notes from attending a talk
misc.
- global harmony is boring, as is this ideal of the perfectly unified multicultural melting pot
- This idea is explored in an Italian book Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
- Friction (without violence) is exciting and what enables cultural innovation
- She read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport lol
- the apps that promise us increased productivity, really just mine us for attention and data, leaving us with nothing - remembering nothing from hours of doom scrolling, time gone like that
- Live intentionally, and the days feel longer
- Being positive, and self-care, is overrated
- Why should we look away from terrible things? Kuang says we should sit in the moral discomfort because that might push us to do something about it
- Channel the discomfort into finding existing ways that people are already trying to help and contribute to those, whether with donations or volunteering or just spreading the word
- External validation is like candy - a short, unsustainable high
- She defines success in literature as being self-satisfied with a sentence she crafts, or just having a lot of fun during the creative process
- Her works often follow people that feel like “outsiders”, who desperately just want to be apart of the in-group, only to become disillusioned with the fantasy of the institutions they glorified (Babel - R.F. Kuang)
- Outsiders better see the inner workings of the group - insiders are not self-aware
- It’s important for the illusion to break
- Don’t cling to the idea of making the right choices in the right order in order to have guaranteed path to success - this perceived prestige pipeline that we’ve been taught no longer exists, and if it does, may be deeply unethical
- In creative writing, there is no point in not taking a risk - if you offended no one, you’ve said nothing interesting - the key is to offend the right people
- AI is not a threat to creative writing, as it does not solve any problem for the field
- there has never been short supply of manuscripts - there is already an influx of bad writing - the publishing industry is about curation
- people read to see language used in a way that it hasn’t been, to learn stories that haven’t been told before - LLMs fundamentally cannot accomplish these things
- the point of literature is to innovate upon language to spark moods
on Katabasis - R.F. Kuang
- inspired by the time her then boyfriend severely struggled with a chronic illness at the start of their PhD programs
- took math lessons to understand hyperbolic geometry for the book’s topological depiction of hell
- held a paradox party where she had her MIT Math PhD friends prepare a real paradox that could be used as a magic spell