Posts Tagged ‘literature’
“Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.”*…
Writer and teacher Drew Calvert on the benefits of reading, and more particularly, on the danger of turning fiction into self-help…
… My understanding has always been that people fall in love with books and only become professors or critics in order to spend more time with them. In college, I felt closest to the scholars who shared this basically affective view of literature: Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty. These teachers treated literature as a higher form of therapy: a training ground for emotions, a study in human virtue. I recall being perhaps inappropriately moved by Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” a commentary on King Lear that helped me think differently about my own relationships. Ditto Murdoch’s “Against Dryness,” in which she argues that novels help us countenance reality and reject “consolation.” Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, was helpful, too, first because he expressed himself in a literary register, and also because he was friendly toward the human imagination—a legacy of his intellectual forebear Donald Winnicott, who claimed that art was a site of healing, a place where one prepares, as Olivia Laing puts it in her book The Lonely City, for “the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.” It’s a nice idea. And it resonates with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy (that it purifies the soul) as much as Freud’s idea of transference (that all of our relationships are at least in part fantastical).
Fiction has power, in other words, because, for better or worse, we are all each other’s surrogates and will therefore find compelling archetypes in vivid characters. In a more expansive mood, I might even claim, as Marilynne Robinson does in “Imagination & Community,” that fiction exercises our capacity to love, or that novels contribute to social hope (as Richard Rorty puts it, in a more secular register) or that characters are important sites of readerly compassion, as Zadie Smith argues in her own recent defense of the genre, “Fascinated to Presume.”
My English major was useless, of course. After college, I went to work and learned that nobody reads Iris Murdoch anymore. Instead, they all read self-help and gauzy genre fiction. I worked with intelligent people. They were consultants, psychologists, engineers, economists, and policy wonks. They spoke fondly of charismatic humanities professors, and they often watched videos from The School of Life or other sources of lifelong learning. Wellness apps and podcasts were more popular than novels. One had to be a sport about this cultural defeat, but the odor of cliché was at times overpowering. A book my colleagues couldn’t seem to stop recommending to me was Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which promised “modern truth” and “ancient wisdom.” Happiness was big in the aughts and early 2010s; the positive psychology movement had learned how to market the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Martin Seligman. Harvard and Yale both hired happiness professors. In 2011, happiness was a topic of discussion at the UN General Assembly, and in 2012, the first World Happiness Report came out.
The problem with books like Haidt’s, at least from my point of view, is that they were almost always addressed not to Aristotle’s suffering crowds or Winnicott’s social organisms or Rorty’s hopeful citizens or Robinson’s noble souls but to optimizing meritocrats angling for leverage. In early press interviews, Haidt recommended Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement regime, which I took to be a bad sign, for I had come to think of myself as a budding Emersonian. My colleagues, of course, were Franklinites, even the ones who had taken Interpersonal Dynamics, the “touchy-feely” class offered at Stanford and other business schools. Their reasons for wanting to cultivate emotional intelligence had little to do with virtue or love; the point was simply to outperform one’s peers in the boardroom. This atomizing tendency manifests today in a certain brand of Stoicism—what the scholar Beth Blum calls “apathy prestige.”…
[Calvert reviews the history of the tension between literature and self-help…]
… It’s hard to keep up with all the overlapping crises. There’s the crisis of democracy, and the mental-health crisis, and the crisis of the humanities, and the death of the English major, and the spread of AI tools through the education system and the publishing industry. My sense is that these crises have an element in common: the refusal of experience. Ideology is one way to refuse it. Social-media use is another. (Haidt, to his credit, calls Instagram an “experience blocker.”) Formulaic self-help and fantasy might qualify, too, since those books fail to engage the moral imagination, relying instead on stereotypes and clichés to build a fan base. One has to be suspicious when a genre attracts pundits. David and Arthur Brooks are both riding the self-help gravy train, and Ross Douthat is serializing a fantasy novel on Substack. None of them seems to have read much literary fiction. Ditto our tech overlords, whose lists of favorites always include the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, both of which they misread fairly catastrophically.
Can literary fiction solve the polycrisis? Probably not. But it might not be a bad idea to preserve its place in the culture, even at the risk of sounding cringe or lame or snobbish…
… The comedy of self-improvement has fueled the novel ever since the origins of the genre, whether one traces it back to Don Quixote or Confessions. George Eliot’s characters are always seeking virtue in their hearts and in their communities. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet follow amateur scientists who embark on absurd but ultimately moving quests for how to live. “Who does science belong to?” these novels seem to ask. “Who, if not the Church, will be the authority to guide our lives?” I read these books in 2015, at the height of the so-called “replication crisis” in social science, and I can’t help but think of Bouvard and Pécuchet as podcast bros “doing their own research.” Their experiments in gardening, husbandry, chemistry, and spiritualism are silly and disastrous. (At one point, they use the gastric juice of a duck to “produce digestion artificially.”) If the novel had been written today, its wayward bourgeois characters might have tried shakes and supplements, like the narrator of Jordan Castro’s recent novel Muscle Man, a disillusioned English professor who copes with the absurdities of the modern university (“People wanted clear-cut moral lines, like cocaine on a mirror”) through a strict regime of powerlifting.
Given how obnoxiously reductive self-help can be, it’s tempting for the discerning reader to mock the whole industry and even, at times, the impulse. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, published in 1966, Philip Rieff does so on behalf of moral order. Douthat, drawing on Rieff, bemoans what he calls the “Oprahfication” of Christianity. In Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy, addressing himself to the “post-religious technological society” of 1983, satirizes the genre with deranged glee; each chapter ends with a silly quiz or thought experiment.
But the industry is one thing, and the impulse is another. A management consultant once told me she was reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. Why not read Proust himself? Because that would be an experience, and what my colleague wanted was a few key takeaways. I, too, have browsed the shelves in search of key takeaways. Last year, when my daughter was born, I did so rather desperately. Yet the books that meant the most to me were still novels and memoirs: Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature; Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors; and Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a story of early motherhood that quotes Proust and Edith Wharton between descriptions of sleep training and horrifying play dates. This memoir taught me nothing, but I highly recommended it. There was something about the experience.
In May, during an audience at the Vatican, Pope Leo connected the practice of serious reading to the “culture of encounter.” I find this phrase useful for explaining what I value about the transfer of consciousness between an author and a reader or the deep sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. The problem with self-help is that in offering solutions, diagnoses, boundaries, and methods, it protects suffering readers from a genuine encounter. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn calls that tendency in therapeutic culture “gnostic escapism.” In Ars Vitae, a book that attempts to wrest philosophy back from the corporate festival crowd and YouTube intellectuals, she makes a persuasive argument against that ancient heresy, which claims to offer access to a secret knowledge beyond the “hurly burly” of human experience. Gnosticism, or “knowingness” (the red pill, the life hack, the silver-bullet insight) “destroys revelation, and revelation is the necessary ingredient to transform the constitution of a self to a soul.” For Lasch-Quinn, the antidote is Neoplatonism. In particular, the work of Plotinus, who accused the Gnostics of arrogantly treating life as a puzzle they could solve instead of the mystery it is. The same accusation could be leveled against the authors of many popular psychology books.
Can a novel really offer the kind of revelation that transforms a self into a soul? A version of this question came up recently on an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy. At the end of a conversation about religion and politics, cohost Sam Adler-Bell admits that he would be worried “to a theological degree” about the humanity of someone who’s incapable of reading a novel. Half in jest, his cohost Matt Sitman recommends the Bible. “Well, let’s start with Tolstoy,” answers Sam (Matt is a practicing Catholic and a former editor at Commonweal; Sam is a secular Mets fan with a serious interest in Freud). The episode ends with a quote from Marilynne Robinson, a shared touchstone. What occurred to me in the moment (I was jogging on the treadmill) was that Robinson, in her latest book, Reading Genesis, invites us to consider the fact that Tolstoy and the Bible offer similar spiritual benefits.
The Old Testament, in Robinson’s view, is a kind of realist novel featuring complex characters, high stakes, a narrative arc, comedic tension, and carefully chosen imagery. “The remarkable realism,” she writes, “is a product of the interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” Of course, there are genre elements—trickster tales, flood narratives, threats of human sacrifice—but ultimately, the Bible has a deep concern for the psychological nuances of life. In this sense, it achieves a higher literary quality than the tales and myths from which it emerged, just as Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, turned tabloid gossip into art through the force of his authorial attention, or as Dostoevsky used the popular structure of a trial in The Brothers Karamazov. Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. It also helps us pass the time between loads of laundry.
Encouragingly, the self-help crowd, including the happiness warriors, are suggesting that we ditch our phones and pick up books instead. Haidt, in particular, has identified the loss of immersive reading as a problem as severe as teen depression. But Haidt is a social psychologist employed by a major business school. As much as I support his recent antitech crusade on behalf of young people, I would not want to entrust him with the power of recommending which books they should read when they turn off their devices. I imagine the list would include more formulaic guides to life than challenging modernist novels. I imagine they would be the kind of books that only help the self…
Eminently worth reading in full.
Turning fiction into self-help amounts to a refusal of experience: “Literature Is Not About You,” from @drwclvrt.bsky.social in @commonwealmagazine.org.
###
As we read on, we might note that today is the final day of the 2026 Banned Books Week.
Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools. Held in the last week of September or first week of October, the annual event highlights the value of free and open access to information and brings together the entire book community — librarians, educators, authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas.
By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) compiles lists of challenged books as reported in the media and submitted by librarians and teachers across the country. – source
Sadly, the problem seems to be growing. In a report timed to coincide with BBW, PEN International detailed nearly 12,000 instances of book banning affecting 7,370 unique titles across 114 U.S. school districts during the 2025–26 academic year, a record high since PEN began tracking literary censorship in American public schools in 2021. (And, of course, this is in addition to censorship in libraries, book stores, and elsewhere.) Texas (8,193 bans) vaulted past the prior “champion” Florida (3,212 bans), in part because schools in Texas have attempted to comply with SB13 (a censorial state law that applies to “broad categories” of books) by ham-fistedly asking chatbots which books they should ban. More on these bans here.
Lest we need a refresher on why this matters. the estimable Richard Ovenden reminds us that “there is no political power without power over the archive” (“Titles banned, data deleted, the nation’s librarians sacked without explanation – Donald Trump’s war on books is a threat to democracy across the world.”)
“The art of the parenthesis is one of the great secrets of eloquence in society”*…
Florence Hazrat, with an adapted excerpt from her recent On the Mark- From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World…
On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come. Come. My life is in danger and I long to see you.” Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead. Sir Philip Sidney [here], courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about errant knights [The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia or simply Arcadia], which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle. He left the action hanging on a parenthesis.
Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life)
Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished. Even so, Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, and using the parenthesis as a memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again. Yet considering how his own life was cut short at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen…
… When Coluccio Salutati invented the parenthesis, nearly 200 years before Sidney perfected it, he rendered visible an age-old rhetorical practice of inserting a particle of a sentence into a greater whole. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called it interpositio, drawing attention to putting something in the middle of something else. But one suspects that there is a limit for how long the mini-digression can become without hijacking the main sentence (or story). There was no rule on the length of a parenthesis; it was up to the discretion of the writer to adjudicate appropriate delay. It makes sense, then, that Sidney’s near-contemporary, the schoolmaster John Hoskins, writes in his Directions for Speech and Style (1600) that “all parentheses are in extremities, either graces or disgraces to a speech”…
… Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings. Sidney’s brackets include qualifications of the thrust of the main sentence, comparisons, doubts, metaphors, and examples, all of which dilate the narrative into a complex, three-dimensional woven tapestry, accommodating innumerable opinions and interpretations. The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life: We pause for thought.
There’s something mysterious about the “little moons”, as Erasmus called them. The moon has represented, in various traditions, creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so has the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader’s ear, mumbled under the author’s breath. For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster and pedagogical author Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as “creatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by”. They’re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can’t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that “the words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.” Both visually and aurally, then, what’s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.
Brackets establish a special magic between reader and writer. Perhaps that’s why Sidney used them to dedicate his work to his sister Mary, a gifted translator and accomplished poet in her own right:
Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most dear Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the spider’s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks, were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father.
Sidney is hedging his words in ever more delaying parentheses. He adds comparisons (“like the spider’s web” and “as the cruel fathers”), classical allusions to Greek myth, and appeals to the reader (“most dear Lady”). Parentheses encase words, keeping vulnerable admissions safe and visually private. An open bracket is always twinned with a closed bracket — the words inside are never left out in the cold…
The uncontested early modern king of brackets and the place of the parenthesis: “Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)graces of the Parenthesis,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
###
As we interrogate interpositions, we might note that today is Ship in a Bottle Day.
Ship in a Bottle Day was first celebrated in 2013. October 4 was chosen in honor of Jack Hinkley, founder of the Ship in a Bottle Association of America, who helped promote and preserve this unusual maritime craft.
The tradition of building ships in bottles became especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sailors often made small models during long voyages, using their knowledge of ships, rigging, wood, thread, and simple tools.
The secret is not that the bottle is cut open. In traditional ship-in-a-bottle construction, the model is built so the masts and sails can fold down. The ship is carefully inserted through the neck of the bottle, and then the rigging is pulled to raise the masts into place. The process requires patience, steady hands, and careful planning. – source
“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…
Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.
But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…
In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…
“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.
* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3
###
As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.
“Traveling booksellers balanced the need to garner sales with the specter of artful deception”*…
We noted in a post last month the extraordinary market in the 19th century U.S. for subscription books (a direct-sales approach to publishing with a long history); even after subscriptions subsided, their infrastructure– sales teams that contained an appreciable number of women– was used to sell books in locations too remote for bookstores. Livia Gershon reviews the risks and rewards of life on the road as a traveling bookseller…
In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the rise of public libraries, many people in remote parts of the United States got their hands on new books thanks to traveling salespeople. As literature scholar and archivist Jolie Braun writes, drawing on three memoirs from this era, women in that line of work had some distinct advantages but also faced serious hardships, both physical and social.
The booksellers visited homes and businesses with sample books, took orders, and then later delivered the books and collected payment. Braun writes that popular volumes included Bibles, farming and health manuals, biographies, and fiction. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs and the works of Mark Twain were popular choices. Many books published using this “subscription” model sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
While the vast majority of book peddlers were men, some publishers recruited women with the idea that they would be well suited to sell books on health and hygiene to female readers, and also that customers would find them sympathetic.
In an 1868 account of her work selling books across northern Illinois and Indiana, Annie Nelles Dumond described taking up the work out of necessity. She wrote that, seeking to escape a difficult childhood, she married young to a man who turned out to already have a wife and children. A second husband abandoned her. So Dumond sought ways to support herself.
When she began selling books, she wore a mourning bonnet. She acknowledged that this was deceptive but wrote that it was “almost necessary to my self-preservation that my past should not be known.”
Dumond described pride in her work’s “dissemination of light and knowledge among the masses.” By contrast, in an 1874 book on her own work as a bookseller, J. W. Likins of central California wrote that, despite knowing it was “honorable and legitimate” employment, “it seemed to me very much like begging.”
Likins, who took the job to support her family after her husband became too ill to work, wrote that some potential customers seemed curious or pitying. But a few men were angry to see a woman out on her own, demanding that she go home to take care of her family or incorrectly assuming that she was a suffragist.
More disturbingly, in a third autobiographical account Braun considers, published in 1881, a northern California peddler named Harriet Wasson Styer described a man telling her that, if she were his sister, he would murder her rather than allow her to canvass.
But much of Styer’s account suggested a fascinating experience. She recounted traveling to lumber camps and mining towns, admiring the wild landscapes, and coping with bed bugs and dirty stagecoaches.
Braun notes that all three peddlers were well aware that they were doing something many people believed was improper for a lady, but they took on the work out of a combination of necessity and a chance for adventure…
“The Women Who Sold Books Door to Door,” from @liviagershon.bsky.social in @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Building a Library in Wartime Paris” (“how librarians brought books to U. S. troops during World War I”)
* John Jude Garcia, American Biography, the History of Books, and the Market for Nationalism, 1800-1855
###
As we get a foot in the door, we might send grateful birthday greetings to Herman Melville; he was born on this date in 1819. A writer, he is best known for Moby-Dick (1851), Typee (1846), and his posthumously published (1924) novella Billy Budd, Sailor. The efforts of the booksellers described above notwithstanding, Melville was not well known to the public at the time of his death in 1891. But the centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival; Moby-Dick is now, of course, considered one of the Great American Novels.
“Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive”*…
A third and final (for awhile:) post on AI and what it might mean… Sunday’s post was a consideration of what we might lose if AI becomes central to our lives, a modern echo of Socrates’ lament on the spread of writing. Indeed, we are in a moment of high dudgeon over AI: its potential impact on the environment, on jobs. on the economy more broadly, and in the wake of recent statements from foundational model companies, on their governability(“rogue AI,” though do also see here), and thus on the prospect of our very existence (though do also see here).
Yesterday’s post was an example of thinking that starts from the implicit assumption that AI is coming, then asks how we might govern it. It’s worth noting that even if there is an AI Bubble about to burst, AI could still loom large in our longer-term future. Investors hobbled in many earlier bubbles (e.g., railroads, telecom, the dot.com crash, et al.) were directionally absolutely right about the longer-term promise of the technologies that excited them, just wrong to believe that the early entrants (and their specific offers) in which they were investing were the vehicles to realize that promise.
Today, we stick with the assumption that AI will continue to develop and to change the world around it. Some suggest that AI and its impact are moving us from literacy back to orality (the loss of which so concerned Socrates). But others suggest that AI (and the advances that it enables) could usher in a new Axial Age, a time of huge and ultimately positive transformation, on the other side of which we– humanity– will be… different, as different from the people we were in, say 1999, as Shakespeare was from Socrates.
But what might that be like? It’s relatively easy to imagine disasters that amount to the things we know collapsing; it’s much harder to envisage positive futures filled with altogether new things, futures the contents of which are, essentially by definition, things we’ve not imagined, much less experienced.
Following, from Vinkatesh Rao, one of the most thoughtful approaches I’ve yet come across. He starts with mathematics– with the recent successes of AIs in that field– locates that work in the history of math (in particular axiomatics), then suggests a way of understanding AI’s “success”:
… A theorem prover does not search the space of all possible sequences of logical symbols. It plays inside a world humans have painstakingly designed.
This makes recent achievements in AI mathematics look slightly different.
Perhaps we have been too quick to interpret them as evidence that AI has acquired access to the wild source of mathematical intuition. A significant part of the achievement may instead be that humans spent a century converting increasingly large regions of mathematical wilderness into exceptionally good game boards: semi-closed environments in which the relevant state can be represented, legitimate moves can be made, accumulated technique can be reused, and success can be verified…
Rao then explains how similar trajectories have accrued in the application of AI to programming and to physics, concluding…
Across mathematics, programming and physics, the same pattern keeps appearing. First there is clever performance. Then somebody finds a representation that captures what the clever performers are doing. Then general machinery accumulates around the representation. Then the machinery becomes architecture. Eventually much of the play becomes mechanical.
The creativity has not disappeared. It has moved.
There is an obvious objection to this story.
Perhaps what I am describing as progress is merely legibility.
James C. Scott famously described [and here] the tendency of modern states to simplify complicated social and natural realities into representations that administrators can see and manipulate: cadastral maps, standardized names, scientific forests, censuses, planned cities.
The representation is useful precisely because it throws things away. A forest seen by a forester interested in timber yield is not the forest experienced by the people, animals, fungi and plants living in it. The administrative forest has become extraordinarily legible along a narrow set of dimensions by becoming blind along others.
Every game performs a similar operation. Before you can play, you must decide what the pieces are. You must decide what constitutes the state of the game, what counts as a move, what consequences follow from moves, and what counts as winning. Everything else becomes environment.
A rigid body in a mechanical simulation is not actually rigid. A point mass is not a point. A frictionless surface does not exist. A program described by its types still runs on processors with caches and memory hierarchies. A theorem encoded in Lean does not contain the diagram that gave somebody the idea for it.
Formalization is compression.
In physics this is explicit. Reality becomes a model, the model becomes mathematics, and the mathematics becomes a numerical representation. Information is discarded at every step.
The miracle is not that nothing is lost. The miracle is how often we can throw almost everything away and still retain what matters…
…
… This suggests an important asymmetry. A productive mathematical ecology wants porous epistemic boundaries and impermeable verification boundaries. On the way in, metaphor, hallucination and category mistakes can be useful. On the way out, they are forbidden.
A poem can inspire the theorem. The poem cannot prove it…
… A domain becomes playable when enough of its phenomenological complexity can be compressed into something like a state; when there is some reasonably stable repertoire of actions; when interactions can be repeated; when outcomes provide feedback about better and worse play; and when the environment is stationary enough that lessons learned yesterday remain useful tomorrow.
None of these conditions needs to be perfect. Poker contains hidden information. Markets change their own rules. Hunting happens in an uncontrolled environment. Conversation does not have an explicit score.
Playability is a matter of degree.
Nor is playability the same as formalizability.
Children learn social games without writing axioms. Hunters learn landscapes. Merchants learn markets. Political operators learn institutions. Formalization is merely one unusually powerful technology for increasing playability.
So are money, measurement, domestication, standardization, simulation, bureaucracy and digitization. They do related things. They compress states. They stabilize interactions. They make outcomes comparable. They create memory. They allow experience to accumulate.
This suggests a hypothesis:
Far more of reality than we might reasonably have expected can be carved into semi-closed environments in which experience accumulates, performance improves through repeated play, and success eventually becomes sufficiently legible to automate.
Call this the Curiously Playable Universe hypothesis…
…
… If playability were merely a property of AI-friendly digital environments, none of this would be particularly interesting.
But the pattern is ancient. Consider agriculture.
Hunting and gathering takes place in a relatively wild learning environment. Animals move. Weather changes. Useful plants appear where they appear. The training distribution is supplied by nature.
Agriculture does something profound to the learning problem: It changes the environment.
Fields stabilize locations. Planting stabilizes cycles. Domestication alters organisms. Irrigation alters water availability. Storage alters time. Property regimes and markets stabilize incentives.
Humans did not merely become better at learning nature. They made nature easier to learn.
The wild game becomes domesticated.
Eventually industrial agriculture pushes large portions of the process toward automaticity: standardized breeds, standardized feed, controlled environments, mechanized planting and harvesting, precisely measured yields.
Then the game moves upward.
Instead of merely optimizing how an organism is cultivated, we begin optimizing the organism itself. Selective breeding becomes genetics becomes genomic selection and genetic engineering.
The old player becomes a game piece.
It is tempting to map this progression onto contemporary machine-learning terminology. Hunting looks vaguely like reinforcement learning in a difficult environment. Agriculture introduces something like shaped rewards and a controlled training distribution. Factory farming begins to resemble a regime of relentless verification against measurable outputs.
The analogy should not be pushed too literally. Human cultures have always involved teaching, imitation, norms and complicated reward systems.
But structurally the direction is unmistakable: increasing control over the state representation, action space, feedback signal and training distribution.
Commerce underwent another version of the transformation.
Exchange begins embedded in relationships, obligations, reputation, kinship and local knowledge. Credit can be intensely personal. Value is contextual.
Money performs an astonishing act of compression.
Heterogeneous goods and obligations become comparable through a common medium. Markets then stabilize arenas in which repeated exchange produces prices. Accounting makes states more legible. Contracts formalize future obligations.
Eventually finance builds games on top of the game.
A derivative can be a claim on the future value of another asset. Options put prices on possible future prices. Markets become arenas for expectations about expectations.
Play moves upward.
None of this required artificial intelligence. Humans have been turning wildernesses into games for thousands of years.
What AI changes is the cost of achieving playability in a domain.
Historically, making a domain playable was expensive. Somebody had to invent the categories. Somebody had to measure the variables. Somebody had to standardize the procedures. Somebody had to construct the institutions that made interactions repeatable.
And the resulting representation had to be relatively explicit because ordinary software was brittle.
Machine learning relaxes that requirement…
Rao muses on where this effect might accrue…
Coding is perhaps the clearest domain currently passing through the transition.
Programming was unusually playable before generative AI arrived.
Compilers already supplied verifiers. Type systems constrained legal moves. Unit tests supplied rewards. Version control recorded trajectories. Continuous integration repeatedly evaluated outcomes. Package ecosystems created enormous libraries of reusable moves.
Generative coding systems arrived in a landscape generations of programmers had inadvertently prepared for them.
As implementation becomes cheaper, the game moves upward toward specifications, architectures, product decisions and the increasingly important question of what software should exist in the first place.
Robotics is a more difficult frontier.
The physical world is phenomenologically unruly. Objects deform. Friction varies. Things break. Lighting changes. People walk into rooms. Drawers stick.
Simulation, cheap sensors, multimodal models and increasingly capable world models are gradually making physical environments more playable, but reality continually leaks through the representation.
This is why robotics may be one of the most important tests of the Curiously Playable Universe hypothesis.
Can enough of ordinary physical reality be compressed into stable learned representations to permit the same cycle of domestication and automation?
Science will probably fragment according to playability rather than according to our traditional rankings of intellectual difficulty.
Protein structure turned out to be unusually playable.
Drug discovery is less so because chemical promise must survive biology, organisms, clinical trials and human heterogeneity. Materials discovery may become increasingly playable through the combination of simulation and automated laboratories. Ecology may remain stubbornly wild because every useful abstraction excludes interactions operating at another scale.
Medicine contains both extremes. Image interpretation and molecular design can be made relatively game-like. Caring for an elderly person with five interacting conditions, family constraints and changing preferences is another matter.
Governance may become a particularly strange frontier.
States have spent centuries making populations legible through names, addresses, laws, property records, taxes, censuses, bureaucratic categories and standardized procedures. In that sense the modern administrative state is already a vast game-making machine.
AI will make more of its internal operations automatic.
But political systems contain an unusual source of wilderness: the pieces know they are pieces.
People respond strategically to measurements, categories and incentives. A rule changes the behavior it was intended to regulate. A metric becomes a target and stops being a good metric (Goodhart’s Law). Political actors learn to play the machinery designed to make them legible.
This may push governance upward toward new games involving states themselves: transnational protocols, financial systems, supply chains, standards regimes, platform governance and other structures that do not fit comfortably inside the old nation-state game board.
Some domains may resist for much longer.
Child-rearing is difficult to make playable because the objective changes as the child changes. Friendship has no stable score. Diplomacy involves adversaries whose models include models of your model of them. Entrepreneurship often consists precisely of discovering a game nobody realized existed.
Frontier science operates where we do not yet know which measurements matter. Cultural creation is evaluated by audiences who change partly because of the works being evaluated. Political legitimacy is altered by attempts to measure and optimize it.
These are not necessarily domains AI cannot enter. They are domains in which the wilderness fights back…
He continues…
… We keep asking what it means that machines can now play chess, write programs, fold proteins, prove theorems, steer robots and discover molecules. The question presumes that the remarkable new object is the machine—that some mysterious substance called intelligence has finally become “general” enough to flow from one human province into another.
But perhaps the stranger discovery concerns the provinces: Wildernesses can be reliably turned into game boards. We domesticate the territory, become skilled at its game, build machinery that plays it better than we can, and move outward to construct another game around the first, domesticating a larger scope.
This happened to fields and livestock long before it happened to chess. It happened to trade before it happened to programming. It happened to mechanics before it happened to mathematical proof.
Artificial intelligence did not invent this strange property of reality. It is merely making it difficult not to notice.
The deepest surprise of the AI era may turn out not to be that intelligence was easier to manufacture than we thought. It may be that the universe is far more playable than we imagined…
And he concludes with a consideration of writing…
… Writing sits somewhere awkwardly in the middle of the playability spectrum. It is obviously more playable than friendship or political legitimacy. There are stable artifacts, accumulated techniques, recognizable genres, repeatable operations and abundant feedback. Sentences can be revised. Arguments can be tested for consistency. Stories can be checked for continuity. Editors can compare two versions and usually say something useful about why one works better.
But writing lacks the feature that makes Lean such an extraordinarily good game board: a verifier. There is no kernel that accepts Middlemarch and rejects a bad novel. The relevant state is incompletely represented, the available moves are effectively unlimited, and the reward function wanders around outside the text in readers, institutions, historical circumstances and cultures that change partly in response to what gets written. Recent attempts to extend verifiable-reward techniques to writing therefore have to manufacture approximate evaluators out of principles and pairwise judgments rather than simply checking an answer. Writing is playable, but imperfectly and unevenly so.
The unevenness is becoming easier to see because AI is revealing which kinds of writing were already more game-like than we realized. A corporate memo, SEO article, product description, technical explanation or conventional news report has relatively strong constraints: purpose, audience, format, facts, length, house style, perhaps measurable outcomes. Formulaic genre fiction has a looser but still recognizable game board of beats, tropes, pacing, character functions and reader expectations. Even fiction once assumed to depend heavily on irreducible human voice is proving surprisingly susceptible to systematic generation and variation. Writing is not one game but a family of wilderness activities at very different stages of domestication.
At the other end lies writing whose purpose is partly to alter the terms by which it will be judged. As Walter Benjamin observed, “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one.”
A genuinely new literary form, a strange essay, a foundational work of philosophy, or a piece of criticism that gives its readers a concept they did not previously possess cannot simply optimize against an existing reward function. Its success may consist in creating a new one. This is writing at its most wilderness-like, and perhaps why arguments about AI writing become confused when “writing” is treated as a single capability. Producing competent prose, satisfying a genre contract, developing an argument and inventing a form are different games with different degrees of playability…
… The meta-game emerging above writing may therefore involve constructing—and strategically revealing—the game boards on which execution takes place. If competent prose becomes cheap, more resources can be directed toward finding the question, assembling unlikely source domains, inventing the useful distinction, designing sequences of inquiry, recognizing when an analogy is productive, deciding what belongs together, and establishing the criteria by which a finished object ought to succeed. The writer becomes somewhat less like a person manufacturing sentences and somewhat more like an architect and player of generative constraints.
That does not mean prose becomes irrelevant. A game board badly realized is still a bad essay, just as a brilliant architectural plan does not eliminate the need for a building. Nor does it mean the higher-level activity is permanently reserved for humans. AI systems may themselves become increasingly capable of inventing representations, designing probes, discovering genres and constructing new games. The point is only that automaticity at one level does not end the activity. It displaces its frontier.
Writing may therefore be undergoing the same transition described throughout this essay, only messier and in public. Some of its old games are becoming startlingly playable. Some are approaching automaticity. New games are forming above them. And beyond those remains the poorly mapped territory from which the next game board might emerge…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Curiously Playable Universe,” from @vgr.bsky.social.
And further: “Our Eukaryotic Moment,” in which Rao urges us to keep our minds open– to resist “premature ontological closure in conceptualizing AI.” A taste:
… About two billion years ago, life underwent a change in architecture. Until then, the planet was ruled by relatively simple prokaryotic cells: bacteria and archaea, tiny packets of chemistry bounded by membranes, carrying their genetic material directly in the same cellular space where much of the business of life took place.
Then something happened, or rather, several things happened in an order that remains uncertain. At some point, an ancestral archaeon cell entered into a permanent symbiosis with a bacterium capable of unusually powerful energy metabolism.
That bacterium eventually became the mitochondrion.
Somewhere in the same long evolutionary transition, genetic material became enclosed within a nucleus, separating the storage and regulation of hereditary information from much of the cell’s everyday chemistry. Internal membranes proliferated, cytoskeletons became more elaborate, and a new kind of cell emerged: the eukaryote….
… Eukaryotic cells became larger, more internally differentiated and capable of forms of organization unavailable to their ancestors. Much later, and independently in several lineages, some evolved multicellularity. Cells themselves became components of larger entities, differentiating and cooperating in increasingly elaborate ways. From the eukaryotic architecture eventually came forests, mushrooms, octopuses, hummingbirds, whales and us.
Eukaryotes were more than just “better bacteria.” They represented a different organization of life, capable of sustaining far more complex structures..
We may be living through an analogous transition now. The emergence of AI, in the particular form that it has appeared (deep learning), is arguably the eukaryotic moment in human cultural evolution, understood in memetic terms, with humans playing the role of mitochondria, and AI the role of the nucleus…
Meantime: “After We Stop Grieving AI: Cyborgs, Centaurs and Cyberpunks” (via Patrick Tanguay) See also: “Diving Deeper Into Digital Transformation” from John Hagel (source of the image above).
As the estimable Tim O’Reilly suggests, we’d probably be wise to take a breath, to treat AI as a “normal technology”: “Technology doesn’t force us… it merely opens the door.”
* Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
###
As we crane to conceive what’s beyond our cocoon, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) was founded. In one sense, computer science dates back to the 17th century and the mechanical calculators of Wilhelm Schickard and Gottfried Leibniz; in another, to the Difference and Analytical Engines of Charles Babbage (and the “programming” of Ada Lovelace). But the ACM can claim to be at least a key stone in the foundation of the field we now knw as “Computer Science”– the first modern “learned society” devoted to the emerging field. (Computer Science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s. The world’s first computer science degree program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science, began at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953. The first computer science department in the United States was formed at Purdue University in 1962.)
You must be logged in to post a comment.