Speaking engagement scope creep is absolutely real. I don't think it minimizes her complaint; I think she was correct that it would have spiraled into a web of prep calls, rehearsal calls, video/sound quality checks; emails with outlines to review and revise; requests for materials inexplicably far in advance, followed by unasked-for suggested edits...
My worst experience trying to unplug on vacation before a speaking engagement involved a red-eye flight to Germany with two toddlers, only to discover a shitstorm in my work email and slack the moment I connected to wifi at my hotel. The organizers of the event (3 weeks in the future) freaked out, assuming I would miss the rehearsal zoom call they'd added the day after my flight (I was just going to zoom in from Germany), and emailed my boss, who basically blasted the whole team with requests to try to get a hold of me, demanding to know why I had flaked out on the prep for this speaking engagement. Even after I explained, he basically lambasted me for still taking the vacation when I should have kept my calendar free in the weeks leading up to the event, and for having the audacity to be unreachable for an entire day when I should have been available to respond to people who were misunderstanding my schedule.
Anyways that sucked, and as anyone still reading this can tell, I'm still mad about it. In conclusion, more power to the DeWitts and Demsases of the world, bravely taking a stand by saying "no" to being always-reachable.
In the early 2000s when Instant Message really started to take hold, a friend of mine once told me... "Instant Message doesn't mean Instant Response"
(Note: I am horrendously distractable and generally ignore this sage advice, but it does live in the back of my mind and I consciously use it at times to stay focused on a task)
My reflexive intuition is that AI *doesn't* fix this, in the way that other productivity enhancing technologies have only made it easier for us to wring out every last second from our lives. But maybe it actually does? Push notification hell could be integrated by a Claw that knows when to communicate actually important things to you, and when your opinion is needed on something. Something to hope for.
The repeated references to DeWitt as a genius are sort of strange to me — given the severity of her mental illness, The Last Samurai, in particular, seems to lose much of it's brilliance, no? It seems to be a straightforward depiction of what it looks like to inhabit Helen DeWitt's head. That's interesting to a point, sure, but does autofiction-while-mentally-ill — without any evident transformation of that personal experience into insight that reaches beyond the self — really earn someone the distinction of "genius"? The blog post she just published about the saga is, after all, recognizably continuous with the novel in both content and sensibility. At some point the admiration of work like this starts to look less like literary criticism and more like the fetishization of mental illness as inherently interesting or significant.
Sure, but that’s a low bar for "genius.” What about the work justifies that label, except that she is more high-functioning (and inclined to write a literary novel) than other mentally ill people? What does the book do to illuminate the world outside of the author’s own mind? It seems to have little to say except that people like Sibylla and Ludo are geniuses, and that society should celebrate them and try to produce more of them. DeWitt neglects to say why, though.
I've read about half of the book (I stopped in the low 200's, I think) — I think DeWitt is a somewhat talented writer, but the message she seems to intend to send with the book is one that I deeply, deeply disagree with. To quote a comment I made on Henry Oliver's post about this controversy: " Dewitt seems to believe that things like the mastery of Ancient Greek (so as to read Homer in the original) or knowledge of Japanese are in themselves remarkable achievements, perversely undervalued by society. The book felt like a thinly-veiled expression of rage and frustration at her own inability to find financial stability and/or success, which, again, she seemed to blame society for.
What was missing was any understanding of why education or learning might be valuable - not to enable the reading of old texts in the original for the sake of doing so, but in order to discover new truths about [edit: or insights into] human life and the world. I felt Dewitt had nothing at all to say about the actual value of education in a deeper sense; all that matters is that one knows lots of stuff, ideally stuff most others don’t."
I used to work a job where I organized panels, often featuring academics. There was an inverse relationship between the quality of the academic's scholarship and how quickly the academic responded. I once agonized about how to reach out to a Nobel prize winner and decided just to cold email. I received a response within 15 minutes. And, of course, the law professor who produces 50,000-word articles full of nothing but nonsense cannot be bothered ever to respond. There were also many exceptions at both ends of the quality distribution, but I do feel like the scholarship quality/response time relationship was inverse on average.
Honest Question: what is so bad about a 45-minute prep call? I understand the slippery slope argument--it's not just a 45-minute prep call but the first of a series of lame requests. At the same time "can you commit to a 90-minute panel six weeks from now?" does not seem that much different from "can you commit to a 90-minute panel six weeks from now plus a 45-minute prep call the week before?"
Speaking engagement scope creep is absolutely real. I don't think it minimizes her complaint; I think she was correct that it would have spiraled into a web of prep calls, rehearsal calls, video/sound quality checks; emails with outlines to review and revise; requests for materials inexplicably far in advance, followed by unasked-for suggested edits...
My worst experience trying to unplug on vacation before a speaking engagement involved a red-eye flight to Germany with two toddlers, only to discover a shitstorm in my work email and slack the moment I connected to wifi at my hotel. The organizers of the event (3 weeks in the future) freaked out, assuming I would miss the rehearsal zoom call they'd added the day after my flight (I was just going to zoom in from Germany), and emailed my boss, who basically blasted the whole team with requests to try to get a hold of me, demanding to know why I had flaked out on the prep for this speaking engagement. Even after I explained, he basically lambasted me for still taking the vacation when I should have kept my calendar free in the weeks leading up to the event, and for having the audacity to be unreachable for an entire day when I should have been available to respond to people who were misunderstanding my schedule.
Anyways that sucked, and as anyone still reading this can tell, I'm still mad about it. In conclusion, more power to the DeWitts and Demsases of the world, bravely taking a stand by saying "no" to being always-reachable.
Fact I discovered only after finishing this post: The novel The Last Samurai has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise film of the same title.
In the early 2000s when Instant Message really started to take hold, a friend of mine once told me... "Instant Message doesn't mean Instant Response"
(Note: I am horrendously distractable and generally ignore this sage advice, but it does live in the back of my mind and I consciously use it at times to stay focused on a task)
My reflexive intuition is that AI *doesn't* fix this, in the way that other productivity enhancing technologies have only made it easier for us to wring out every last second from our lives. But maybe it actually does? Push notification hell could be integrated by a Claw that knows when to communicate actually important things to you, and when your opinion is needed on something. Something to hope for.
The repeated references to DeWitt as a genius are sort of strange to me — given the severity of her mental illness, The Last Samurai, in particular, seems to lose much of it's brilliance, no? It seems to be a straightforward depiction of what it looks like to inhabit Helen DeWitt's head. That's interesting to a point, sure, but does autofiction-while-mentally-ill — without any evident transformation of that personal experience into insight that reaches beyond the self — really earn someone the distinction of "genius"? The blog post she just published about the saga is, after all, recognizably continuous with the novel in both content and sensibility. At some point the admiration of work like this starts to look less like literary criticism and more like the fetishization of mental illness as inherently interesting or significant.
There are billions of mentally ill people, I'm not sure how many could produce The Last Samurai (90 pages in now).
Sure, but that’s a low bar for "genius.” What about the work justifies that label, except that she is more high-functioning (and inclined to write a literary novel) than other mentally ill people? What does the book do to illuminate the world outside of the author’s own mind? It seems to have little to say except that people like Sibylla and Ludo are geniuses, and that society should celebrate them and try to produce more of them. DeWitt neglects to say why, though.
I'm very serious you should read it!
I've read about half of the book (I stopped in the low 200's, I think) — I think DeWitt is a somewhat talented writer, but the message she seems to intend to send with the book is one that I deeply, deeply disagree with. To quote a comment I made on Henry Oliver's post about this controversy: " Dewitt seems to believe that things like the mastery of Ancient Greek (so as to read Homer in the original) or knowledge of Japanese are in themselves remarkable achievements, perversely undervalued by society. The book felt like a thinly-veiled expression of rage and frustration at her own inability to find financial stability and/or success, which, again, she seemed to blame society for.
What was missing was any understanding of why education or learning might be valuable - not to enable the reading of old texts in the original for the sake of doing so, but in order to discover new truths about [edit: or insights into] human life and the world. I felt Dewitt had nothing at all to say about the actual value of education in a deeper sense; all that matters is that one knows lots of stuff, ideally stuff most others don’t."
I used to work a job where I organized panels, often featuring academics. There was an inverse relationship between the quality of the academic's scholarship and how quickly the academic responded. I once agonized about how to reach out to a Nobel prize winner and decided just to cold email. I received a response within 15 minutes. And, of course, the law professor who produces 50,000-word articles full of nothing but nonsense cannot be bothered ever to respond. There were also many exceptions at both ends of the quality distribution, but I do feel like the scholarship quality/response time relationship was inverse on average.
Honest Question: what is so bad about a 45-minute prep call? I understand the slippery slope argument--it's not just a 45-minute prep call but the first of a series of lame requests. At the same time "can you commit to a 90-minute panel six weeks from now?" does not seem that much different from "can you commit to a 90-minute panel six weeks from now plus a 45-minute prep call the week before?"