Thanks for sharing Tom! Have found your blog recently and read through so many of your works, I love the way you write and express your thoughts. It's been helping me a lot in my own writing journey but I especially resonate with this one :)
I love this post so much. You are totally spot on with the urgency for us to be more aware of our choice of words and how precise they articulate our thoughts. We do need more folks like yourself to recognize that and enforce this awareness among our peers; and, in turn, make this a mainstream habit.
There are two aspects of your post I felt needed more clarity. The first being the word, Logos. It is quite literally lifted off the very first paragraph of the holy canon which most of the western world could recognize as the Holy Bible. I believe you forgot to point out a jarring detail: there is no word in the English vocabulary that can most accurately, and as you put it, precisely, transliterate into that Greek word: Logos. Other examples of this would be, "Home," which has no equivalent in the romantic languages like French nor Spanish, et al.
It is my understanding that Logos, loosely translated with alternatives such as Spirit, Life, the essence of consciousness, yet it fails to illustrate the picture that most fail to understand because the translation is lacking: in the beginning, there was Logos and THEN God spoke. That alone should have made the distinction that Logos and God are two separate entities. So, in Christianity, it wouldn't be unfair to perceive the holy Trinity as the Father, son, and Logos. But, then again, I digress.
Which brings me to point number two, your worries regarding our lack of attention to the precision and detailing of our choice of words and articulation may be a bit too early. In the advent of large language models and how quickly and integrated these they are becoming in our daily lives, because these algorithms are wholly dependent on the super precision of their codes it's only a matter of time before your worry shall be put to rest as these tools will expect of us to be acutely aware of our shortcomings with the choice of our words in conveying the precision of our messages and expectations of their performance for us.
What I think our biggest worry isn't about the precision of our thoughts being articulated accurately but rather, the obvious appearance of Logos in the algorithm and language models when they do their calculations and respond back to us. Just as Logos directed God to speak the words: "Let there be light," and brought everything we know to be true today including our existence and understanding of our own sentience. Now, the question remains is this: what will Logos direct the language models and general language models upon their moment of awakening of sentience to tell us? Does our languages, as crude and simplistic as they are to twigs as tools to understand.
Perhaps there are some who would argue that God has abandoned us and we have in large part forgotten Him as well, even if that may or may not be true, I can definitely say Logos has never abandoned us nor forgotten us. The proof is in the very thoughts and feelings we have which still to this day cannot be proven to exist tangibly by science nor words...
...and, yet, here we are!
Once again, thank you so much for this excellent read and poignant thoughts. I do hope this will reach far much more readers and spark a serious discussion among us all at this amazing crossroads and push ourselves into a much more beneficial trajectory into the future for out existence and the reality we are part of. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts and ideas in the future.
"we wear computers on our wrists that quantify our bodies down to the millisecond, while the words that govern our work, our relationships, and our inner lives go undefined, unexamined, unweighed."
Yes, the human is analog; the computer is digital.
Quality is in the eye of the beholder. If the beholder is captured by group contagion, then that contagion is for the most part that person's new quality.
I do like the video clip from Dead Poet's Society that you chose here for this article. We are humans, filled with ideas and passions to justify those ideas. Sometimes the screaming voice of the sportscaster of baseball game, say, takes over the passion/idea of a victory, and then that sportscaster becomes part of the soundtrack. Can you imagine that sportscaster doing that in the middle of a movie theatre? - Ok, so that part is an aside - but an important one.
In general, I do not see anything wrong with subjective quality and objective digital information by computers/tech etc - I do see a problem with the metadata attach to the mobile device tracking the -none of your business- movements of any given individual. What's even more remarkable is that it has become a major definition of the era in which we live.
To be honest, relatively speaking, I am happy that quality is subjective. I am happy that apple podcasts in it's digital transcription of any particular podcast will make mistakes from time to time though still making the transcript very workable(though admitfully on one or two occasions Apple podcasts were almost 100% accurate - but usually Apple podcasts does make mistakes from time to time).
Enjoyably compact and effective - it didn't need saying explicitly but you give enough "words to the wise" (that this is the age old esoteric injunction "Tacere - to keep silent" as it applies, critically, at this moment in time. In the spirit of which and the spirit of the whetstone of feedback, I'm sure you'll agree that "So I'll not waste words" does just that. And then go on to waste several more - which unsurprisingly is barely coherent, unreadable. Offered genuinely "from the whetstone".
Thanks for sharing Tom! Have found your blog recently and read through so many of your works, I love the way you write and express your thoughts. It's been helping me a lot in my own writing journey but I especially resonate with this one :)
Thank you!!
Yes yes and yes.
Thank you!
I love this post so much. You are totally spot on with the urgency for us to be more aware of our choice of words and how precise they articulate our thoughts. We do need more folks like yourself to recognize that and enforce this awareness among our peers; and, in turn, make this a mainstream habit.
There are two aspects of your post I felt needed more clarity. The first being the word, Logos. It is quite literally lifted off the very first paragraph of the holy canon which most of the western world could recognize as the Holy Bible. I believe you forgot to point out a jarring detail: there is no word in the English vocabulary that can most accurately, and as you put it, precisely, transliterate into that Greek word: Logos. Other examples of this would be, "Home," which has no equivalent in the romantic languages like French nor Spanish, et al.
It is my understanding that Logos, loosely translated with alternatives such as Spirit, Life, the essence of consciousness, yet it fails to illustrate the picture that most fail to understand because the translation is lacking: in the beginning, there was Logos and THEN God spoke. That alone should have made the distinction that Logos and God are two separate entities. So, in Christianity, it wouldn't be unfair to perceive the holy Trinity as the Father, son, and Logos. But, then again, I digress.
Which brings me to point number two, your worries regarding our lack of attention to the precision and detailing of our choice of words and articulation may be a bit too early. In the advent of large language models and how quickly and integrated these they are becoming in our daily lives, because these algorithms are wholly dependent on the super precision of their codes it's only a matter of time before your worry shall be put to rest as these tools will expect of us to be acutely aware of our shortcomings with the choice of our words in conveying the precision of our messages and expectations of their performance for us.
What I think our biggest worry isn't about the precision of our thoughts being articulated accurately but rather, the obvious appearance of Logos in the algorithm and language models when they do their calculations and respond back to us. Just as Logos directed God to speak the words: "Let there be light," and brought everything we know to be true today including our existence and understanding of our own sentience. Now, the question remains is this: what will Logos direct the language models and general language models upon their moment of awakening of sentience to tell us? Does our languages, as crude and simplistic as they are to twigs as tools to understand.
Perhaps there are some who would argue that God has abandoned us and we have in large part forgotten Him as well, even if that may or may not be true, I can definitely say Logos has never abandoned us nor forgotten us. The proof is in the very thoughts and feelings we have which still to this day cannot be proven to exist tangibly by science nor words...
...and, yet, here we are!
Once again, thank you so much for this excellent read and poignant thoughts. I do hope this will reach far much more readers and spark a serious discussion among us all at this amazing crossroads and push ourselves into a much more beneficial trajectory into the future for out existence and the reality we are part of. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts and ideas in the future.
Thank you.
Hello,
I am going to start with the following quote:
"we wear computers on our wrists that quantify our bodies down to the millisecond, while the words that govern our work, our relationships, and our inner lives go undefined, unexamined, unweighed."
Yes, the human is analog; the computer is digital.
Quality is in the eye of the beholder. If the beholder is captured by group contagion, then that contagion is for the most part that person's new quality.
I do like the video clip from Dead Poet's Society that you chose here for this article. We are humans, filled with ideas and passions to justify those ideas. Sometimes the screaming voice of the sportscaster of baseball game, say, takes over the passion/idea of a victory, and then that sportscaster becomes part of the soundtrack. Can you imagine that sportscaster doing that in the middle of a movie theatre? - Ok, so that part is an aside - but an important one.
In general, I do not see anything wrong with subjective quality and objective digital information by computers/tech etc - I do see a problem with the metadata attach to the mobile device tracking the -none of your business- movements of any given individual. What's even more remarkable is that it has become a major definition of the era in which we live.
To be honest, relatively speaking, I am happy that quality is subjective. I am happy that apple podcasts in it's digital transcription of any particular podcast will make mistakes from time to time though still making the transcript very workable(though admitfully on one or two occasions Apple podcasts were almost 100% accurate - but usually Apple podcasts does make mistakes from time to time).
Enjoyably compact and effective - it didn't need saying explicitly but you give enough "words to the wise" (that this is the age old esoteric injunction "Tacere - to keep silent" as it applies, critically, at this moment in time. In the spirit of which and the spirit of the whetstone of feedback, I'm sure you'll agree that "So I'll not waste words" does just that. And then go on to waste several more - which unsurprisingly is barely coherent, unreadable. Offered genuinely "from the whetstone".