Just jumped to HN to share this post and saw that OP had raced me to it. Stéphane's reflections are heartfelt and well-written and, despite his melancholy, compel me to join him and keep building, too.
The bit about the pigeon's name was funny, too!
I love myNoise and hope it continues forever. Guess I'll donate again soon!
We've used them to generate stories about our kids and their favourite characters, too. It's a great use case — your approach sounds excellent. Good luck to you!
There's an ethical/moral-luck dilemma at the heart of this.
If a AAA-tier podcast on the subject you want to listen to a podcast about exists (and you know about it), then that's probably a better (and obvious) choice for your listening time.
However, if you want to listen to someone discuss or explain something and you don't know about a AAA-tier podcast, it's possible that a generated podcast is better than nothing.
On the other hand, it's also possible that the generated podcast will miss or hallucinate a key detail, and herein lies the dilemma. Is it better to listen to something that might get something wrong, or not to listen and perhaps someday to learn about the subject through some other form that is less likely to include mistakes?
> But it’s also a bit quaint, these days. To your typical 21st century epistemologist, that’s just not a very terrifying dilemma. One can even keep buying original recipe JTB [...]
Sorry, naive questions: what is a terrifying dilemma to 21st century epistemologist? What is the "modern" recipe?
I suppose the extreme version of the parent comment's vision would be to develop entirely new neurological circuits that can process, interpret, and integrate some arbitrary new source of data in the world. I agree that that's kind of unimaginable now, but give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and one of them will probably hook up the company's sales data to a new section of cortex just to see what would happen.
I read a more interesting takeaway, perhaps: that we can — and do — develop new "senses" for any given signal we can perceive. A possibly-shoddy example of this is what social media does to us: the social networks provided everyone with a novel social sense, and indeed everyone who uses social networks perceive and attenuate to that sense in different ways.
This has practical implications: given that we don't have infinite cognitive capacity or even much moment-to-moment bandwidth, we should be careful about which of these digital senses have our attention.
There're obvious links here to "augcog" (augmented cognition; [1]), but also I feel like Ackoff's five assumptions about "management misinformation systems" are relevant somehow[2].
The important thing I take away from this comment is that before you choose what to read, it's crucial to be able to identify which readings contain the most useful and valuable takeaways that are worth the effort of reading them. It's true that modern mental models of reading and writing train us to only seek out the stuff that's easy to read, but the real problem is that there's so much to read that we have to prioritize, leading to a tendency to read the easy stuff because it's a guarantee you'll get something out of it. Then there's a sort-of market dynamic leading to the success of the easy stuff and the dismissal of the hard.
If that dynamic means that we miss out on the readings that are truly transformative, we've lost. So perhaps the strategic differentiator between readers is to actually have a really powerful theory of prioritization, and useful mechanisms to prioritize (such as the curated references of a good university course or a social network that shares only the most important resources, regardless of how difficult they are to understand).
Thanks for this recommendation. I've tried SteerMouse and other alternatives in the past and haven't stuck with them (can't recall why exactly) but would dearly like to get away from Logitech's software.
> It can be the great filter that leads to the Fermi paradox.
I'm increasingly of a similar view — that the great filter is something we're already past, due to the incredible combinations of constraints that led to where we are today.
Another infinitesimal probability may be the development of abstract intelligence. The conditions that led to our brand of intelligence being an evolutionary advantage seem particularly unique: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK210002/
It doesn't respond to the 2016 address, but this site [1] has a table of many of Christy's claims and evidence against them.
A central graph in the 2016 address (found on page 2) has numerous visualization issues (e.g., misalignment of the lines on the graph to exaggerate differences, no uncertainty ranges are provided, averaging data sets in the curves, leaving out data) [2].
The bit about the pigeon's name was funny, too!
I love myNoise and hope it continues forever. Guess I'll donate again soon!