Boring and Unfair

I’ve got into the habit of asking ChatGPT to generate images for my posts and it came up with the above for Boring and Unfair. I can see the boring bit for sure – but unfair? At first I thought that the supervisor was the only male, which would have been unfair. But no – there are men doing the tedious clerical work too. Anyway, I like the image.

This post was inspired by a post by Literary Bitch – a story about the difficulties of a writer whose theme is the unfairness and shittiness of life. LB’s post gives examples of life’s unsatisfactoriness, but I’ll add a few more of my own.

Ugly people may – or may not – be nicer or more intelligent than good-looking people.

Bullies are not all cowards. Some may be quite brave.

Old age may not have any compensations. Or, more likely, it does have some compensations, but they don’t outweigh the downsides of being old. More money – more knowledge – more wisdom – but I’d still prefer youth.

A TikTok video about narcissists claims they are insecure people – deep down – and my bullshit detector twitches in response to anything so convenient. I suspect many narcissists are actually quite secure and happy, thank you very much – at least no more insecure than I am. Does a therapist four decades younger than me know more than I do? I can’t rule it out of course.

Some crave fairness – others like to believe interesting rather than boring things. This latter accounts for the attraction of conspiracy theories among the loony right – but it affects the liberal left too, and has something in common with the need for fairness.

Take the following statement …

For rapists it’s not about sex – it’s about power.

Men have a better insight into their own sex than women (obviously) and, on hearing this, most will think nah, it really is about sex – albeit an aspect of male sexuality that has turned nasty. Men can’t have stronger sexual urges than women. That would be unfair in a sense, and uninteresting too – because it’s more obvious.

Clichés have a large element of truth in them. That’s why people repeat them and why they end up as clichés. (Creative writers frown on them because they send readers into snooze mode – and what good is the truth if it goes in one ear and out of the other?) But in the non-literary world the simplest answer is often the best. Searching for interesting and different theories can lead you astray. Scientists often talk about Occam’s razor in this context.

Racking my mind for more examples, I come up with the following …

Politicians are only in it for themselves.

… and immediately I see a problem.

I’ve argued that people often believe things merely because they’re interesting. But the above sentence isn’t interesting – for the reason that everybody keeps saying it. If it were interesting, what would be the corresponding non-interesting statement? Politicians are tireless public servants … said nobody ever. So my analysis doesn’t apply to every leaden statement.

Usually if I write anything I can foresee a counter-argument to my own argument – and it surprises me how rarely people throw that counter-argument back at me. I have a prepared response to that counter-argument as well, of course.

Man or horse

Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.

William Hazlitt

---

People become fixated on a word or phrase. Its meaning for them has gone, leaving a husk – and now it serves merely as an emotional trigger. Perhaps, as with the Hazlitt quote, they never knew its meaning in the first place.

It’s hard to write about this without appearing to take sides – and I don’t want to do that because this isn’t about sides for me – though it is often about politics.

When we first learn words we learn them in a specific context. When I was about fifteen our maths teacher set us a question that asked us to discriminate between the roots of a quadratic equation. One boy in the class looked puzzled. He had learned this word in the context of racial discrimination, which was big in the news at the time. He couldn’t understand why the teacher was asking us to do this terrible thing – to discriminate.

In medicine the term NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) gave way to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) because of the negative associations of the word nuclear. Such associations resist explanation – in fact explanation makes a certain type of person even more suspicious that something bad is being done to them.

Returning to the word specific, I once knew somebody who spelt it persific. I fancied that for him the word had lost its savour, if it ever had any. It was a mere verbal tic – a standalone entity with no wider roots – species, specify, and so on. I grant, though, that he may simply have been dyslexic.

Most of us above a certain age will have learned the word austerity as the noun corresponding to the adjective austere – meaning strict in manner or attitude, plain living, etc. One may agree or disagree with the set of policies now called austerity, but attempts by finance ministers to balance the books are nothing new. The word austerity doesn’t make the policy new or different – though it is a new trigger.

Net zero and federalism similarly affect people on the right. Nobody cares what they mean. Their meaning often points to some laudable intention. Terms such as do-gooder and social justice warrior (SJW) have become absurdly shorn of meaning. Why would anyone object to somebody doing good or striving for social justice? And an asylum seeker is one who seeks asylum. But it is futile to argue along these lines since it’s not about meaning. It’s about phonemes that have found a shortcut to the lizard brain.

Washing their socks

ChatGPT has just excelled itself. I asked it for an illustration of shepherds washing their socks by night and it came up with the cheesy, crazy image you see above. I could have pushed it further and asked to make the landscape look more like the Middle East, but in the end I decided to leave it as it was – with the fir trees and the eclectic mix of yokels from Ireland to Azerbaijan.

Its performance before that had been less impressive, however.

A few days ago I was thinking about my mother – specifically that her favourite line from a Christmas carol was Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife. Although I knew some of the words and the tune, I couldn’t recall how it starts. The best thing to do would have been to google the words – instead I gave them to ChatGPT. The AI informed me they came from While shepherds watched their flocks by night, which was demonstrably false. The line is from It came upon the midnight clear – as I soon discovered by more conventional means.

The following day I was listening to the Finnish carol Enkeli taivaan lausui näin. It sounded familiar. Was its tune shared by an English hymn, I wondered. But how to find out? My first guess was A Mighty Fortress Is Our God (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott) – but a trip to YouTube revealed that the two tunes are different. So I thought I’d give ChatGPT a second chance. I asked what the tune was and whether any English hymn had the same tune.

While shepherds watched their flocks by night – came the answer again.

This carol is mostly sung to the familiar melody Winchester Old. There are other lesser-known tunes, but the Finnish carol’s tune isn’t one of them.

Why this AI obsession with the scrubbing herdsmen and their tub of stewing socks?

Anyway, I gave it one last chance today …

---

Q What is the tune of Enkeli taivaan lausui näin – and is that tune shared by any English hymn or carol?

A The melody of Enkeli taivaan lausui näin is also associated with the German hymn Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her, composed by Martin Luther. This tune has been adapted into several English-language hymns and carols. The most notable is From Heaven Above to Earth I Come, an English version published by Catherine Winkworth in 1855​​.

---

I verified the above on YouTube.

There are three lessons here. (1) ChatGPT is capable of figuring something out that might otherwise take quite a bit of googling. (2) It is also capable of giving you a false but plausible answer, so you need to check what it tells you. (3) It’s worth repeating and rephrasing the question you put to it.

Mad or Bad?

ChatGPT gave me the above when I asked it to generate an image to go at the top of a blog post with the theme Mad or Bad? I hadn’t expected anything abstract. For some reason I’d expected a grinning caricature villain.

The courts seem to regard the distinction between mad and bad as important. If a person kills somebody – let’s say – the court will summon an expert to pronounce on their mental state. If the expert finds the culprit sane the court will send him to prison. If they find him insane he will go to a secure mental hospital. In the latter case he is not culpable but he is a danger to society. Prison is for the culpable.

Anybody who follows my blog will probably guess what I’m going to say next – that there is no distinction between mad and bad as regards culpability. In fact I’m not sure what culpability means. The everyday notion of culpability says that a person is culpable if they chose to do what they did. They could have chosen not to do whatever it was – but they still went ahead and did it.

I take the scientific – or Taoistic – view that there is no ego to stand aside from action. Things just happen. There are various ways of understanding this. One simple one is to look inside yourself to find out where your choices come from. If you do that you’ll see that they come out of the blue. They arise from a chain of cause and effect that goes back to the Big Bang. If you had free will you would be able to choose your choices. But then you’d also have to be able to choose your choice of choice – and so on ad infinitum.

I am being mischievous when I call the above the scientific view, although it does accord with physics. There are no atoms in the brain that can stand aside from the other atoms in the brain and tell them what to do. The universe works as one organic whole. The laws of nature don’t make an exception for human beings. But I bet if you asked a hundred physicists you’d find few who apply that view to ordinary life. Many physicists have little interest in philosophy. In fact they tend to look down on it. They chose to study physics because they’re good at maths. They love the subject for its own sake – and so on. They didn’t embark on a physics degree to upend their worldview. They’re content that their life and thinking outside physics should be conventional.

So what difference does this make in practice? Maybe not a lot. After all, we will still need to keep some people locked up because they are a danger to society. And deterrence isn’t dependent on free will for it to work.

But it could make a difference to our mindset and language. For example, why not use the same adjective to describe all these miscreants? Call them all mad? Or call them all bad? Yet I suspect we may still want to make a distinction even if we reject culpability. If I had to choose I would call them all bad. I don’t recognise the concept of culpability, but what they do is still bad in the sense of unpleasant.

This worldview could make a psychological difference to the person who embraced it. That person might not be as inclined to punish people in a draconian and cruel way. But of course nobody has to embrace it. If you can’t let go of blaming and the notion of culpability then nobody can blame you. You are not culpable.

So I’m repeating myself in this blog. Still there’s no harm in expressing the same idea in different ways. You often have to do that in order for people to grasp it. I should know that as a former teacher.

But there’s another reason why I’ve decided to repeat myself now.

Since I got into TikTok (see my previous post) I’ve seen quite a few videos on the subject of narcissists – how to spot them – how to react to them – and so on. For those unfamiliar with the modern use of the term, these are people who are self-centred and manipulative. They use other people for their own ends. They have little empathy and only care about self-aggrandisement. (Some readers may only be familiar with the classical meaning – viz somebody who is in love with their own reflection.) The two meanings are, of course, related.

Narcissists are interesting because they sit on the conventional mad-bad boundary – and for this reason they show up the flaws in our everyday way of looking at things. Much of what you see and read about narcissists focuses on their bad-ness. Their actions have bad consequences. And yet narcissistic personality disorder is a recognised mental health condition – so narcissists are also mad in the broad-brush and provocative sense of the word. Popular media emphasise the bad-ness and psychotherapists pay lip service to the mad-ness. I say pay lip service because even these professionals seem drawn towards culpability. They use a different tone from the one they would use in talking about a psychotic person, for example – even though a psychotic person might do some awful things. Even a person with depression can be tough to live with.

Why the inconsistency – in a profession that purports to help people with mental issues? Could it be because it is near impossible to help narcissists? The professionals wash their hands of them and consign them to the bad bin for that reason? They then turn their attention to the narcissist’s victims, who they can help.

So I am going to say that narcissists are bad – but not culpable. And it is a misfortune to be bad – to paraphrase Schopenhauer – a misfortune both for you and the people you interact with.

TikTok

I got into TikTok a few weeks ago after reading an article that recommended it for video editing.

I’ve edited videos ever since I got a camera with video capability. I’ve even uploaded movies to YouTube. Yet I’ve always had an uneasy feeling about the medium – a fear of inducing boredom that comes from my years as a teacher. Anything that has a duration in time risks boring people. You can glance at a photo. You don’t feel obliged to watch it to the end because it occupies zero time. But I always feared that my video footage – though interesting to me – would not enthral anybody else. And I have no background in videography – no GCSE Film Studies or experience in the media. I have never learnt the tricks I imagine professionals use to hold an audience.

So why don’t I worry about boring you in this blog? [Actually I do a little – but not very much.] Well, people come to a blog with different expectations compared to how they approach a video. They expect to have to engage their brain a bit more.

On the plus side, I’ve noticed that videography gives a truer picture of my holidays than photography. After a trip I cherry-pick the best photos based on their aesthetics. I reject photos – even photos of significant things – if they don’t please my eye. Yet I will video something of interest even if I judge it imperfect from an aesthetic point of view. Of course I weed out ugly and boring video clips too, but I don’t apply such a strict aesthetic criterion to them.

When the iPhone came along I noticed that its videos were more vibrant than its stills. I checked on the internet and found that other people had seen the same thing. Before that I’d always thought it silly to video static subjects. Now I had a justification for doing just that. I’d always scoffed at people who filmed scenes in portrait mode, as you often see people doing. Why would they do that? A landscale demands landscape mode, n’est ce pas? I’d granted that portrait mode made sense for a person or tall building. But TikTok – where portrait mode rules – has made me rethink that notion too. Many TikTok users post travelogues and so on in portrait mode – and they look great. Searching my mind for an explanation, it occurred to me that the eye has quite a small clear field of view. It gets its landscape impression by darting about – and the brain does the rest. Does portrait mode mimic the eye-brain combo?

So a lot of new ideas have come together. I looked at the content of TikTok and noted the genuine talent of many of its contributors. I’d imagined it populated only with teenagers and nurses doing little dances – not that I have anything against teenagers or dancing. It’s just that I felt it catered to a younger demographic. And most TikTok-ers do indeed appear younger than me as far as I can tell their age. A newer medium has younger users. The medium itself has nothing young about it – whatever that means.

The data and security concerns wash over my head for the most part. What data? A real phone number, a made-up username and date of birth? If you get paranoid about tracking and data then avoid the internet altogether. The genie has already escaped from the bottle. I see myself as a data needle in a haystack of data. If somebody wants to waste his resources directing advertising at a man of my age that’s his loss. I remember every jingle from my childhood in the fifties, when far fewer jingles jingled – yet I can’t describe a single ad from today’s media.

I get the impression that some kind of Chinese social credit system operates on TikTok. It has strict rules. If you say fuck or show your tits – if you have any – they give you a black mark. I don’t know how many strikes it takes before they ban you and I don’t propose to find out.

So what about TikTok’s video editing capabilities? It has far more features than iMovie – for example – and a huge library of free background music. One thing in particular has caught my attention – Text-to-Speech (TTS). TTS will read out whatever subtitles you put on the video – so you can create a commentary without the hassle of recording and synching your own voice. The robotic voice of TTS may at first seem like a downside, until you grasp its comedic potential. For example, I found that it often mispronounces local place names – so one of my subtitles reads Ashdown Forest is part of the High Weald – pronounced wheeled. The voice pronounces Weald as weld, and I force it to correct itself. This amuses me anyway. I soon abandoned any attempt to add commentary to my France 2023 movie. Dieppe, Saumur, Loire, etc defeated the voice. I guess most viewers would find a correction in every subtitle more annoying than funny.

TTS has a large choice of voices – American for the most part, as you might expect. The handful of British voices all sound Southern English. I’ve discovered no Scots, Welsh, Irish or Northern English accents among them. For this reason I often use an intellectual-sounding American called Author to read my words. He has the slow fruity drawl of a man who, I imagine, teaches at Harvard. I’d rather have him speaking for me than the wrong kind of Englishman! Yet I admit I have made some use of a posh sexy female southern English voice called Peaceful.

Soon after meeting him, I began to wonder how the Author-man would fare if I got him to read out my blog poems, and I’ve discovered that he does it quite well – at any rate better than those oh-so-poetic voices that poetry readers used to affect. Of course, to make a TikTok out of the poem I also needed some images. In an ideal world I’d have gone out on location and recorded some footage relevant to the poem’s content – but my chosen poem has its action in the Lancashire of the late 1950s, and I live in Sussex in 2023. So what about using a sequence of stills? No luck there either. I have a large collection of photos but couldn’t find any appropriate ones. So what about pinching them from the internet? I’d rather not do that, so I asked ChatGPT to generate them – and the fun started.

The poem mentions a silver torch [flashlight]. No problem. Then a doily. Again, no problem. Then a nut-brown wireless. ChatGPT gave me an old wireless with a rotary dial. I’d wanted a linear one, but I settled for the rotary one. Nobody has access to the inside of my head. Nobody knows what kind of radio inspired me. In the poem’s story I used the torch to light my way to the toilet at the bottom of the yard – so I told the AI to generate an image of an old-fashioned toilet consisting of a wooden board with a hole in it. [I didn’t mention the squares of newspaper hanging on a nail. I didn’t want to over-tax it.] Anyway it came up with the image below.

The board with a hole in it has somehow become part of the cistern. And the AI has given me a pedestal toilet that I didn’t want – albeit with antique features.

After many attempts ChatGPT finally came up with the image at the top of this post. The board should have a round hole and extend right across the outbuilding, but the pic does at least have an outdoor feel. I’d wanted outdoor-urban rather than outdoor-rural so I’d have tried to push it in that direction if I’d continued.

Don’t be so literal-minded, you may say. Isn’t it better to let the reader create the images in her own head? Fair point – but I hope to get away with ironic and knowing literal-mindedness!

I’ll finish by writing about some of the genres on TikTok that have caught my attention so far.

Old film footage from the late 1800s onwards – some of it colourised. I could watch any amount of this stuff, but I’ve found it best to ignore the below-the-line comments. Either they applaud the lack of diversity in the movie or they repeat the same tired observation. It’s so sad to think that all those people are now dead. Es tan triste pensar que todas esas personas ahora están muertas. Es ist so traurig zu denken, dass all diese Menschen jetzt tot sind – in every conceivable language to the point of stupefaction. Under one of the videos some wit has pointed out that the dog in the video is probably dead by now. At least I assumed this was a subversive attempt at humour.

People doing accents Actually I’ve only found one so far but I assume others must exist. This young man is one of those rare people who can do many different accents and switch from one to the other with ease. I admire these people because I know I’d only manage stock phrases if I tried it. For South Wales I’d say I been down the pit boyo. For Lancashire – Ave we to go ont’ rec? For Ulster I’d declare in a booming voice that The people of Northern Ireland will not stand for this! aping the late Ian Paisley. My skills are not transferable.

South-east England used to have two major accents – Received Pronunciation (RP) and Cockney. Posh southerners used to speak RP a few decades ago – the older ones still do – and the working class spoke Cockney. I read recently that three new accents have begun to replace those two – Estuary English, Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Multicultural London English (MLE). Estuary is a subtler version of Cockney and SSBE is a less marked version of RP. MLE is spoken by Asian and Black British people for the most part – though a few white youngsters have adopted it. [Asian in the UK implies Indian or Pakistani heritage rather than Chinese, Korean etc.] Of those three, I find MLE the most difficult to follow – on a par with the notorious Glaswegian. To my ears it has quirky intonation and an off-beat emphasis. Many call centre and helpline operatives seem to speak it.

Videos in which expats compare their adopted country with home As you might expect, USA v UK comparisons make up most of these. One middle-aged woman on TikTok has moved from Georgia to Yorkshire. Her crazy mixed accent alone makes the videos worth watching. She admits that in her former life she’d have voted Trump and thought you needed guns to protect your family. She’s now become so anglicised that she can’t understand that old self.

A younger woman has moved from a small Canadian town to Miami and experienced a culture shock. She’s found the people of Miami shallow, aggressive, self-centred, and so on. In one video she says [on social media] that she wishes above all else that she’d lived in the era before social media. She binge-watches interviews from the seventies and eighties – before she was born. She scrutinises these alien people, envying them their pre-internet lives.

While I can see her point in some ways, I find it a little difficult to empathise fully. I lived most of my early life without social media, so I have a pre-internet foundation. Social media and so on have created a new layer on top of that old foundation. When I look at smartphone use I see an activity based on literacy. You need the ability to read. You need fine motor skills and knowledge of many things undreamt of in my childhood. You need a particular kind of logic and attention to detail to use any computer, smartphone or app. I don’t take that for granted because I remember when only a few boffs had it. When I use my iPhone I see it as a small miracle. I don’t think I’ve regressed.

In the seventies I used to listen to a discussion programme on the UK’s Radio 4 called Thinking Allowed. In one episode they had as their theme the rising importance of computers in everyday life. One of the regulars – the theatre critic Milton Shulman – hated the damned things. They threatened to turn us all into scientists, he said. Well it’s happened. In a limited sort of way we have all become scientists.

In the early sixties I asked my father whether one day we’d have maps that indicated our position with a little dot. To his credit he said yes without hesitation. In some ways modern technology has made my childhood dreams come true.

And I have cataracts, so these days I often find reading a screen easier than a printed page. I have a large collection of physical books on my shelves and I like the look and feel of them.

A mixture of puritanism and intellectual snobbery pervades this subject. If we can easily digest something we tend to devalue it compared to something that needs more effort. Yet I will read a good book in preference to looking at a TikTok video – with the emphasis on the word good. I don’t need to force myself. However TikTok wins over a boring book. Why not let these pastimes fight it out and go with the flow? If we turn to more difficult long-form material we don’t do it out of a sense of duty. We do it because popular and trivial ways of looking at things bore us in the end.