Computers are better writers than a lot of people

I don't know if this is an indictment of journalism today or a small piece of support evidence for my least popular opinion ever:

Robot Sportswriter Outperforms Human (NPR)

…

The writer of that [terrible story that people assumed was written by a robot] — it turns out — was a living, breathing human being. But the creators of Narrative Science, a news-writing software program, took Deadspin's assumption as fighting words. They set out to prove that their system could produce a better story.

"We actually got hold of the information director of the school, we got the raw material, the numbers around the story," said Kris Hammond, chief technology officer of Narrative Science. "And we fed it to our system, which wrote the story, where the headline and the lead were focused on the fact that it was a no-hitter. Because how could you write a baseball story and not notice that it was a no hitter? I mean what kind of writer or machine would you be?"

I'll say it again (this is twice): Computers will be able to replicate every human creative activity within our lifetimes, and this is a good thing.

I've included the full text of the robot's article below the jump.

Why do the AP classes focus on the least useful texts?

I have no idea, but I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks so. Penny Arcade Tycho writes about his own experience surviving his expulsion from the smart kid lit classes, where they were "reading" Ulysses:

My first and only F well in hand, the illusion I had of myself - that of a pristine jarred brain casting aspersions on greasy, cavorting bipeds - was obliterated. I was enrolled, then, in a series of what were (and may still be called) "bonehead" classes, which was apparently where they hoarded all the Twain. And I Am The Cheese, and Watership Down, books that played with modern language and perspective and voice, and played rough.  There's really no doubt that my entire life turned on that point, and it never really stopped turning: the point at which Writing became decoupled from English.

This is why you shouldn't let your kids do spelling bee

That's from Razib Khan's article, people of class drink alcohol.

David Markson R.I.P.

I've never read any David Markson. But when I read he died early last week, I recalled that I had an unread book of his somewhere in my bookshelves. I searched for it and found it, discovering to my surprise that it was a signed copy (those who know me know I separately shelve signed books; I'd missed this one somewhere). My American experimental Po-Mo has not strayed far beyond Barthelme and Foster Wallace, but of course I'm going to read this book, and his much-hailed masterpiece Wittgenstein's Mistress.

My impression so far has been, thank goodness someone can do this well for the rest of us who might have really sucked at it.

By the way, from what I've read so far, I'll take Ben Marcus over Jonathan Safran Foer any day, on this point.

Barry Hannah 1942-2010

"Well, yeah, I’m proud, but I tell you, the older you get as a writer, the more modest you get and the more you should shut up. You’re less arrogant, with good reason. There’s just a hell of a lot going on in the world. You’ve not penetrated too many consciousnesses. When I was twenty-one, I thought that you write a book and the world paid attention, man. There was no doubt. Then you grow up and you see that that’s not it at all. That you have to love it itself. And that you’re working for about the top 3 percent, max, of America. And they’re literary. That’s not the nuclear scientists, who ain’t going to read you. You’re working with literary folks, 3 percent of the reading public, and it becomes a tiny club and you should have more modesty.

But Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, that’s what you should shoot for. Beckett. The best of Beckett’s prose, you know. If you can get that close to the heart, and that honesty, with some music, why write the other kind of books that many people can agree with and not be disturbed by? I don’t like the books where everybody shakes their heads and says, How true, how true. I want to be in a region that’s beyond good and evil. Where it’s just fireworks or Mozart. Where there’s just no explanation. That’s what McCarthy and Faulkner do for me. It’s better than any review. That’s what I’m after."

-from The Pleasures of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers

The horrible truth

... is that I need to spend less time playing games, and more time doing my freakin' work of choice:

The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers [!], ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals [!!!]" writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery." | The Guardian, via Daring Fireball |

Related: How does one accumulate 10,000 hours of being a master criminal?

Don't write angry

I make my share of typos, but also I don't say things like:

Why would you change a sentnece [sic] aso [sic!] that it meant something i [sic] didn't mean? I don't know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it's [sic!] easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.

In a more flattering attempt to practice what he preaches, he writes

Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i [sic] have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

But seriously, by his own logic it should end with a fifth fuck.

via the Corner, but I can't find the link.

Still funny, though

I often take great comfort in the fact that studies have shown that writing often and well seems to help stave off Alzheimer's. But it only helps, as illustrated by the fact that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early Alzheimer's.

Bummer. But he's taking it very well (click the link for his full statement), but in true instaBellman style, I'll highlight this:

I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

Anatomy of a scab

Question: If, during the writer's strike, a writer donates a screenplay to a production company in return for nothing other than a screenplay credit, is that writer crossing the metaphorical picket line?

Discuss.

The Writer's Strike

Really, DR isn't "busy," he just didn't want to cross a picket line. Any picket line.

Anyway, there is one reason to be enthusiastic about the strike: It's an occasion to for Ze Frank to return to v-blogging.

Also, I found this post by Fake Steve Jobs to be pretty entertaining. Here are a couple excerpts:

I guess we can't blame these writers. They've all got big stupid houses in Los Angeles and Hawaii, plus Porsches and Land Rovers and way more money than they ever deserved and they got it all for producing what history will view as probably the worst bulk of absolute fecal matter that has ever been passed off onto the world. Honestly these guys have run the biggest scam I've ever seen. Now they're clinging to that fat stupid system that has served them so well.

Obtain a clue, people. You're sitting there fighting over residuals and terms of this and that when what you should be doing is leaving the system altogether and helping to build the next one. But you can't do that because you can't get off the heroin of network money. You're hooked to a lifestyle. For all your groovy talk and hip little soul patch beards, you're the most risk-averse people in the world. You're lifers. I mean, you belong to a fucking union! How fucked up and 20th century is that?

The innocence of youth

Here's a fun game: what did you write in junior high that would be most likely to get a student arrested nowadays?

For my part I'm pretty sure that it's the short story I wrote about the guy who had such bad luck that every time he stepped on a plane somebody hijacked it. The story that actually got my pops called in for a parent teacher conference, though, was a comic piece called A Day in the Life of a Mass Murderer. I'm not really sure why I thought serial killers were funny, but it might have had something to do with this.