This morning I asked chatGPT to suggest revisions to a draft of an opinion piece I’m writing. About half of the ten it came up with were at least worth considering. Not bad for a soulless pile of statistics! I’d consider using it again and would recommend it to students, with the caution that it can be dumb and insane.

So, I decided to up the stakes:

PROMPT:

At the end of this prompt is the text of Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg address. Please list the edits you would suggest that would make it more impactful. Include any fixes to poor grammar or spelling. Here is the address:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. “But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

RESPONSE:

Here are nine possible edits that could make Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address more impactful:

1. Replace “our fathers” with “our ancestors” to be more inclusive of all genders and identities.
2. Add a comma after “conceived in liberty” to improve the flow of the sentence.
3. Replace “Now we are engaged in” with “Today, we are in the midst of” to make the language more contemporary.
4. Remove the repetition of “that nation” and replace it with “it” in the sentence “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure” for clarity.
5. Add a comma after “here” in the sentence “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live” to improve the flow of the sentence.
6. Replace “it is” with “it’s” in the sentence “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this” to make the language less formal.
7. Replace “nor long remember” with “nor forget” in the sentence “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here” to simplify the language.
8. Add a comma after “dead” in the sentence “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” to improve the flow of the sentence.
9. Replace “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” with “and that the people shall continue to govern themselves” to simplify the language and make the message more clear.

Revised text: Four score and seven years ago our ancestors brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. Today, we are in the midst of a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives here that our nation might live. It’s altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor forget what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It’s for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It’s rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, and that the people shall continue to govern themselves.

I like suggestion #1, but after that it pretty much goes down hill, with #9 being the stuff of parody.

Still, if you’re not writing 19th century graveyard consecrations, you want to let chatGPT take an editing pass on your draft. (And if you are speaking at a 19th century graveyard consecration, please see Garry Wills’ awesome short book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. [Article version at The Atlantic].)

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Topic: The Supreme Court is hearing a case about whether section 230 exempts Google from responsibility for what it algorithmically recommends.

A thought from one of my favorite philosophers, Richard Rorty:

Rortiana, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

“…revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and the moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both… The gradual trial and error creation of a new, third, vocabulary… is not a discovery about how old vocabularies fit together… Such creations are not the result of successfully filling together pieces of a puzzle. They are not discoveries of a reality behind the appearances, of an undistorted view of the whole picture with which to replace myopic views of its parts. The proper analogy is with the invention of new tools to take the place of old tools.” — Richard Rorty,  Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989, p. 12

We’ve had to invent a new vocabulary to talk about these things: Is a website like a place or a magazine?  Are text messages like phone calls or telegrams? Are personal bloggers journalists [a question from 2004]?

The issue isn’t which Procrustean bed we want to force these new entries into, but what sort of world we want to live in with them. It’s about values, not principles or definitions. IMUOETC (“In my uncertain opinion expressed too confidently”)

Procruste’s bed. And this is better than being too tall for it :(

A point all of this misses: “Yo, we’re talking about law here, which by its nature requires us to bring entities and events under established categories.”

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I  typed my doctoral dissertation in 1978 on my last electric typewriter, a sturdy IBM Model B.

My soon-to-be wife was writing hers out long hand, which I was then typing up.

Then one day we took a chapter to a local typist who was using a Xerox word processor which was priced too high for grad students or for most offices. When I saw her correcting text, and cutting and pasting, my eyes bulged out like a Tex Avery wolf.

As soon as Kay-Pro II’s were available, I bought one from my cousin who had recently opened a computer store.

The moment I received it  and turned it on, I got curious about how the characters made it to the screen, and became a writer about tech. In fact, I became a frequent contributor to the Pro-Files KayPro magazine, writing ‘splainers about the details of how these contraptions. worked.

I typed my wife’s dissertation on it — which was my justification for buying it — and the day when its power really hit her was when I used WordStar’s block move command to instantly swap sections 1 and 4 as her thesis advisor had suggested; she had unthinkingly assumed it meant I’d be retyping the entire chapter. 

People noticed the deeper implications early on. E.g., Michael Heim, a fellow philosophy prof (which I had been, too), wrote a prescient book, Electric Language, in the early 1990s (I think) about  the metaphysical implications of typing into an utterly malleable medium. David Levy wrote Scrolling Forward about the nature of documents in the Age of the PC. People like Frode Hegland are still writing about this and innovating in the text manipulation space.

A small observation I used to like to make around 1990 about the transformation that had already snuck into our culture: Before word processors, a document was a one of a kind piece of writing like a passport, a deed, or an historic map used by Napoleon; a document was tied to its material embodiment. Then the word processing folks needed a way to talk about anything you could write using bits, thus severing “documents” from their embodiment. Everything became a document as everything became a copy.

In any case, word processing profoundly changed not only how I write, but how I think, since I think by writing. Having a fluid medium lowers the cost of trying out ideas, but also makes it easy for me to change the structure of my thoughts, and since thinking is generally  about connecting ideas, and those connections almost always assume a structure that changes their meaning — not just a linear scroll of one-liners — word processing is a crucial piece of “scaffolding” (in Clark and Chalmer‘s sense) for me and I suspect for most people.

In fact, I’ve come to recognize I am not a writer so much as a re-writer of my own words.

Figures

1. Norsk Teknisk Museum – Teigen fotoatelier, CC BY-SA 4.0
   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
2. By Autopilot – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39098108

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I have a confession: In 1982, I cancelled Mary Poppins.

The book’s beloved author, P.L. Travers, had just released a new version that removed some of the ethnic stereotypes that were in the original —I remember that “Eskimos” and Africans were caricatures, and I think there were more.

I was freelancing for Macleans at the time, and interviewed Ms. Travers about it over the phone. She was sweet, humble, and kind. It was a bit like getting to talk with Mr. Rogers.

I asked her why she had revised the book. She replied something like, “Why, I wouldn’t want to hurt any creature, human or animal.” (I can’t find the article online anywhere.)

So, yes, I actively helped to cancel Mary Poppins.

I wonder whatever happened to that book…

* * *

(Do I have to add that the article was in fact supportive of her? Good lord, you people are monsters!)

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I just briefly posted at Psychology Today about the way hope has been welcomely intruding as grief sometimes does.

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You’ve probably heard about MyHeritage.com‘s DeepNostalgia service that animates photos of faces. I’ve just posted at Psychology Today about the new type of uncanniness it induces, even though the animations of the individual photos I think pretty well escape The uncanny Value.

Here’s a sample from the MyHeritage site:

And here’s a thread of artworks and famous photos animated using DeepNostalgia that I reference in my post:

https://t.co/MDFSu3J0H1 has created some sort of animate your old photos application and I’m of course using it to feed my history addiction.
I apologise in advance to all the ancestors I’m about to offend.

Very fake history.

I’m sorry Queenie. pic.twitter.com/2np437yXyt

— Fake History Hunter (@fakehistoryhunt) February 28, 2021

More at Psychology Today …

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I just stumbled across an open access archive of 146 issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s 1960s political and cultural satire magazine. Thanks, JSTOR!

I read it when I was in high school and college in the 1960s and early 1970s. It was far more savage than MAD magazine, more explicit in topics and language, and went after riskier targets. The epitome of this was his parody of William Manchester’s book about the JFK assassination, The Death of a President — a parody that ended with an act by LBJ on the plane carrying Kennedy’s body to Washington that is still so crude and shocking that I’d have to use euphemisms to describe it. Instead, here’s an article that puts it in context.

That was Krassner pulping a topic with a meat hammer, but The Realist was often more clever and addressed very real issues: craven politicians, the abuse of power, the institutionalized oppression of the vulnerable, the US as a warmonger, the heartlessness of capitalism. To be clear, the LBJ article also addressed real issues: The growing JFK hagiography, LBJ’s lust for power and crude lack of empathy, the masculine all-consuming and sexualized power dynamic, the media’s genteel cowardice, etc. It just did so atypically in the form of a short story

Krassner was one of the co-founders of the Yippies. He published The Realist until 2001. He died in 2019.

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Lauren Oyler’s “The Case for Semicolons” in the NY Times Magazine is an entertaining defense of a punctuation mark that has, alas, been losing steam.

But I was struck by her use of em dashes in the articles, for I am an enthusiast of semicolons who over-uses em dashes, as do many of us. Em dashes as grammatical marks are matched only by parentheses in the permissiveness of their use, so I do not find them as satisfying as a well-placed semicolon.

I’ve been informally watching dashes eclipse semicolons and parentheses for decades now, but rest assured that no data has been harmed in this pursuit. I’d love to know if the rise in the use of dashes  — if there has been any such thing  — coincides with the influence of the Web. Are they more widely used (if indeed they are) because the rules are more lax? Because we write on the Web more like we speak? Because we’re writing more complex sentences? More poorly structured sentences? Because of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

I expect to go the grave with this question unanswered.

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At Medium.com I’m maintaining that television as a rhetorical form has reached a turning point — not that we’re at Peak TV (which we are) in terms of streaming services and network television, but that we are expecting and appreciating serious information and events to be presented in the ways pioneered by entertainment TV. And this is a good thing.

More here …

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danah boyd’s 2018 “You think you want media literacy, do you?” remains an essential, frame-changing discussion of the sort of media literacy that everyone, including danah [@zephoria], agrees we need: the sort that usually focuses on teaching us how to not fall for traps and thus how to disbelieve. But, she argues, that’s not enough. We also need to know how to come to belief.

I went back to danah’s brilliant essay because Barbara Fister [@bfister], a librarian I’ve long admired, has now posted “Lizard People in the Library.” Referencing danah’s essay among many others, Barbara asks: Given the extremity and absurdity of many American’s beliefs, what’s missing from our educational system, and what can we do about it? Barbara presents a set of important, practical, and highly sensible steps we can take. (Her essay is part of the Project Information Literacy research program.)

The only thing I’d dare to add to either essay — or more exactly, an emphasis I would add — is that we desperately need to learn and teach how to come to belief together. Sense-making as well as belief-forming are inherently collaborative projects. It turns out that without explicit training and guidance, we tend to be very very bad at it.

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