I recently started reading a book by George Anastaplo entitled The Artist as Thinker: From Shakespeare to Joyce. In the prologue, he told the following story about himself and his psychoanalyst:
It seems that this psychoanalyst was once telling a group of us a story with profound implications about the social dimensions of suicide – about what the suicidal person is trying to say and whom he is ‘relating to." His story turned around the fact that in almost all instances of suicide from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the victim jumps from the side of the bridge facing toward the city rather than from the side of the bridge facing away from the city.
It also seems that I asked on that occasion a simple-minded question that stopped my storyteller dead in his tracks and the recollection of which continues to annoy him: “Which side of the Golden Gate Bridge is the sidewalk on?” He did not know – nor did I. But we both sensed that the import of this story depended in part on the answer to my rather prosaic question. Indeed, do not many moving stories depend – if we are to understand them – upon what is done with the most obvious facts.
When I spend time on Substack, I see an awful lot of posts that remind me of the psychoanalyst’s story – posts that seem to illuminate a human truth, but posts that are built on a single catchy data point that ultimately simplifies what it is to live. Memorable and entertaining, they are little more than intellectual cotton candy. But this kind of writing seems to be what is demanded by the “content creator” machine of Substack and YouTube and podcasts and and and… There simply isn’t enough time to think and write with any depth or complexity, nor are there rewards attached to doing so. Productivity is valued over profundity.
Today, increasingly, books are stitched-together posts from blogs and Substack – the latest I’ve encountered is The Nerd Reich, which is drawn from a blog of that name and reads like it. Online discussions of AI are particularly good examples of such bird bath thinking – like the AI builders themselves, critics of AI, pro or con, don’t have the time to really think deeply enough to make a useful case. They need to get there first with their hot take. Consequently, they thrash around in the shallows making maximum splashes that draw maximum attention. “We’re all going to die” is just as shallow as “we’re going to cure cancer.” Everything is kneejerk politics in service of the marketplace, and little is philosophy. And that works to the detriment of those trying to create useful, satisfactory, and effective regulations for AI. “Shut it all down for a while” may be a necessary starting point, but it will only be helpful if the time is used to carefully consider the deeper ramifications of AI on humanity. This is not the place for a Corey Doctorow vs Sam Altman throwdown.
By the way, the answer to the question about the Golden Gate Bridge is that there are sidewalks on both sides, but the one on the side that doesn’t face the city is for bicycles only and open only during rush hour; pedestrians walk on the side facing the city. So proximity is probably more significant than intention, which ruins an otherwise good theory about suicide as a final middle finger to civilization, but may lead to further thought about something that is literally a life-or-death topic. Or maybe it means that bicyclists are less likely to commit suicide than pedestrians.