AI, Alice, and Way Out West

Things-Sam-wishes-he-had-known. Children as R&D factories. Poetry and Sonny Rollins.

Open throttle?

Our Calling

Here is a post from Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, on What I Wish Someone Had Told Me. Whether or not one agrees with all of the observations, they are useful to consider.

1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.
2. Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.
3. It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
4. Incentives are superpowers; set them carefully.
5. Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.
6. Communicate clearly and concisely.
7. Fight bullshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.
8. Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results.
9. Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fast rate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.
10. Superstars are even more valuable than they seem, but you have to evaluate people on their net impact on the performance of the organization.
11. Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
12. Don’t fight the business equivalent of the laws of physics.
13. Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.
14. Scale often has surprising emergent properties.
15. Compounding exponentials are magic. In particular, you really want to build a business that gets a compounding advantage with scale.
16. Get back up and keep going.
17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.

What’s the tea?

Children, Adults, and The Jefferson Airplane

From Sam Leith, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, considering Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll), Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass:

It is a way of entering into a childlike mode of apprehending the world. The fact that some of the episodes in those books resemble psychedelic experiences has not gone unnoticed. We have lit on the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the drinks that make you bigger and smaller, the magic mushroom, the unstable sense of self and other, the way familiar people and objects become strange. In Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Grace Slick commands in a rising howl: Remember . . . what the dormouse said! Feed your head!”

There’s no reason at all to suppose that the strait-laced Dodgson was off his head on laudanum. To see the dream-narrative of Alice as a trip is to put the cart before the horse: being a child is trippy enough. Neuroscience backs this up. Adult minds are focused like spotlights—they have learned to ignore extraneous sensory input and fit the world into established categories and hierarchy of meaning—but children have what the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has called “lantern consciousness.” They are overloaded with the external stimuli and form original and unusual connections and hypotheses. Fantasy and counterfactuals are how children run. “Children,” writes Gopnick,”are the R & D department of the human species.”

Sam Wood, A History of Childhood Reading at 110-111

Here is The Jefferson Airplane and “White Rabbit,” which was a track on 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow. The clip is from, delightfully, “The Smothers Brothers” show:

Poetry

Matthew Nienow is a poet whose collection If Nothing was published recently. Although less formal than my usual taste, some of it is extraordinary.

Letter of Recommendation
 

I am writing on behalf of the wind in my son’s hair,
which, at least in this photograph, is always there for him,
always cooling his cheeks and suggesting new scents
from over yon dale, you know the one, just out
of sight from the cidery yard where his friends run
with him into the alchemical twilight, which clothes
every living thing in the ephemeral silk of youth,
which is only enhanced by the wind that carries downy
seedpods and pollen, giving the light something to shine
through, and the wind does this all thanklessly, so humble,
remaining mostly unseen, bowing down low in the grasses,
sometimes precisely in one branch alone, more often
broadly present, bearing the soft, steady answer
to the long question of what it means to be free.


And this:

What Luck

I lived. Lived again. Wrecked, 

hungover. Swerved in the dark

from river back to bunk

and never hit a tree. Never was

pulled over when my only 

tongue was Swamp. Locked 

my keys in the trunk in a thunder

storm, done hotboxing the Cimarron 

with can’t remember, car halfway 

in the road. Aura of blunt, pungent 

as roadkill skunk. Always made it

home. Always stumbling thick

tongued, lucky if I didn’t get the spins,

mumbling if I had to speak, numb

thing dumb in the truest sense.

Floor was floor and I was on it, gone

wind in a way. Also stone.

Somehow sang even undone. 

Almost alone, even throned

among future tombs, I lived, 

the coal of my heart on a slow 

burn, no time to lose, no such 

thing as time, eyes tuned 

to the lack of light, skull 

locked tight, crowned alive, the king 

of lost keys.




Music

Sonny Rollins

I recently read The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins. Although some of it is jazz theory and practice well beyond my ability to understand, some of it stays with you, especially if you are a creative type (which most of us are or would like to be).

I must remember that events are happening for the good—and not to get disillusioned when I fail to adhere to an ideal goal which I set.

And this, his last entry, which applies to jazz, the practice of law, writing fiction, and most things:

No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

Here is “I’m An Old Cowhand” from Way Out West (Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Ray Brown, bass; Shelly Manne, drums. Los Angeles, California, March 7, 1957).