The Story of My Intellectual Life
In the early 1970s I discovered that “Kubla Khan” had a rich, marvelous, and fantastically symmetrical structure. I’d found myself intellectually. I knew what I was doing. I had a specific intellectual mission: to find the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” As defined, that mission failed, and still has not been achieved some 40 odd years later.
It’s like this: If you set out to hitch rides from New York City to, say, Los Angeles, and don’t make it, well then your hitch-hike adventure is a failure. But if you end up on Mars instead, just what kind of failure is that? Yeah, you’re lost. Really really lost. But you’re lost on Mars! How cool is that!
Of course, it might not actually be Mars. It might just be an abandoned set on a studio back lot.
That’s a bit metaphorical. Let’s just say I’ve read and thought about a lot of things having to do with the brain, mind, and culture, and published about them as well. I’ve written a bunch of academic articles and two general trade books, Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution (Harry Abrams1989), co-authored with Richard Friedhoff, and Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001). Here’s what I say about myself at my blog, New Savanna. I’ve got a conventional CV at Academia.edu. I’ve also written a lot of stuff that I’ve not published in a conventional venue. I think of them as working papers. I’ve got them all at Academia.edu. Some of my best – certainly my most recent – stuff is there.
I don’t know what these mean: “sort a list of 655 topics into a linear order,” “sorting along a single axis.” The lists I’m talking about are already in alphabetical order. The idea is to come up with a set of categories which you can use to organize the list in thematically coherent sub lists. It’s like you have a library of 1000 books. How are you going to put them on shelves? You could group them alphabetically by title or author’s (last) name. Or you could group them by subject matter. In doing this you know what the subjects are have a sense of what things you’d like to see in the same shelves. This is what you call ‘sorting by semantic similarity.’
The abstract of the paper explains what I was up to. But I wasn’t using books; I was using unadorned lists of categories. When I started I didn’t know what ChatGPT would do when given a list for which it had to come up with organizing categories. I know how I used those labels, but it knows nothing of that. So I gave it a try and found out what it could do. Things got interesting when I asked it to go beyond coming up with organizing categories and to actually sort list items into those categories.
I’ve also played around with having ChatGPT respond to clusters of words.