michaelerard.bsky.social
Writer, linguist. New book: BYE BYE I LOVE YOU, about first and last words. @Economist.com: "strangely comforting." @waywordradio.org: "As fascinating as it is original." To buy: https://bit.ly/4kN0PKa
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I do not want AI in Slack. I do not want AI in Google. I do not want AI on Facebook. I do not want AI in documents or spreadsheets. I do not want AI in Adobe Acrobat. I do not want AI in Zoom. I do not want AI on news sites. I do not want AI in the patient portal for my doctor's office. I do not wan
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Not yet—should I?
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It’s not what I do when I review, nor is it how I want to be reviewed.
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It looks like someone formed an impression based on an excerpt, then brought that impression to the book (and used the rest of their reading to support that). I don’t know, but that’s how it seems.
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I wrote my books as a whole thing, a trajectory, a structure, an experience, an argument. You ought to respect the artist's effort and read (and review) the works that way too.
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I would add: explanations/metaphors for generative models that also "leave room" for the role of interventions and their potential impact; also explanations that show that outcomes of the models are emergent, not teleological.
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I just discovered this, which seems like a productive way to talk about things. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spheric...
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Thanks for returning to that point. I’m mainly with you on flaws, though pedagogical metaphors can be different from public comms ones. In the first you can scaffold in the context of an ongoing relationship. In the second the metaphor has to survive away from its delivery vehicle.
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I encourage everyone to reach out broadly to their friends, family, and networks.
Here is a link to a pdf of a letter similar to what I used.
jeremymberg.github.io/jeremyberg.g...
5/n
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It is actively ridiculous to expect authors to be able to participate in any kind of effective promotion if they get a sales report 10 months later that lumps half of a year's worth of sales together!
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Here’s a piece I wrote about my work
aeon.co/essays/how-t...
It might be worthwhile for us to talk about a dev project, if you’re interested
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there is probably a pop culture character or narrative that would work. but i don't have enough of that at my fingertips
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The think tank project was explaining epigenetics, actually! Yes, it's really hard. We never cracked it. It's kind of my white whale.
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Sometimes we found that the previous generation’s cutting edge explanations stuck around unhelpfully. There could be more consideration in scicomm for explanatory needs over time to reduce the disabuse.
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I used to work for a think tank in DC where we developed and tested metaphors for social reframing and scicomm. I’m still involved in this a bit.
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In regards to genetics, metaphor development hinged on 1) very effective bio 101 education about Mendelian heredity (at least for Americans) and 2) cognitive and linguistic limits. There are few domains to map generative and non-linear onto.
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From a scicomm perspective, an explanatory metaphor isn’t a blueprint of the science (if I can use your vocab), it’s a generative model. And sometimes it doesn’t generate all of the points. But it can do some. So you set your threshold and select accordingly.
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I don’t see it. “Generative model of the organism” sounds like another technical explanation, not an explanatory metaphor.
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That’s from a quick glance at the beginning of the article—I’ll read further
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I understand the reasons for your critique, but I don’t see anything that looks like a metaphor in that article. Having worked on this exact problem—metaphors for genes—I know the conceptual and linguistic lack of resources for communicating generative, non linear and esp multi-level processes.
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Several years earlier I published a piece in the North American Review about urban demolition in Taiwan (where I also lived) about the shock of dismemberment and revelation of architectural layers.