cleithart

Iteration in the Classroom

So here’s my one small idea: I’d begin to teach iteration. Iteration as a subject, equivalent to math, science, history, language, art, music, etc. How do you make something better over time? How do you return to something that you’ve done and see it with fresh eyes? How do you apply new perspective to an old problem? Where do you find that new perspective? What trails do you follow and which do you ignore? How do you smash the familiar and reassemble something new from the same pieces?

Once you’re done with school, and cast out into the world, your job is likely to involve iteration. No matter what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have to do something over. And often times again and again. You rarely simply deliver something and move on. You’re asked to refactor, to build on it, to “make it better”.
Jason Fried

I’m not sure about teaching iteration as a subject in itself, but it should definitely be a part of every class. Speaking for myself, the main difficulty in teaching iteration is giving students specific, insightful feedback. In the real world, your work will be evaluated by your boss, your family, your customers, the world at large. If you don’t do a good job, you’re forced to try again and do better. In school, you’re lucky if your teacher looks at your work with anything more than a passing glance.

Like Hotcakes

Ear, Hand, Foot had a good first week. I’ve fulfilled over a hundred orders in the last six days.

Don’t wait to order! We only ordered 500 copies for our first printing and almost half of them are sold. And the Christmas shopping season has only just started. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a big fat “Out of Stock” message on the website soon.

Ear, Hand, Foot display - Photo cred: Brian Moats

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An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)

The animators really explored the studio space in this one.

Before All Things Else

What distinguishes [the artist] here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work. Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done. What else causes the armaments worker to labour passionately when he knows that the existence of his country is threatened, but that his heart travels along the endless band with the machine parts and that his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear. As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he “watches to finish the work”; for once, that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it, in a vision of Idea, Energy, and Power. It is unfortunate that so little effort should be made by Church or State to show him the works of peace in the same terms. Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygienic world? I doubt it; yet there is much merit in sanitary plumbing—more, if you come to think of it, than there is in warfare.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Work by the Standard of Eternity

That the eyes of all workers should behold the integrity of the work is the sole means to make that work good in itself and so good for mankind. This is only another way of saying that the work must be measured by the standard of eternity; or that it must be done for God first and foremost; or that the Energy must faithfully manifest forth the Idea; or, theologically, that the Son does the will of the Father.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Those With Ears to Hear

A passing hostile comment in the second-century pagan critic Celsus shows that the chants used in Christian worship (which he seems to have heard) were not only unusual to his pagan ears but so beautiful that he actually resented their emotive effect as an instrument for dulling the critical faculty.
Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

The Maturity of the Church

It is a paradoxical law of early liturgical study that the greater the biblical element in any given prayer the less primitive it is likely to be.
Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

Makers

The distinction between the artist and the man who is not an artist thus lies in the fact that the artist is living in the “way of grace,” so far as his vocation is concerned. He is not necessarily an artist in handling his personal life, but (since life is the material of his work) he has at least got thus far, that he is using life to make something new. Because of this, the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never, for him, be wholly meaningless and useless, as they are to the man who dumbly endures them and can (as he complains with only too much truth) “make nothing of them.” If, therefore, we are to deal with our “problems” in “a creative way,” we must deal with them along the artist’s lines: not expecting to “solve” them by a detective trick, but to “make something of them,” even when they are, strictly speaking, insoluble.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

While Sayers’ is the most compelling explanation I’ve read so far of what the artist can offer the Church, the paragraph above should be placed side by side with this. Egyptian gold can be shaped into more than one thing.

We Are Leviathan

It’s so obvious in retrospect that Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into an AI farm. I’ve known this was the long-term play of technocrats for a while. I just hadn’t put two and two together (or X and X?).

Mary Harrington has noted what makes this potential AI (named Grok) different from others: rather than pulling information from static data, Grok draws on the “living” hive-mind that is Twitter. As if that isn’t disturbing enough, Harrington takes it one step further into politics:

This provides a potential solution to one of 21st century’s thorniest problems: how do you govern a demos that is both reflexively anti-authoritarian, but that also yearns for strongman governance?

In other words, young people today want to do what they want and they want to be told what to do. Justice means no human being should hold power over another, but it takes a strong, decisive authority to enforce that equality. What’s a young person to do? If Elon’s AI experiment works, it’s possible that young people could begin to trust the radically democratic central authority that is Grok. After all, Grok’s intelligence will be drawn from the people, so its decisions will be guided by what the people want without any personal biases. Right? Right?? In fact, feeding information to Grok could become part of your civic duty. Don’t you want a just society?

Harrington:

I hope this is all just my over-active imagination. But I can picture a near future in which it’s considered far more meaningfully democratic to pour your opinions and political passions into the LLM than to cast your vote. Isn’t this potentially a far richer way of contributing your perspective, than merely casting a ballot once every five years? When your words, sentences, opinions and sentiments form part of the billions of such phrasings that go to make up the totality of what the egregore knows, is that not a more representative form of participation in governance than casting a ballot?

It might feel a little less like being borne down upon by Leviathan, and more like becoming part of Leviathan. It might, indeed, feel legitimate.

How long till we see “I tweeted” stickers proudly displayed on election day?