It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.
Roald Dahl also wrote a story about two dudes who wanted to try each other's wives without getting consent from said wives so they swapped places in the middle of darkness and then the next morning, one of the dude's wives said to her husband, "Holy shit, whatever you did last night was amazing. I never liked doing the hot dog dance before but if you can keep doing what you did last night, I'll always be down!"
They didn't mention my favorite part, the name. "Prolefeed" I've been waiting for someone to pick up the word so people would get more self-conscious about consuming it.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
- Dune
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger."
- God Emperor of Dune
I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime.
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.
> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984"
Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation.
> not puerile consumption.
I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.
"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."
Fitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
It's a fun quote. On the other hand, while no one should accuse Rand of being a good writer of fiction, I don't find what's depicted in Atlas Shrugged all that fantastical.
For what it’s worth I read Lotr when I was 8 and atlas shrugged when I was 12. I’m must be stupid naive about the discourse over shrugged around here. The meta-story made sense to me as much as the hero journey of frodo(and gollum) made sense to me.
I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.
The beef is mainly that the book portrays Galt's Gulch as both a good thing and as something that would actually function, when the real world consequences of trying to run a society like that are that your town fills up with wild bears that destroy everything and eat your pets (https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...).
1984 has fear and pain for the white collar set like the protagonist, but it's implied mass media, telescreens, and propaganda do for the working class there, which is similar to BNW's style and of course has overlap with Animal Farm.
A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
> Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time.
Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already.
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
Honestly though, they're not all that prophetic. I mean, you can find widespread instances of each means used throughout human history. Although I would happen to agree that the methods that feed complacency and ignorance are the most effective.
Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency.
1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.
Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.
Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?
Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.
The villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.
It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.
Roald
Autocorrect error
Roald Dahl also wrote a story about two dudes who wanted to try each other's wives without getting consent from said wives so they swapped places in the middle of darkness and then the next morning, one of the dude's wives said to her husband, "Holy shit, whatever you did last night was amazing. I never liked doing the hot dog dance before but if you can keep doing what you did last night, I'll always be down!"
Why would you out of nowhere spoil a book like that?
what was this called?
The Great Switcheroo
They didn't mention my favorite part, the name. "Prolefeed" I've been waiting for someone to pick up the word so people would get more self-conscious about consuming it.
"I read a self-help book. It's really good. Everything works out if you'd just follow the rules."
https://youtu.be/KOiDWGs4JE4?t=28s
wHNston
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune
> and a steady stream of pacifying media
Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...
I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime.
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.
> a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984"
Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation.
> not puerile consumption.
I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.
"While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers."
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
Fitting how the author felt compelled to use Gemini to generate an ugly banner for their blog post. An image completely devoid of meaning, that adds nothing to the article except a few kilobytes: slop under any definition.
Just wait until you read Huxley _Brave New World_ it’ll blow your mind. 1984, Brave New World, and Animal Farm should be required reading.
Edit: and atlas shrugged, but that doesn’t go over well here.
Animal Farm was required reading at my school. They also did Fahrenheit 451 instead of 1984 though.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
It's a fun quote. On the other hand, while no one should accuse Rand of being a good writer of fiction, I don't find what's depicted in Atlas Shrugged all that fantastical.
For what it’s worth I read Lotr when I was 8 and atlas shrugged when I was 12. I’m must be stupid naive about the discourse over shrugged around here. The meta-story made sense to me as much as the hero journey of frodo(and gollum) made sense to me.
I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.
The beef is mainly that the book portrays Galt's Gulch as both a good thing and as something that would actually function, when the real world consequences of trying to run a society like that are that your town fills up with wild bears that destroy everything and eat your pets (https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...).
The four books you mentioned have very different methods of control. The primary thing they share is being dystopic.
---
1984: control through fear and pain.
Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction.
Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception.
Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation.
---
Brave New World is the most prophetic.
Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
1984 has fear and pain for the white collar set like the protagonist, but it's implied mass media, telescreens, and propaganda do for the working class there, which is similar to BNW's style and of course has overlap with Animal Farm.
A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
> Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time.
Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already.
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
Honestly though, they're not all that prophetic. I mean, you can find widespread instances of each means used throughout human history. Although I would happen to agree that the methods that feed complacency and ignorance are the most effective.
You have to defend your freedom from all angles of attack.
That was kind of the theme of the suggestions, control. I’m kind of stoked you identified it.
I liked Atlas Shrugged, didn't go over well for me because I'd read all of them by 15, and I assumed 2/4 were de rigeur in at most high school.
Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency.
1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.
Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.
Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?
Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.
The villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.