No. 123 — Specimens ⫶ The Middle Word ⫶ The Model

A Wonderful Namer of Things

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Last week I turned 40! I don’t have too many feelings about this age, other than that I’m happy to finally be on this side. In France they say "Elle a la quarantaine," loosely translated as "she has the forties," which feels very fun and very French. Paris is a lovely city to grow older in, for all the clichés of valuing a woman's experience, staying visible, and not having to explain yourself.

1.

I’m writing this from Sweden, where we’re visiting family. Stockholm has been in the news lately as a technology-friendly capital, but I keep visiting it as a city that decided, over a century ago, to take childhood seriously.

Over 300 playgrounds, many themed and designed with real ambition. A beautiful children’s library at Kulturhuset. Junibacken, still wonderful. Thielska Galleriet has this spring an exhibition on Elsa Beskow, which sent me back to the bigger question: where does this tradition come from? Selma Lagerlöf, Carl Larsson, Ellen Key, Elsa Beskow.. Together they all built an idea of Nordic childhood as a distinct project.

2.

In 2012 I visited MoMA’s Century of the Child exhibition in New York. It’s one of those exhibitions that became part of my reference set for everything I do. The MoMA team took Ellen Key’s ideas and read the entire twentieth century of design for children through her lens.

Back to Stockholm. In 1968, Palle Nielsen approached Moderna Museet with a proposal for turning the museum into an adventure playground. For three weeks, it was! The project was called The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society (PDF). Almost sixty years later it’s still a marvel.

3.

“For me, AI has something limitless in it.”

“I feel the exact opposite - it feels like you put a little in, but a lot comes out. Or actually maybe it’s the opposite, you put a lot in, but only a little comes out.”

Two things I overheard while working with fifty primary school teachers of Lucas Onderwijs in Rotterdam two weeks ago, where this edition’s photos also come from.

I’m always impressed with how the quality of our thinking changes when we hold something in our hands. During the workshops, we first did sorting algorithms (pancake sorting and bubblesort). Afterwards one teacher said: “Oh, so the algorithm is the set of rules, and you can have different rules for the same problem?” I love this moment. Ten minutes earlier, “sorting algorithm” was a vague, slightly threatening word. Now it was a thing she’d done with her hands.

The second activity was making the shape of AI. This is always a scary activity. As grown-ups, we’re rarely in a position where we don’t have the answer, or even the vocabulary. Sitting with that discomfort is tough (and yet we ask children to do it all the time!). But something happens when we hold play-doh. The discussions afterwards felt lightyears more interesting than the generalities we talk about.

I run these workshops for schools, museums, and teams who want to think about technology with their hands. More here or just reply to this email.

4.

Related: Do Architects Still Need to Draw? Written in 2020, but it keeps resurfacing. The argument is simple: the closer you stay to the raw material, the better you build.

5.

Rachel Cohen on Joseph Cornell and Marianne Moore in a lecture at American Library in Paris (Wes Anderson just staged Cornell’s studio in Paris!):

“People often sent things to Marianne Moore with the idea that they might get good language back. She was almost like a namer, a wonderful namer of things. People would send her almost like specimens and then she would find language for them. Cornell wrote: ‘Inspired by paths of romance in the last letter, which brought into focus so sharply and clearly and helpfully the way that I feel about certain aspects of my research.’ I think that can really happen — that a writer encounters a visual artist, or a visual artist a writer, and something seems to crystallize in their understanding, and it becomes a way to carry that understanding and then to put it into their own work.”

I love when this happens, when someone from a completely different discipline can clarify and sharpen your work. Cohen's book on these encounters is called A Chance Meeting. Is this what we're doing when we talk to an LLM? Sending it specimens?

6.

What if the most important word in “large language model” is language? I’ve been thinking about this since the dinner party, and a few books found me at the right time. Peter Dahm Robertson pointed me to Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines, “an academically rigorous and extremely persuasive account of the connection between Critical Theory (Saussure, Baudrillard, Derrida) and LLMs.” Clicked so fast BUY!

And I’m reading Tom Griffiths’ The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of Mind. I loved his previous book and admire the way he carries all these disparate disciplines through a single narrative without the scaffolding showing. It also has a fair bit on language and Chomsky. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously!

And last one for the pile for anyone whose interest in a linguistics degree has suddenly surged: Dennis Yi Tenen’s Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write. I wrote about the book before.

7.

“I’ve come to think that the traits we used to call slow advantages, like being well-read, having a strong reference set, and really knowing the history of your craft, were always valuable but never urgent. They compounded quietly over years. But in a world where anyone can produce the obvious thing instantly, they become the only thing that can pull your output away from the model’s defaults, which makes them the difference between work that reads as cared-for and work that reads as whatever the computer handed you.”

Well-read, strong reference set, knowing the history of your craft! Hilary Gridley, via Diana, who is also a wonderful namer of things.

8.

Both Jon Klassen and Daniel Benneworth Gray recently recommended the Instagram account of Michael Dumontier. I love the feeling of rummaging through someone’s imagination. The blog is a gem too.

9.

Friends in Helsinki: next Tuesday, April 28th, I have two talks. First, a morning talk on children’s culture, then an evening one for the professional community of academic engineers and architects in Finland. Both are sold out, I think, but in case you manage to snag a waitlist ticket!