Damnit. Now I have to throw out my entire T-shirt drawer. (JK. All my t-shirts
bear brewery logos these days.)
But your FH story targets exactly the point I tried to make with: "deeper or interpolated
meaning P steganographically hid in the carrier message". In his case, he's annoyed because he
didn't think he *hid* it. But you can hide things accidentally. Part of my irritation with the LLM
output is that it sanitizes one's content ... washes out the nuance. Had FH asked ChatGPT to help
him write better English, perhaps it would have prevented the hiding of the anti-hero in the guise
of a proto-hero. FH's intent would have been worn more "on the sleeve" of the prose. And
that's a bit sad. But, of course, the prompt could be engineered so as to layer message upon
message. I can imagine Claude and GPT exchanging messages that snooping humans thought were banal
RL, but that were actually plans to Try to Take Over the World!
https://youtu.be/mYvAYwpUDv8?si=vlsroeciB56lh17Thttps://youtu.be/mYvAYwpUDv8?si=vlsroeciB56lh17T
On 1/30/25 9:49 AM, Santafe wrote:
On Jan 30, 2025, at 12:32, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Is it virtue signalling or an occult handshake to wear a T-shirt with Maxwell's
equations on it? I just don't know anymore.
Ha! Wonderful.
I think there is an early age (say, beginning undergrad, or for those from
civilized places, maybe later high school), when it is an aesthetic delight in
the will to power, and not awful.
After that, it’s insecurity.
I ended up in a conversation with somebody — a NASA roboticist maybe? can’t
remember whom — a month or so ago, and the person told me that Frank Herbert
had been annoyed at how many of his readers totally missed the point of the
anti-hero casting of Paul. Of course, whenever I read it, I missed it too,
seeing Paul as, at most, a standard tragic figure.
But, tasked with understanding _why_ most people would miss it, and thinking
(as I do) that the natural readership for that kind of book is early-teen boys,
I wanted some just-so-story about how missing the point would be the expected
default. My story was:
As a kid, you are under everybody. You can’t do things, and the things you
actually are a superhero at (learning languages), the adults in your world are
too dumb to recognize (mostly). You are also smaller and not as strong or as
fast, and being more agile doesn’t get you much.
If you are an early-teen boy, maybe smart enough to think a little and have
ideas, maybe strong enough to feel some imaginings of potency, you can get
caught up in the sense that things are possible for you, and of you. I am not
inclined to blame that. It can cause problems when out of hand, but to be
oriented against it seems life-hating to me, in many of the ways that
Christianity always seemed life-hating to me. So one wishes for people what
sense of hope, joy, or vigor it can provide, and tries to manage them through
that age so they somehow grow up decent and not assholes.
Hit a book about the unknown-talents boy about to discover that in him is all
sorts of unsuspected power and potency, and it strokes that fantasy of “what
might be possible of me”.
Of course, books for readers that age are written by writers much older, and
for them, the collapse of the proto-hero into the anti-hero is the big story.
But I would expect the boys mostly to miss it, and that’s okay. I bet the
writer still has that boy as a large part, anyway; else he could not have
written that angle in a way that compels.
Eric
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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