WIL: Weekly 5-Point Review #1
Preventing ChatGPT from rotting my writing, encroaching socialism and more
I’m starting a free weekly newsletter covering 5 bite-sized tidbits from the week. Subscribe if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week! (I will still be continuing my series Reasoning from Utopia vs. from Reality later)
1. I refuse to use ChatGPT for writing unless…
I’ve been avoiding using ChatGPT for coming to conclusions or writing prose because (a) it’s usually quite bland and (b) I don’t want to lose what writing skill I have à la Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. (I recently talked about how relying on technology to do something for us inevitably erodes our skill with doing that particular thing in the section Smarter AI, dumber humans of my article AI Crisis: The dangerous of AI working perfectly)
If I’m just trying to brainstorm ideas like the title of a weekly structured newsletter, then I find it’s reasonably useful. Where Chat GPT-4 has been quite helpful lately is digging up statistics, articles or research.
I recommend always double checking the citations provided along with the statements as ChatGPT has a tendency to ‘hallucinate’ and completely make things up.
2. Meeting PewDiePie
I recently met PewDiePie when I went to the Spartan race with Nick Pettas. Very cool guy. Funny, down-to-earth. 10/10 would wait in line to crawl in the dirt and talk about pork hot dogs again.
Nick’s IG post:
3. Noteworthy comment
A while back, when I was first listening to Jordan Peterson I noticed he talked about socialism, communism a lot but I didn’t feel particularly drawn to the topic because I thought it was common knowledge that socialism is a really bad idea. When he talked about the ‘bloody Marxists,’ it initially reminded me of the old man yells at cloud meme from the Simpsons.
Then I read that 2/3rds of young britons want to live under a socialist economic system and 41% of Gen Z hold favorable views of socialism and it started to seem more relevant.
Recently in response to my pinned comment on my community post, Spenceramaa wrote:
“After a modest decade as an economist, I worked at one top policy school and attended another before getting my MBA. I can tell you for sure that the vast majority “elite” young academics embrace pure socialism, and bringing up capitalist frameworks in a positive light, even just to highlight the value of certain market mechanisms, is a shortcut to ridicule and social excommunication.”
4. Thing I’m recently addicted to: Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom
At some point I decided to (mostly) stop playing competitive online games because they’re so addicting. The loop of wanting to play again because you just won a match and you’re feeling great or wanting to play again because you lost and you have to redeem yourself is very sticky. I let myself get into Tekken 7 because I wasn’t particularly good at it. I noticed that when I start to get good at an online game is when it becomes addictive. I noticed I start to identify with it, I start to think of being good at X game as some ‘part’ of me, so when I lose at the game I feel more compelled to rematch so I can preserve that part of me that considers myself good at it. However with Tekken 7, if I lost I didn’t care because I didn’t identify with it.
Zelda is addictive in a less… anxious way. You’re not reacting to your frustration at losing or your confidence high from winning, the game is just so populated with things to explore that you get lost in that. You’re on a main quest, then you see something in the distance, so you start heading towards that and halfway through you run into an NPC who offers up an interesting side quest so you start doing that but you go into the wrong cave which has its own interesting content and so on and so on. It reminds me of the old days when I would get lost reading stuff on the internet. As I would be reading about some topic I would get curious about the little details and branch off on a tangent digging into that and then loop back to the original topic and repeat.
5. Quote of the week
Nothing is easier to prove than that something human has imperfections. I’m amazed at how many people devote themselves to that task. -Thomas Sowell
Bonus - Happy Homer Googly Eyes
When I added the word “happy” to the Midjourney prompt, Homer Simpson wearing a suit writing a newsletter on a typewriter went from this
To this:
Bro TOTK is truly magical. I’m an attorney studying to take another bar exam and it’s like my only mental break. Worth every second.
I liked all topics.
It was a comfy read.