This Reader’s Digest

That last book I read, it was entirely forgettable

Just finished reading “Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read” by Julie Beck, writing for The Atlantic; the article begins with a confession:

I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object. I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.

The confession belongs to Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review (or at least she was when the article was written).

Now Paul is a consummate reader, or I assume so, given the job title.

Which makes this reader feel just a little less bad about all the books he has read and forgotten.

Funny, that I now feel better about a personal failing, knowing other people—people who do this for a living—fail to measure up to my own expectations in the same way.

Readers—we love to talk about books, mostly about the fact that we have read them, mostly to people who have not. Just don’t ask too much about what we have read. But then…

This is more and more unlikely to be a problem. Because most people are not readers. And most of the people who are have not just finished reading the same book. And in the increasingly unlikely event that one does encounter another reader, who just so happens to have read the same book, rest easy. Because this individual is unlikely to remember much of anything about that book either. One can then congratulate the other on the selfsame personal achievement and safely bullshit their way to the next topic of conversation without anyone being the wiser.

Money money money, money

Just finished reading “Stop Asking Whether Money Buys Happiness” by Michael Mechanic, writing for The Atlantic; from the article:

For more than a half century, researchers at UCLA have conducted a massive annual survey of incoming college students titled “The American Freshman: National Norms.” One part of the survey asks students to rank 20 life goals on a scale from “not important” to “essential.” Most are lofty aspirations such as becoming , a community leader, contributing to scientific progress, creating artistic works, and launching a successful business. Surveyed in 1969, freshmen entering four-year colleges were most interested in “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” (85 percent considered it “essential” or “very important”); “raising a family” (73 percent); and “helping others who are in difficulty” (69 percent). Ten years later, freshmen opted for “being an authority in my field” (74 percent), followed by “helping others” and “raising a family.”

But something shifted amid the Reagan Revolution, which deregulated Wall Street, revamped the tax code, and set the nation hurtling toward levels of wealth and income inequality unseen since before the Great Depression. By 1989, a new priority had taken over the survey’s top position, and has appeared there on and off ever since: money. Indeed, the No. 1 goal of the Class of 2023, deemed “essential” or “very important” by more than four in five students, was “being very well off financially.”

Concerning our fears about A.I.

Just finished this morning’s reading, two quotations:

1. We need to regulate this, we need laws,” says Janet Haven, executive director of Data & Society, a nonprofit research organization in New York. “The idea that tech companies get to build whatever they want and release it into the world and society scrambles to adjust and make way for that thing is backwards.”

Source: From Bloomberg. “ChatGPT Advances Are Moving So Fast Regulators Can’t Keep Up.

2. ChatGPT doesn’t really resemble the Manhattan Project, obviously. But I wonder if the existential feeling that seeps into most of my A.I. conversations parallels the feelings inside Los Alamos in the 1940s. I’m sure there were questions then. If we don’t build it, won’t someone else? Will this make us safer? Should we take on monumental risk simply because we can? Like everything about our AI moment, what I find calming is also what I find disquieting. At least those people knew what they were building.

Source: The Atlantic. “What Have Humans Just Unleashed?”

Seems we don’t have time to make new friends

Just finished reading “Why Making Friends in Midlife Is so Hard” by Kathrine Smyth, writing for The Atlantic. Some takeaways:

1. We tend to make best friends when we are younger. The average age one acquires a bestie is 21 (apparently someone’s done the research on this).
2. The average American spends only 41 minutes a day socializing, and it takes more than 200 hours to make a close friend.
3. You are not imagining it, Jack. It is more difficult to make friends once you hit 40.

Thoughts:

At the risk of exposing an area of personal weakness, let’s do some basic math.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Jack is the average American and that he spends 41 minutes a day socializing. And let us say it does take him 200 hours to make a friend. How many days is that?

(200 hours, 60 minutes in an hour. Now let me see here. That is 12,000 minutes spent at a rate of 41 minutes per day.)

I get 292.68 days.

Now suppose Jack made it a New Year’s resolution. And let us further suppose he met a suitable candidate for friendship on New Year’s Day. By my calculation, he could fulfill his New Year’s pledge by October 21.

Of course, he could accelerate the process. Double his daily efforts, halve the time, and make himself a brand-new bosom buddy by the end of May, this assuming he spends all his limited socializing time on the same individual.

But all his chips on Red? What if Red turns out to be a complete asshole?

There is such a thing as knowing too much about a person too soon. Maybe it is best not to jump into an exclusive potential close friendship before Jack is ready and willing to overlook and/or excuse Red’s many flaws.

Maybe it better to spread the risk—play the field, see other people. But then he runs the risk of not making a new friend before the year is out. And maybe not next year either. And that is assuming he sticks with it, which is a big assumption. Because how many people actually honor their New Year’s pledges?

Symptomatic of civilizational decline

Just finished reading “The End of the English Major” by Nathan Heller, writing for The New Yorker. Worthwhile reading, if a bit depressing.

Full disclosure: Jack is a holds a degree that falls under the humanities umbrella. Also, he has, long ago, bought into the liberal arts mindset, believes—deeply—in the inherent value of broadest possible education, education for its own sake, as the paramount human project.

But we all seem to be ~~entralled~~ enslaved by same impoverished worldview. What has become a bit of a mantra for me, what was running through my mind as I read this piece: Not everything that has value can be denominated in dollars. The ascendence of the business major is the prioritizing of making money above all other considerations is the cheapening of life itself is the hastening of civilizational decline. But I digress.

Belatedly, some figures quoted from the article:

…from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while SUNY Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates—standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges—saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils. During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent… The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade.

Words For The Meanwhile

a commonplace blog

That last book I read, it was entirely forgettable

Money money money, money

Concerning our fears about A.I.

Seems we don’t have time to make new friends

Symptomatic of civilizational decline

by Jack Freeborne