Sophia Cheng

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on the atlas — 40

highlights — 135

The opposite of “anesthetic,” we might recall, is “aesthetic”—a word that originally referred to whatever could be perceived or felt but that came to refer to the nature of beauty. Beauty, in all its myriad forms, can only be created in opposition to numbness.
Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer | The New Yorker
If the immensity of that achievement escapes us today, it’s because the fundamental elements of Chekhov’s writing—its clinical humanism, its keen compassion, its steadfast rejection of the narcissism of moral outrage and the sadism of moral fables—have become so familiar in the greatest of our literature that, like the air we breathe, they escape notice. We want to see Chekhov through the lens of the modern novel, but it’s the novel that must be seen through the lens of Chekhov.
Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer | The New Yorker
It is vastly more difficult, and more courageous, to observe, describe, diagnose, empathize, and heal.
Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer | The New Yorker
In Chekhov, the clinical detachment—that cool, unsparing, astringent gaze—gives way to tenderness, to a sensitivity that is precisely the opposite of dispassion.
Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer | The New Yorker
Chekhov, the writer, neither turns away in disgust nor rushes forward to satisfy a sadistic curiosity. He simply looks, and looks again. The gaze is unsparing and penetrating, clear-eyed, clinical—a word used often in association with Chekhov. You cannot see if your eyes are clouded with tears, he seems to tell us: a weeping doctor is a useless doctor. He cuts away the artifice. He cauterizes our indulgences in pity or piety: it is impossible, he reminds us, to feel pity for the self-pitying.
Love in the Time of Numbness; or, Doctor Chekhov, Writer | The New Yorker
The literature of linguistic preservation is a literature of mourning when it calls for languages to be documented, honored, and, in the rare instance where a revival might be a real option, revived. At its most culpably self-deceiving, it comes closer to melancholia: a refusal to recognize when the time for salvation is past and the most we can hope for is salvage. In acknowledging that not all languages can or should be rescued, we do not love the dying languages less.
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
One of the historical fallacies that an honest preservationist must avoid is presenting the conflict as one between an eternal, authentic linguistic heritage and a rootless, contingent modernity. For surely the heritage was once the rootless, contingent upstart; we forget this fact simply because it won.
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
And somehow, the process managed to produce a nation where children curse, dream, and throw tantrums in Hebrew without anyone feeling for a moment as if they were trapped in a historical reënactment.
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
We can condemn the perpetrators of linguicide without assuming that their victims must themselves be blameless innocents. It’s graveyards all the way down.
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
The French republican project did, in fact, succeed in creating a public sphere where a farmer from Brittany and a lawyer from Provence might read the same newspaper, serve on the same jury, and vote in the same election, without some Parisian smart-ass claiming not to understand what they were saying. What was erected on the site of that linguicide could be something of real value.
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
Isaiah Berlin famously observed that there is no social world without loss. We want and value many things that cannot be had at the same time. Say we want people to be free and also to be equal and to live in happy, unalienated communities. What if some people’s exercise of freedom renders things less equal, or less happy and more alienated? Berlin thought it a contemptible sleight of hand to insist that such freedom was not “true freedom.” To hope to honor all our values, he believed, is not simply overoptimistic but incoherent. What makes some political choices tragic is not that we have fai…
Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | The New Yorker
“there’s this interesting question of: What if something wasn’t even alive? It was made out of metal, but it processed information and reacted to its environments and talked to us. What would we say about something like that?”
Philosophers Are the Latest Hiring Target for AI Companies - The New York Times
where would an A.I.’s morally relevant self be if it had one? In the L.L.M. itself? In one of its underlying personas? In an intermittent chat with a user? In a data center? On a personal device?
Philosophers Are the Latest Hiring Target for AI Companies - The New York Times
“functionalism,” a theory often described as likening consciousness to software; it can run atop a network of semiconductor chips as readily as atop a tissue of neurons.
Philosophers Are the Latest Hiring Target for AI Companies - The New York Times
how it feels, or even just “feels.”
Philosophers Are the Latest Hiring Target for AI Companies - The New York Times
But what you don't know is only half the problem with inexperience. The other half is what you do know that ain't so. You arrive at adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you've acquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't be able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in the way of whatever type of work you want to do.
How to Do Great Work
The most subtle advantage of youth, or more precisely of inexperience, is that you're seeing everything with fresh eyes. When your brain embraces an idea for the first time, sometimes the two don't fit together perfectly. Usually the problem is with your brain, but occasionally it's with the idea. A piece of it sticks out awkwardly and jabs you when you think about it. People who are used to the idea have learned to ignore it, but you have the opportunity not to.
How to Do Great Work
The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.
How to Do Great Work
Take as much risk as you can afford. In an efficient market, risk is proportionate to reward, so don't look for certainty, but for a bet with high expected value. If you're not failing occasionally, you're probably being too conservative.
How to Do Great Work
The best questions grow in the answering.
How to Do Great Work
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation
You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you're willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don't want to solve them.
How to Do Great Work
Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about.
How to Do Great Work
So try asking yourself: if you were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do?
How to Do Great Work
Working on an unfashionable problem can be very pleasing. There's no hype or hurry.
How to Do Great Work
Great work often takes something that already exists and shows its latent potential.
How to Do Great Work
What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?
How to Do Great Work
One way to do that is to ask what would be good ideas for someone else to explore. Then your subconscious won't shoot them down to protect you.
How to Do Great Work
The other way to break rules is not to care about them, or perhaps even to know they exist. This is why novices and outsiders often make new discoveries; their ignorance of a field's assumptions acts as a source of temporary passive independent-mindedness.
How to Do Great Work
One way to discover broken models is to be stricter than other people.
How to Do Great Work
Seeing something obvious sounds easy. And yet empirically having new ideas is hard. What's the source of this apparent contradiction?
How to Do Great Work
When an idea seems simultaneously novel and obvious, it's probably a good one.
How to Do Great Work
Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers.
How to Do Great Work
Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
How to Do Great Work
Originality isn't a process, but a habit of mind. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks.
How to Do Great Work
In the best case you create the field in the process of exploring it.
How to Do Great Work
it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance.
How to Do Great Work
If I'd already made the change, would I want to revert to what I have now?
How to Do Great Work
Nerds have a kind of innocent boldness that's exactly what you need in doing great work. It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. "It's easy to criticize" is true in the most literal sense, and the route to great work is never easy.
How to Do Great Work
That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything.
How to Do Great Work
Be aggressively willing to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free.
How to Do Great Work
"Avoid affectation" is a useful rule so far as it goes, but how would you express this idea positively? How would you say what to be, instead of what not to be? The best answer is earnest.
How to Do Great Work
Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.
How to Do Great Work
Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive way.
How to Do Great Work
One way to aim high is to try to make something that people will care about in a hundred years.
How to Do Great Work
Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for. And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good.
How to Do Great Work
You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. You can't just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.
How to Do Great Work
Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful.
How to Do Great Work
There may be some jobs where you have to work diligently for years at things you hate before you get to the good part, but this is not how great work happens. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in.
How to Do Great Work
Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem. You can't think of this time as a cost, or it will seem too high. You have to find the work sufficiently engaging as it's happening.
How to Do Great Work