Travels
just under an hour, in the 1990s
The original research was done by hand (well, by grad students, same same). That article is about whether AI can be effective as a tool to make the same estimations…
…which makes me wonder, not having any grad students of my own, what other hidden numbers can be extracted from prose by GPT-4?
2.
I read the other day about the origin of flint, which is wild.
The geology of where I grew up was chalk. Meaning that, as previously discussed, my mental picture of a “stream” is actually a chalk stream, and it turns out this is globally peculiar.
Chalk was formed deep under the ancient oceans of the Earth, from vast quantities of compressed microscopic plankton.
There was also a lot of flint. Using flint for tools in the palaeolithic made sense to me because, well, flint litters the landscape. Not true! It is rare! But, for me, as a kid, you wonder at the colours of flint (and try to smack things with it), draw with chalk, and make things out of the clay you dig up.
Anyway, flint! It never really occurred to me to ask why chalk and flint are co-present.
Apparently the formation of flint was a mystery until the 1980s.
It’s also oceans, it turns out.
Now get this:
Flint was formed in soft, limy mud on the floor of the Chalk Sea some 80 million years ago. It is made of quartz, or silica, which came from the skeletons of tiny sponges that lived in this tropical sea. Their skeletons were dissolved in the seawater and therefore the mud on the sea floor contained silica in small amounts. … Some flint beds can be traced for hundreds of kilometres.
The bizarre shapes of flint nodules, with spiky protrusions and holes, are thought to be due to flint replacing the chalk in the burrows of marine animals such as arthropods that were living beneath the Chalk Sea floor, and it was this connection with burrows that proved to be the key to how flint was formed. The process of flint formation was originally the subject of much argument and was only finally worked out in the 1980s when it was established that flint formed preferentially in burrows due to the presence of decaying organic matter, and also at the ‘redox boundary’, below which anaerobic, sulphate-reducing bacteria predominate. The shape of a flint nodule is therefore often the shape of an animal’s burrow, with the surface often showing the burrowed fabric of the chalk it has replaced.
What?
WHAT??
Not only does flint represent 80 million year old sea sponges, but the shape of the rock is a cast of an arthropod burrow?
And then it was the key material for tool-making by humans for about 3 million years, driving trade routes, and allowing hunting, fabrication, and all the rest?
Deep time vertigo.
3.
Amelia Wattenberger, AI research engineer, has recently prototype a writing app thathighlights sentences according to how abstract or concrete they are.
Wattenberger quotes Robin Sloan, friend of this parish, about the ladder of abstraction:
Good writers move up and down a ladder of language. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like freedom and literacy. Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and technocracy lurk.
So… she can reveal that? Astounding.
Read: Getting creative with embeddings (2023) – and check out the screenshots.
This works because each sentence can be placed, using large language models, in “embedding space”, a 1,000-dimensional space where two sentences that mean roughly the same thing will be close together, even if they use different words. But also all the abstract sentences will be closer together versus the concrete ones, and so on.
LOOK:
I realised the other day that this is how I read long articles online:
read the headline
read the penultimate para
scroll wildly up and down reading odd words
if it’s good, read backwards for a couple sections
if it’s still good, read forwards from ~1/4 of the way in
ignore the beginning/end
I’m not saying this is right. I’m just saying that it turns out that this is what I do. It’s probably a symptom of some attentional dysfunction.
Secretly I think it’s because a lot of long-form is filler (including my own). I need to squeeze the fruit before taking it home.
But I wonder whether there are hidden patterns in the essays that I do like, that Wattenberger’s work could reveal:
speed of ideas: per-sentence velocity through embedding space
volatility in the abstract/concrete mix – could we Fourier transform Wattenberger’s visualisation and see what frequency mix I like?
a new scale that shows semantic opposition/agreement vs my own corpus of notes.
Can’t wait to try some of these experiments myself. We are so early with this new technology. We’re imagination bottlenecked. There’s low-hanging fruit for the next decade.
4.
From Greg Egan’s 1997 novel Diaspora, this is the first chapter, about the birth of a machine intelligence - not quite an AI, but a human hosted on a computational substrate - from its own point of view.
Like a baby learning how to use its eyes and hands, and working towards establishing self-identity.
Don’t skip bits like I would, it’s well worth reading properly.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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1.
How fast does time move in fiction?
Fascinating result:
Measuring the was:
The original research was done by hand (well, by grad students, same same). That article is about whether AI can be effective as a tool to make the same estimations…
…which makes me wonder, not having any grad students of my own, what other hidden numbers can be extracted from prose by GPT-4?
2.
I read the other day about the origin of flint, which is wild.
The geology of where I grew up was chalk. Meaning that, as previously discussed, my mental picture of a “stream” is actually a chalk stream, and it turns out this is globally peculiar.
Chalk was formed deep under the ancient oceans of the Earth, from vast quantities of compressed microscopic plankton.
There was also a lot of flint. Using flint for tools in the palaeolithic made sense to me because, well, flint litters the landscape. Not true! It is rare! But, for me, as a kid, you wonder at the colours of flint (and try to smack things with it), draw with chalk, and make things out of the clay you dig up.
Anyway, flint! It never really occurred to me to ask why chalk and flint are co-present.
Apparently the formation of flint was a mystery until the 1980s.
It’s also oceans, it turns out.
Now get this:
What?
WHAT??
Not only does flint represent 80 million year old sea sponges, but the shape of the rock is a cast of an arthropod burrow?
And then it was the key material for tool-making by humans for about 3 million years, driving trade routes, and allowing hunting, fabrication, and all the rest?
Deep time vertigo.
3.
Amelia Wattenberger, AI research engineer, has recently prototype a writing app thathighlights sentences according to how abstract or concrete they are.
Wattenberger quotes Robin Sloan, friend of this parish, about the ladder of abstraction:
So… she can reveal that? Astounding.
Read: Getting creative with embeddings (2023) – and check out the screenshots.
This works because each sentence can be placed, using large language models, in “embedding space”, a 1,000-dimensional space where two sentences that mean roughly the same thing will be close together, even if they use different words. But also all the abstract sentences will be closer together versus the concrete ones, and so on.
LOOK:
I realised the other day that this is how I read long articles online:
I’m not saying this is right. I’m just saying that it turns out that this is what I do. It’s probably a symptom of some attentional dysfunction.
Secretly I think it’s because a lot of long-form is filler (including my own). I need to squeeze the fruit before taking it home.
But I wonder whether there are hidden patterns in the essays that I do like, that Wattenberger’s work could reveal:
Can’t wait to try some of these experiments myself. We are so early with this new technology. We’re imagination bottlenecked. There’s low-hanging fruit for the next decade.
4.
From Greg Egan’s 1997 novel Diaspora, this is the first chapter, about the birth of a machine intelligence - not quite an AI, but a human hosted on a computational substrate - from its own point of view.
Like a baby learning how to use its eyes and hands, and working towards establishing self-identity.
Don’t skip bits like I would, it’s well worth reading properly.
Orphanogenesis by Greg Egan.