Hello there!
Welcome back!
I hope you guys are doing well.
I have some exciting news to share this weekend!
First off, Roscoe at @BirthofClarity shared great insights about instant gratification culture for their Mindset Monday newsletter. In this edition, Roscoe talks about the perils associated with instant gratification and the pitfalls it brings with itself. They paraphrased thoughts from Lighthouse No. 4 about Delayed Gratification and how ascribing delayed gratification can help people lead fuller and better lives. @Birthofclarity has a wide audience and I’m grateful for being a part of this.
Second, my personal website went live at https://prashanths.blog. All the posts I’ve written in the newsletter are posts on the blog too. The website would be other updates too. Like your constant support here, I’ll be grateful for your support there too!
Third, I gave up on Cable TV about 2 years ago. Along with it I also gave up News. Life became better and society, happier. Till about 2 days ago, I only subscribed to a Business Daily because they only gave me the news that I wanted to - about companies and the economic scenario in the country. I gave up that too. I did a small experiment. I opened up the digital version of the newspaper from 24th of July 2019 and read it to see whether I remembered any of it and whether anything that happened then mattered today. Guess what, the only thing I remembered was the name of the business daily. Nothing else mattered. Personally, I’ve realised I don’t need to keep myself updated with news.
Will Long-form Writing Be the Norm Once Again?
If you prefer, you can read this post on my website.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
When I was a kid, I used to subscribe to a children’s magazine called Tinkle. It still is in wide circulation in India. The last page of the magazine contained letters of appreciation for the magazine. Children would post these letters of appreciation from across the world. I would pick a random name from this and write a long form letter to one of them. More often than not, I ended up getting a response. I developed connections - a penpal . It was exciting to write to people in Singapore, Malaysia and Canada. It was liberating to read about how they went about their lives, the cities they lived in, the people they lived with, etc. In the midst of moving homes and penpals changing countries, we all lost touch. In the mid 90s, when cable television was a rarity and there was no internet, you could talk to someone only through a traditional letter. It was inexpensive. There were phone calls, but they were even more expensive.
The Internet happened and it shrank the world and everyone was 2 screens apart. The advent of the mobile culture brought with it the 160 character limit for an SMS which is where we lost it completely. We mixed up English with vernacular languages. We came up with a mish-mash of words. Some even made their way into the dictionary. Nonetheless, human communication with words took a different trajectory. I’d given up hope that humanity would ever go back to long form communication.
Lo and behold, last week I heard about this instance of Artificial Intelligence called GPT-3. In its most basic terms, GPT-3 simply generates a continuation of any text that you give it. GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer. I first heard about it from a tweet by Keagan Stokoe. I dug a little deeper and saw Tinkered Thinking was playing with it. Tinkered Thinking wrote a great post about GPT-3 here, it even reached the front page of Hacker News!. It’s a clear explanation of what GPT-3 is and roughly how it works. Be sure to read up on the conversations between Tinkered Thinker and GPT-3.
In a nutshell, GPT-3 is an AI that utilizes a neural network trained on language from the internet. It has been trained with about 175 billion parameters. It appears to intuit the context of what you feed into it and the content it throws out is remarkable. Close to what a well read intellectual would say.
Many swooped down to warn the world about the evils of GPT-3. The simplest example would be one where vile media outlets use it to smear dirt on one other, etc,. But I believe in the positive potential a technology offers. With GPT-3, the breakthrough would come in the form of better writing outlets? - for professionals, for me, and for you. Every time an author is stuck with writer’s block,GPT-3 has the capability of generating possible continuations from which an author can reference for further inspiration. (Tinkered Thinking did this here) Would it help create better stories? Would it help make better authors? Or would GPT-3 realise it is the better author? Would GPT-3 become a 'crutch' for writers? Would authors still be motivated to write if a machine can generate a story at the push of a button? Right now, GPT-3 is here and looks like it’s not going away anytime soon.
I went one step ahead to think about what would happen if we integrate GPT-3 into conventional operating systems? The predictive text options we see beneath what we’re typing (Phone, tablet or even Gmail) is a Neanderthal version of GPT-3. But with GPT-3, this game rises to a whole new level. Will we finally come out of - "IDK", "Wr r u?", "U 2" - symbolisms that have come to dominate instant messaging? Will we revert back to the long form method of communicating with each other? Everyone who has interacted with me knows my disdain for these short-forms. I will respond to you without eating up alphabets; no matter how short or long the response. I love using long form words and expressions. Some of the letters I have written have ended up being longer than posts here in my newsletter and on my blog.
If you’re wondering whether integrating a tool like GPT-3 in your personal device would lead to everyone talking and writing the same way, "Hold your horses boys! You ain’t seen nuthin' yet." GPT-3 interacts with you based on what you feed it and where you lead it. With Billions of people having interesting thoughts, I think there’s a low probability that you’re going to be writing something that is similar to your next door neighbour. In fact, if what we have seen is true, GPT-3 will respond in a different way, when you repeat the same question. Tinkered Thinking, and many others have already tried this.
Communicating with fellow beings is the part of GPT-3 that excites me the most. It is in human nature to want to seek connections - it doesn’t matter where the connection comes from. We want to reach out - we want to be reached. The soul yearns for connection.
With GPT-3, I have renewed hope. If we are able to leverage a simple version of this to improve communication, the world will be a better place.
I’d love to get a response to this! I’d love to respond to your response, because in the medium of exchange we create new ideas, bonds, and relationships.
P.S: Thanks to Tinkered Thinking for reading drafts of this post and guiding me to make it better.
Here’s something interesting I came across this week:
One of the things was GPT-3. Tinkered Thinking’s GPT-3 post is one of the links.
The Best Career Advice I’ve Ever Gotten by Ryan Holiday: This is a direct opposite of what anyone would tell you. It's simple, it's shocking, it's to the point. If you are kickstarting your career don't care about taking credit, just make your boss look good. When you sacrifice your ego and act as a troubleshooter for your boss, you are losing a battle but winning a war. The canvas strategy, is aptly named because without a canvas, you would never have a great painter.
How to Manage Conflict: Reframing Your Anger by Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Everyone gets angry or frustrated - every single day. There's nothing wrong with you about this emotion. You can downright place the blame on your brain - your Amygdala. They're as small as 2 almonds, but have caused entire civilizations to fall. Don't go judging by size alone. Anne Laure examines the science behind anger and effective strategies to counter it.
Be Kind, for Everyone Is Fighting A Hard Battle by Evan: Complementing the above read, this piece by Evan reminds us why we need to be Kind. The most powerful attribute we posses as a human being is the power of choice. Last time I checked, kindness has never cost anything. If you can, then be kind. If you cannot, then you must be kind. That's what I have come to believe in the past few years.
Personal Renewal, by John Gardener courtesy Farnam Street Blog: This struck a personal chord. Over the past few years, my outlook towards life, learning and failures has changed. I have tired to look for the lesson every situation life has put me in. I'm not saying I have perfected this art, I am far from it, but doing so have brought better meaning to life. Life I realised is not about arriving at a destination, but the journey itself. John Gardener on Meaning - "Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."
Book of the Week
Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae by Steven Pressfield
I completed reading Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire. The movie 300 picks up the narrative from this novel. The epic battle between a small unit of 300 Spartans and tens of thousands of Persians. I wasn't aware of the book until someone mentioned this on twitter. I have come to realise, a movie only picks up the parts that people want to watch and leaves the rest. I picked up the book because I wanted to know what made men like Leonidas? What made the Spartans?
Before every battle, the Spartans inscribed their names on each end of wooden twig and broke it into two. One they tied around their wrist and other remained in a basket at the rear end of the battle train. After the battle, each man retrieved his ticket. The uncollected were those of comrades who perished. Even if the name on the twig bound at their wrist was defiled/ face of the warrior mutilated, it would fit perfectly with the other half (like the pieces of a jigsaw) in the basket to identify the warrior.
On one such instance, after battle, Leonidas talks about the Spartan mindset on waging wars:
"When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his “ticket”, in two parts. One part he leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed. ‘That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind.
He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.”
Prior to their march to the Hot Gates at Thermopylae, Leonidas acknowledges the bravery of his men. But the bravest among the Spartans he acknowledges are the women who let go the men, to fate. It is among them that he finds and fans the flame of courage.
"Shall I tell you where I find this strength, friends? In the eyes of our sons in scarlet before us, yes. And in the countenances of their comrades who will follow in battles to come. But more than that, my heart finds courage from these, our women, who watch in tearless silence as we go."
"‘Men’s pain is lightly borne and swiftly over. Our wounds are of the flesh, which is nothing; women’s are of the heart – sorrow unending, far more bitter to bear."
I'll leave you with one other passage which is a conversation between Dienekes and Xeo:
Dienekes: ‘Do you remember the night, Xeo, when we sat with Ariston and Alexandros and spoke of fear and its opposite?’
‘The opposite of fear,’ Dienekes said, ‘is love.’
If you have read this book, let me know which are the parts that intrigued you or resonated with you. Or if you are going to read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts once you're finished.
A thought I’m ruminating on - “When you see someone often flashing their rank or position, or someone whose name is often bandied about in public, don’t be envious; such things are bought at the expense of life... Some die on the first rungs of the ladder of success, others before they can reach the top, and the few that make it to the top of their ambition through a thousand indignities realise at the end it’s only for an inscription on their gravestone.” - Seneca, On The Brevity of Life.
Till next weekend, take care.
-
Prashanth
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