Pun Salad

Via Slashdot, this Verge story is intriguing: Meta’s AI can now talk to you in the voices of Awkwafina, John Cena, and Judi Dench.

Confession: since becoming aware of her back in 2018 (Crazy Rich Asians), I've had kind of a thing for Awkwafina. Not to be confused with my thing for Michelle Yeoh. Or for that matter, Tina Fey. And, oh yeah, Mayim Bialik.

Plus, the first three letters of her name are shared by a very useful Unix/Linux utility.

But, as noted, it's a close call, with Dame Dench coming in a close second. If her chatbot voice could be configured to call me "Bond" (with a tinge of disdain), alternating perhaps with "Double-O Seven", I might flip.

Also of note:

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  If you're looking for a life-changing philosophy… you might want to pick one that doesn't suck. Iona Italia points to one in her 2019 review of Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine by Derren Brown. Amazon link at your right, and I've ordered a copy myself.

  Stoicism has got a bad rap in recent years. In the popular imagination, it is associated with reluctance—particularly male reluctance—to show vulnerability or talk frankly about emotions. The 2018 American Psychological Association guidelines on treating men and boys mention “components of traditional masculinity such as emotional stoicism” and “male stoicism” among the societal messages which they, as an institution, wish to combat. Stoicism has become associated with toxic masculinity, caricatured as a bottling up of emotions, an unwillingness to admit weakness which leads men to fail to seek desperately needed treatment for depression and anxiety or confide in friends who might offer comfort. Such attitudes, some feel, have contributed to men’s higher rates of suicide. I believe this is wrong-headed. It’s time to reappraise Stoicism.

  Derren Brown’s book provides both a field guide to the Stoics and suggestions as to how to incorporate their teachings into one’s life. It is a glorious, erudite romp through history and philosophy; a deeply compassionate examination of human foibles; and a self-help book for hardened sceptics like me.

  Self-help is one of the most frustrating genres. The vast majority of these works are flimsy volumes, written in a glib, condescending tone, stuffed with facile truisms and overly pat, clearly fictional case studies designed to stretch a single threadbare idea to wafer-thinness over the regulation 200 pages, eked out with dad jokes and lengthy retellings of warmed-over psych experiments (many of which have since failed to replicate). This subject is treated with less care than almost any other—only diet books are more abundant, more replete with cheap salesmanship and more dispiritingly trashy. And yet it is surely one of the most important topics of all: how to live a happier life.

  I'm coming off reading The Pursuit of Happiness which examined the reading lists of the Founders, and they were stoic fans.

• In the Costello club. Alan Jacobs writes on Paroch[i]alism. His post in its entirety:

  I’ve seen a great many essays of this kind over the decades. I’m no longer surprised by them — I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused — but we shouldn’t forget that the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing. Manvir Singh thinks Christianity is dead (murdered by “the natural sciences”) — someone should tell the world’s two billion Christians — and that suspicion of our moral self-justification began with Nietzsche — someone should tell St. Paul. But for Singh, ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Manvir Singh.”

  Yes, that second link goes to the Elvis song on YouTube. Welcome to the party, pal.

• Three guesses and the first two don't count. Jim Geraghty points to some news about a town of fun and laughter: Guess Where the Possibly Nuclear-Fuel-Leaking Sunken Chinese Submarine Is?

  You readers are going to think I’m obsessed with man-made disasters in one particular Chinese city. It’s not me, I swear; this is the big story in the Wall Street Journal this morning:

  China’s newest nuclear-powered attack submarine sank in the spring, a major setback for one of the country’s priority weapons programs, U.S. officials said.

  The episode, which Chinese authorities scrambled to cover up and hasn’t previously been disclosed, occurred at a shipyard near Wuhan in late May or early June.

  I’m sorry, where again?

  Wait, you mean the city that had a state-run lab with a substandard safety record doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats right before the Covid-19 outbreak started there?

  You probably remember that one, on account of the fact that it completely disrupted your life for a year or two and caused 27 million or so “excess deaths” around the world. But I’ll bet you don’t remember the Wuhan University researchers who allowed artificial intelligence to control an Earth-observation satellite, which led the satellite to start looking at Indian military bases and a Japanese port used by the U.S. Navy. Lead researcher Wang Mi boasted, “This approach breaks the existing rules in mission planning.” Yes, and we all know all the great things that happen when scientific researchers in Wuhan break the existing rules. First the Andromeda Strain, then SkyNet.

  Geraghty wonders, not without reason: "Are they just flipping through old Marvel comics, reading about the villains’ plots, and thinking, 'Hey, that would make a cool experiment'?"

• I don't need to have any more bad high school memories, thanks. But David R. Henderson recalls one of his own: A Writing Exercise Brings Back a Bad High School Memory. And here's the excercise, suggested by another Pun Salad fave, Jason Brennan:

  Try this as a 2-part writing exercise in your classes:

  Part 1: Write a very mundane, trivial, platitudinous statement on the board, such as "Sometimes, things change." Ask the students to rewrite the sentence, but to compete in making it as long-winded and as high-falutin' as they can. They will all succeed, but they will likely produce a horrible paragraph that reads like typical academic writing. [DRH note: And, as a bonus, they will find their inner Kamala Harris.]

  Part 2: Give them a complicated paragraph, and ask them to rewrite it in a way an 8th-grader can understand. Half won't be able to do it.

  For me, this helps sell the idea that bad writing that sounds fancy is easy, but writing that is rigorous yet engaging and clear is hard. It also helps them realize many of their professors are faking it.

  I'm scared to try this myself, frankly.