Tenacious, sanguine, rhapsodic, ardent, forthright. Impatient, melancholy, cantankerous, impetuous, pugnacious. It’s Aries season and today is my birthday.
I must get back into it. My writing. Why is it so hard? It’s hard, Callie, because you’re not setting aside time. Regularly. Consistently.
Girl, you know what you need to do.
I have a friend who shares my birthday, to the year: April 14, 1967. She was born in Seattle, I was born in Aspen. I met her a few years ago – before the pandemic – in a data visualization critique at Microsoft, where we both work as product designers (I’ve written about her house). This year we co-celebrated with a trip to a Korean day spa north of Seattle, a place where men are not allowed. Nor are clothes, shoes, or loud voices. It’s a refreshing concentration of the feminine, the antithesis of our day jobs.
While driving to the spa, I listened to a great podcast by Ezra Klein where he interviews Ethan Mollick on how to use AI (which I’ve wondered about in terms of making writing easier). I’d like to share some excerpts:
Ezra Klein
Let me ask you one specific question on that, because I’ve been writing a book. And on some bad days of writing the book, I decided to play around with GPT-4. And of the things that it got me thinking about was the kind of mistake or problem these systems can help you see and the kind they can’t. So they can do a lot of, give me 15 versions of this paragraph, 30 versions of this sentence. And every once in a while, you get a good version or you’ll shake something a little bit loose.
But almost always when I am stuck, the problem is I don’t know what I need to say. Oftentimes, I have structured the chapter wrong. Oftentimes, I’ve simply not done enough work. And one of the difficulties for me about using A.I. is that A.I. never gives me the answer, which is often the true answer — this whole chapter is wrong. It is poorly structured. You have to delete it and start over. It’s not feeling right to you because it is not right.
And I actually worry a little bit about tools that can see one kind of problem and trick you into thinking it’s this easier problem, but make it actually harder for you to see the other kind of problem that maybe if you were just sitting there, banging your head against the wall of your computer, or the wall of your own mind, you would eventually find.
Ethan Mollick1
I think that’s a wise point. I think there’s two or three things bundled there. The first of those is A.I. is good, but it’s not as good as you. It is, say, at the 80th percentile of writers based on some results, maybe a little bit higher. In some ways, if it was able to have that burst of insight and to tell you this chapter is wrong, and I’ve thought of a new way of phrasing it, we would be at that sort of mythical AGI level of A.I. as smart as the best human. And it just isn’t yet.
I think the second issue is also quite profound, which is, what does using this tool shape us to do and not do? One nice example that you just gave is writing. And I think a lot of us think about writing as thinking. We don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but for writers, that’s how they think. And sometimes, getting that shortcut could shortcut the thinking process. So I’ve had to change sometimes a little bit how I think when I use A.I., for better or for worse. So I think these are both concerns to be taken seriously.
Thinking is writing. Writing is thinking. We must ask ourselves what we lose when we make our lives too easy. There is value in struggle. Self-esteem lies in mastery, as witnessed by “the IKEA effect”: to wit, people place more value on things they create and finish themselves, value which is internalized.
When instant cake mixes were introduced in the 1950’s as part of a broader trend to simplify the life of the American housewife by minimizing manual labor, housewives were initially resistant: The mixes made cooking too easy, making their labor and skill seem undervalued. As a result, manufacturers changed the recipe to require adding an egg; while there are likely several reasons why this change led to greater subsequent adoption, infusing the task with labor appeared to be a crucial ingredient.2
And so, I must dig out my writing tools and my music and my pens and my papers and set a timer accompanied by S.M.A.R.T.3 goals. I must do the things I think I cannot do.
But for today, happy birthday to me.
Celebrating.
Things That Nourished My Writing: February-April 2024
FOOD
The Peanut Butter Cookie from Seattle’s beloved Metropolitan Market.
LITERARY
Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
Dune by Frank Herbert
FILM + TV
Tutwiler, a Frontline documentary on women who give birth while incarcerated.
THEATRE
Nassim at Portland Center Stage. The most unique theatre act I’ve ever experienced.
PLACES
The Ace Hotel in Portland, Oregon. One of my favorite places to stay anywhere and where Bria and I celebrated our Aries birthdays last weekend (she was born on March 22nd).
Pittock Mansion, just outside Portland. Bria thought it was creepy, but I loved it.
THINGS
This beautiful toilet paper holder from West Elm that Will just installed for me.
DOGS
Friedrich, as always. And our newly adopted blue Weimaraner, Ted. We are a two-dog household once more.
Love seeing how your mind works as well as the workings of other minds and non-minds i.e. AI. ( it will always just be code to me)
Please keep writing!
xxoo
Sounds like a great birthday celebration - wish I could have been there (winking smiley face). I believe the Aries trait that best defines your 57th year will be rhapsodic!