Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.
I think his anger was just a wounded ego. He reduces his argument to an ad-hominem and sleight of hand mostly.
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power if his station in a sense.
It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
Anti-AI arguments are often literally 'It's anti-Life' - that mysterious thing that creative humans have which a machine couldn't possibly ever.
I'd be more convinced if the antis demonstrated this clearly in their own work instead of simply affirming it.
I'm agnostic. I have no idea what Leavis meant when he said Life, and he clearly didn't either. He comes across as a rather narcissistic figure who enjoyed tearing others down to build himself up - the opposite of Snow, who seems to have been a rather dull bureaucrat with genuine good-intentions.
It's possible the two cultures aren't really the humanities vs science but those who have genuine concern for others and those whose fragility drives their ambition at the expense of those around them.
There just might be an empirical fact that when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all scientist" or "all intelectuals", that person is just full of it.
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
>when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all [ anyone ]", that person is just full of it.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
The scientific method is inherently introspective. Studies seek to affirm or falsify the null hypothesis. Those studies are subject to peer review. Verification and falsifiability are baked into every step.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
...his confrontation between Snow and Leavis – two dramatically different thinkers, representing traditions long in tension – gets at something more fundamental than
the worn phrase that survived it: our deepest and conflicting temperaments towards life.
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According to the English novelist Anthony Powell, C P Snow was affable, and rather humourless, the sort of man who gladly recognised a joke in conversation...
I have long had the policy that I close the window as soon as those pop up. I'm hoping that enough people join me that eventually somebody finds data that a significant (minority) of people just close them and so they are not worth it.
I have a similar policy - tab closed on 2nd nag, so if there's an inline subscribe box and the overlay pops up, I'm out. Fighting the good behavioral fight, but I don't expect us to win, it's just about saving myself the brainpower. Same for dark patterns - they're clearly unserious, so I'll take my business elsewhere.
Maybe I've been desensitized by all the "Subscribe now" pop ups that take over your entire browser, but seeing the subscription box inline with the rest of the text didn't bother me too much.
They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. People have been complaining about these sorts of popups for nigh two decades now and it still continues to happen.
Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.
I think his anger was just a wounded ego. He reduces his argument to an ad-hominem and sleight of hand mostly.
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power if his station in a sense.
Related and worth reading: The Third Culture by the former executive editor of Wired (when Wired was good): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.279.5353.992
> ... otherwise Britain will sunset before its time, like the decadent Doges of the long-lost Venetian Republic ...
i love it when history rhymes
It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
Anti-AI arguments are often literally 'It's anti-Life' - that mysterious thing that creative humans have which a machine couldn't possibly ever.
I'd be more convinced if the antis demonstrated this clearly in their own work instead of simply affirming it.
I'm agnostic. I have no idea what Leavis meant when he said Life, and he clearly didn't either. He comes across as a rather narcissistic figure who enjoyed tearing others down to build himself up - the opposite of Snow, who seems to have been a rather dull bureaucrat with genuine good-intentions.
It's possible the two cultures aren't really the humanities vs science but those who have genuine concern for others and those whose fragility drives their ambition at the expense of those around them.
There just might be an empirical fact that when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all scientist" or "all intelectuals", that person is just full of it.
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
>when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all [ anyone ]", that person is just full of it.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
Loved that.
He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
The scientific method is inherently introspective. Studies seek to affirm or falsify the null hypothesis. Those studies are subject to peer review. Verification and falsifiability are baked into every step.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
And his actual book on the two cultures is worth reading too (and only 54 p.).
Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
I have long had the policy that I close the window as soon as those pop up. I'm hoping that enough people join me that eventually somebody finds data that a significant (minority) of people just close them and so they are not worth it.
I have a similar policy - tab closed on 2nd nag, so if there's an inline subscribe box and the overlay pops up, I'm out. Fighting the good behavioral fight, but I don't expect us to win, it's just about saving myself the brainpower. Same for dark patterns - they're clearly unserious, so I'll take my business elsewhere.
Maybe I've been desensitized by all the "Subscribe now" pop ups that take over your entire browser, but seeing the subscription box inline with the rest of the text didn't bother me too much.
I kinda am for shorter, shallower content that I'll likely skim over, but this article is a properly written essay and the contrast is just jarring.
They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. People have been complaining about these sorts of popups for nigh two decades now and it still continues to happen.