“We should be wary of frictionless freedom.”

AI
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This article resonated with me. While there were and are problems with editors, which the author acknowledges, the lack of gatekeepers has resulted in an avalanche of “brain rot” material, which is being made exponentially worse by AI.

Perhaps I’m guilty of “fence sitting,” but I’m coming to believe that a hybrid approach, a combination of editors gatekeeping what gets published or broadcast along with the freedom of uncontrolled publishing and broadcasting separate from major media outlets, will improve the quality of what is published and reduce the pile of brain rot. Unfortunately, as pointed out in the article, we are rapidly losing the editors, the gatekeepers of quality.

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I would argue that people like editors frequently produce conformity rather than quality. And that’s not inherently a bad thing, but it is a useful distinction.

I would further argue that in the modern context, to “reduce the pile of brain rot” what we need aren’t editors per se, but filters - of which editors are a single subcategory.

Editors filter pre-publication. Something doesn’t get published by the New York Times unless it’s been approved by the editor. That’s useful, provided you (a) trust the NYT, and (b) enjoy their writing style.

But we also need post-publication filters to surface quality material. And I think that’s the real goal you’re driving at. The fact that something wasn’t scrupulously edited and triple-checked pre-publication doesn’t mean it’s not good and worth reading. The challenge is that sifting through tens of thousands of pieces of content to find a few good ones is (a) something that arguably needs to be done, and (b) is incredibly inefficient.

To me the question is, in the modern information economy, how do we (a) efficiently surface the items of actual value, and (b) adequately recognize/compensate the value of the people who act as a filter on our behalf?

I don’t have a solution. But I do think that’s the real question. :slight_smile:

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One approach is to encourage generous use of hyperlinks to specific sources.

That is as true for articles I read from scholars as it is for AI-written research reports.

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That’s not how it works for major publications that charge readers/bookstores/distributors.

The acquisitions editor is the second or third person to read a submission. For trade publishing the percentage of unagented submissions that gets that far is somewhere between 2% and 5%.

Increasingly major publishers don’t accept unagented submissopns because the level of crap is otherwise unbearable just in terms of processing them to track them, never mind getting them into the hands of slush readers. Publishers I’ve spoken with recently are mulling over returning to hard copy submissions if they will even accept unagented mss.

The flood of unagented submissins was already a problem in terms of sheer numbers before 2023. With AI readly available now it is so much worse, and the amount of plagiarism has dramatically increased as well.

While I understand how frustrating it is for would-be authors to be told they have to find an agent or self-publish, I can understand why publishers rely on agents.

At the same time, the idea of filtering the published stuff to highlight the best is via reviews increasingly something that large papers (hello Washington Post) are doing less and less. Which leaves Amazonb. and Goodreads and TikTok, all of which have algorithms that are frequently manipulated.

Increasingly, I rely on word-of-mouth, from places like this, or podcasts, or, oddly, a Slack group for fountainpen & stationery fans.

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Okay, I’m confused. My point was that the editors act as a filter for stuff before it’s published (which was also at least one of the points in the linked article). It sounds like you’re saying they’re not the initial filter? If so, I’ll happily grant that.

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I am agreeing with you, but I don’t think humans, for much of trade publishing, can keep up with the amount of submissions (and earn a living). Most slush is read by interns, new hires/apprentices, assistants, and even volunteers (I was paid in books, not money).

By the time a submission gets to a book editor, in the sense I think you are using editor (and the article is using ediror) (vs an acquiring editor) it’s going to be published unless there’s a disaster.

The “gatekeeper” function the article talks about is all before the editor, The short story that was Gibson’s first sale was read by two or even three people before the editor even saw it.

That decades old system is overwhelmed with the increase in unsolicited submissions from AI. There’s too much for live humans to even enter in the databases.

I don’t think that the issue is so much one of gatekeepers/editors as flood control. Increasingly publishing sumissions remind me of the way email spam was first handled by the email client, and now, before it gets to the client, servers and routers filter it. There’s a lot of it we don’t see, in addition to what arrives in our spam/junk mail.

Where a big trade publisher could be a year or eighteen months behind in unsolicited submissions before 2023, now the same publisher could be multiple years behind.

I think we will see AI/LLMs come into play as first line pre-processors, or even more likely, more publishers and publications eliminating unsolicited submissions, and agents possibly using LLMs.

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He eventually touched upon what I thought of as I read through the piece. It’s not that I desire a gatekeeper but rather a like minded person that has excellent curation skills. Though I’d say the bullhorns have always been out in force and part of the journey has been finding the diamond in the rough or the excellent piece in a cacophony of white noise masquerading as art/information.

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I think I’m beginning to question the entire premise. Allow me to elucidate:

First, I agree that most traditional sources of ‘info’ out there are not only full of ‘brain rot’ but are also algorithmically fed to the reader in a way that benefits the modern gatekeepers (social media, aggregation sites, search engines, etc) and their ability to glean user data and sell ads.

But I do not believe we should be exposing ourselves to ‘feeds’ nearly as much as most do.

For example, I subscribe to ZERO ‘news’ sources. I do not have Cable TV. I NEVER watch ‘news’ shows. I do pay for one social media source which is fairly news-driven, but they have both keyword and user filters that allow me to see a feed of only those whom I follow, and that never shows me posts with certain keywords.

I have never subscribed to Apple News except for maybe one trial period.

I am still, to this day, envious of the man, Erik Hagerman, who was given the moniker “The Man Who Knew Too Little” in a New York Times article, and his ability to absolutely avoid 99.5% of ‘news’ in his life.

This substack post mentions him and continues with the author’s own journey into avoiding news:

We got cocaine in the form of cable news and the 24 hour news cycle. And social media? Maybe it’s a little more freebasing crack at 2am behind a dumpster.

Now, for books/literature I really do think we need gatekeepers, but I also like that people can bypass them w/ Amazon. That helps the few good authors get exposure to the public and eventually gets the attention of the gatekeepers themselves, in a roundabout way (see ‘Wool’ by Hugh Howey). But sometimes gatekeepers really do shield us from slop (see the shocked reactions of friends/family when American Idol judges slap you with the reality that you are a horrible singer).

And like most technology, AI is a two-edged sword – it can probably be a gatekeeper/filter for our feeds while also enabling the slop. We can choose which way we use it.

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As consumers what the consumer does to be their own gatekeeper has been a thought of mine recently. I find the most consternation there with YouTube. There are a ton of great YouTubers out there doing great work, but the YouTube homepage is just a slush of brain rot. I wish we could go back as a middle ground to an open web RSS model. Allow me to filter out the nonsense.

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An ethical gatekeeper is a fine thing, but a simpler idea comes to mind.

AI driven searches return AI-infested results. Fine. Let it.

Why not bring back human academia? Real studies and honest peer reviews, by which I mean known human sources. Eschew instant gratification. Paraphrasing Kennedy, we choose to study history and these other subjects not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Obviously, this won’t sell to the masses. It will work, though, if it sells to the enclaves, the fellow intellectuals to whom it matters.

Of course, academia doesn’t rot away until the last academic is gone. Y’all seek each other out. If it seems pointless, remember that boring old-school normies will be who saves the world.

They will also own the world at that point, collapse under the weight of intellectual corruption just like the present, and the cycle will start all over.

With any luck, there will always be one more four-eyed pencil-necked geek to pick up the pieces.

Cherish the nerds. They are precious.

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The NYT article begins by calling him "The most ignorant man in America ". Based on the rest of the story, it is a title that he richly deserves.

And one, unfortunately, that is probably shared with a growing number of US citizens, IMO.

“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, January 8, 1789

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OK, so when is the last time that you became informed by the news and decided that things were ‘so far wrong’ that you switched and voted for a different political party in order to ‘set them to rights?’ Please note, by the news - not from reading a book or essay. When have you done this?

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Six years ago.

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And you did this primarily because of something you read in the news that informed you, not by comparing policies, etc.?

I say this because the vast majority of people do not change their votes over long periods of time even though they consume the news. I don’t believe it is a viable source of accurate information in the short term, and only rarely in the long term. I guess I read too much Noam Chomsky in the past ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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The news is a signaling mechanism. Whether or not the news stories are the best source for 100% accurate information isn’t the issue - discoverability is.

It’s kind of like asking when the last time was that somebody diagnosed an engine issue on their car solely by looking at the dashboard lights. They’re not good for that, but they are good for letting you know you might want to do additional digging into a potential problem.

Do many people consume far, far too much news? Absolutely. But going from there to “no news at all” would seem to be the same shoe on a different (and not better) foot.

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