A parade of sad relations

Artificial intelligence, analogies, falling in love, and Helen Keller

Steve Bryant

Mar 7

Oh hello, oh hi.

How are you?

Are you doing good?

Are you doing better than Rob and Fab?

So many things happening, lately.

My friend with the coolest name®

Anita Schillhorn

Van Veen came to visit on her way to the Ladies Who Strategize retreat. We saw some art and had some ice cream.

Then my Phish-following friend ® Jeff Miller stopped by for a few days. We ate tacos and visited the stunning Biblioteca Vasconcelos, which can best be described as “similar to the library at the end of Interstellar.”

Friends who visit need maps, so I’m slowly working on making a map for visitors to Mexico City. Here’s a draft of an itinerary for Centro. More neighborhoods to come. If you have favorites in CDMX, tell me.

Or, if you want recs for when you visit, or want to grab a drink when you’re here, leave a comment or reply to this email. And if you like maps, you might want to check out Felt.

Meanwhile.

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI.

Haven’t we all.

I admit I’m not too terribly interested in things like, e.g., the AI copywriting tools (here’s a market landscape compiled by my talented friend

Noah Brier

over at

BrXnd Dispatch

). Maybe I'll do a review of each tool in turn. They're really bad you guys.

What I’m interested in, rather, is whether and how fine-tuned LLMs and generative art platforms think.

Which they don’t! But appear to do! And that uncertainty, that uncanny valley of seemingness, is what’s interesting to me.

So I’ve been reading old Hofstadter and recent Melanie Mitchell and some essays by the (mostly forgotten) Walker Pierce and wrote this thing about analogical reasoning and love.

I hope you enjoy it.

-s.

Hashtag hustling

A few years back I did some creative consulting for a dating app.

This was in a WeWork on California Street in San Francisco.

In this WeWork we sat in a glass-walled conference room.

I felt like we were on display.

Other WeWorkers would walk by, all day long, looking in and deciding, I guess, whether we were working hard, or working on something cool, or cute.

WeWork is a bit like a dating app that way.

A dating app for people who’s favorite hobby is hashtag hustling.

The best dating apps aren’t actually dating apps

While we sat inside that display case on California Street in San Francisco, we talked about how dating apps incentivize the worst behavior.

Dick pics, slut shaming, harassment, stuff like that.

When you make yourself available on Tinder or Bumble or Hinge or whatever, a certain, large, non-zero percentage of people will treat you like garbage.

You don’t get these behaviors—or rather, you don’t get them nearly as often—on regular ol’ non-dating apps.

You can post about thrifting on Reddit without men calling you ugly.

You can rate restaurants on Yelp without being harassed.

You can leave comments on a Discord about A.I. without, you know, the threat of sexual violence or somebody asking for photos of your feet.

Nasty things still happen in those communities!

But they happen with much less frequency.

Because, in those communities, the point isn’t romantic or sexual availability.

The point is expressing yourself through an interest.

To a potential partner, the fact that you also like the thing they like, that is what makes you romantically or sexually interesting.

And as they become more attracted, they like the way you like the thing, because it reminds them of the way they like the thing.

You know how the saying goes:

Being interested is interesting.

Love is an analogy

What I’ve just described to you, when we get down low and reductive, is an analogy

“Thing is other thing."

As in, what you’re doing when you experience another through the lens of your shared interests is you are transferring meaning from a particular subject (the source) to another (the target).

Thrifting is actually romance.

Rating restaurants is actually courting.

And talking about robot-on-robot wordplay is actually human-on-human flirtation.

You are transferring what it feels like to love one thing (your hobby, or whatever) to what it feels like to love another thing (e.g., a romantic partner).

You see the other through a lens.

Now please don’t confuse what I’m saying: I’m decidedly not saying that you can only fall in love by, e.g., spending an unfortunate amount of time in a Buffalo Exchange.

What I decidedly am saying is that the feeling of being in love must always be an analogy. Attraction is always a correspondence.

This, it happens, is precisely why it’s difficult to define love.

You could, of course, argue that point.

You could open up your Miriam-Webster to the appropriate page, sit up straight, and confidently intone that “love is a feeling of deep affection”.

But that doesn’t quite cut the mustard, does it. “Deep affection” doesn’t describe the almost-quiteness of Gatsy and Buchanan. It doesn’t describe the forbidden longing of Clarissa Dalloway for Sally Seton. It doesn’t describe the burly bond between those two gorgeous young men from RRR.

Even in that spare definition, the word “deep” is a metaphor. How deep? Deep as what? Deep and fathomful, like an undeground sea, or deep and narrow, like a bottomless cave where divers lose their minds and their air?

Realizing this futility, you could try to define love by metaphor.

You could say that love is like a tree, putting down roots in the whole of your being.

Or a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

Or a kind of warfare, an assault on the self.

Each of those metaphors are deep and clever and contain the feeling of being true. That’s what makes them artful.

But none of them begin to define the totality of love.

Because it doesn’t matter what the object of the analogy is, actually. It can be a tree or a sigh or warfare or whatever. It can the soul’s recognition of itself in the way the other thrifts, or takes food pics, or discourses about robots.

It only matters that love is, itself, the feeling of a powerfully true analogy.

Let’s do a Bongard problem

Bongards, which are almost as fun as they sound, are a puzzle of analogies.

You’re presented with two sets of relatively simple diagrams, say A and B.

All the diagrams from set A have some common factor. That common factor is lacking in all the diagrams of set B.

Your task is to find the common factor.

Here’s a simple one:

And this one’s harder:

To solve a Bongard, you’ve got to bounce back and forth between diagrams.

Sometimes you remain within a single set. Sometimes you compare across sets. To discern rules, you have to do guesswork.

“Perhaps shapes count,” wrote cognition expert Douglas Hofstadter, “but not colors — or vice versa. Perhaps orientations count, but not sizes — or vice versa. Perhaps curvature or its lack counts, but not location inside the box — or vice versa. Perhaps numbers of objects but not their types matter — or vice versa.”

He goes on:

Even when one’s first hunch turns out wrong, it often takes but a minor “tweak” of it in order to find the proper aspects on which to focus. In other words, there is a subtle sense in which people are often “close to right” even when they are wrong. All of these kinds of high-level mental activities are what “seeing” the various diagrams in a Bongard problem — a pattern-recognition activity — involves.

This activity, Hofstadter argues, forms a core part of human cognition. To discern important features you must filter out the superfluous or superficial and create analogies at an abstract level.

That is, you don’t just lump things into categories. You create new categories, and find resemblances and differences at that arbitrary level.

This, it so happens, is exactly what current AIs can’t do.

Not very well at least.

They can identify pictures of cats and generate art from prompts and predict which word comes next in this sentence.

But they’re still terribly bad at reasoning by analogy.

A famous blind girl figured all of this out

For my money, the person who best expressed the fundamental importance of analogy was Helen Keller.

In 1888, Helen was eight years old.

She was deaf.

She was blind.

She couldn’t much speak.

She lived in Tuscumbia, Alabama and communicated by writing words on the hand of her companion, Anne Sullivan.

If Helen wanted cake, she spelled cake on Anne’s hand.

If Helen wanted a doll, she spelled doll on Anne’s hand.

These are things that chimps can do, btw: they know a few words, they can say a few things.

But they have no way of extending that reasoning beyond a few hundred signs, of understanding that you can not only describe all objects in the world with a sign, but also the relationship between those objects.

Helen was in the same boat. Her world was desperately limited.

Then one day, Anne took Helen to the pump-house:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!

Before this experience, Helen could spell “cake” and receive something soft and spongy and delicious.

She could spell “doll” and receive a toy to play with.

But that’s a one-to-one correspondence, like operant conditioning. Hear buzzer, start salivating.

What she learned at the water pump was that the word “w-a-t-e-r” was an analogy for the object “water”.

She made that connection within herself, and could apply the same analogical process as a sensemaker for any other type of experience.

The very essence of meaning is analogy.

Falling out of love

When I started this post I had a different intention entirely.

I was going to complain about the state of the internet.

I wanted to complain about how twitter has devolved into a metastasised cancer of threadbois and crypto spam, that linkedin has been overrun by ultra-earnest and self-congratulatory kudzu, and how the experience of using my browser had become like the experience of wading, like Atreyu in the swamp of sadness, through highly optimized ⓒⓞⓝⓣⓔⓝⓣ ⓑⓤⓛⓛⓢⓗⓘⓣ.

I was going to make an analogy.

I was going to compare the internet to QVC.

But then I realized that it actually doesn’t matter what dreaded, stinky, no-good thing I compare today’s internet to.

What matters is that I no longer think of the internet like I did when I fell in love with the internet.

It’s no longer a place to go to escape the real world.

It’s no longer a pocket dimension for fellow travelers.

It no longer feels like me and my homies, sneaking out back for a smoke.

It’s no longer smoke made with the fume of sighs but rather, like, stale cartridges from a bodega vape.

The lack of love is the inability to find a correspondence with another thing you love.

Falling out of love is what happens when an analogy no longer feels true.

How can I help? This is a 100% organic, free-range, desktop-to-inbox newsletter devoted to helping you navigate uncertainty, seek the most interesting challenges, and make better creative decisions in marketing and beyond. Your host is Steve Bryant, who is for hire.

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Do NOT say Panaderia Rosetta. Be better than that.

Kill me

It’s mostly men

Victor Hugo

Shakespeare

Adrienne Rich

Walker Pierce made this point in The Message in the Bottle, writing that this “delta phenomenon” was “nothing less, I suspected, than the ultimate and elemental unit not only of language but of the very condition of the awakening of human intelligence and consciousness.”

Delightful