The Whippet #186: Forms of Floral Larceny

Hello!

Once again, I don't like to waste your time with apologies for lack of sending newsletters, but it feels weird not to acknowledge it! Okay.

I've been thinking about LLMs (chatgpt-type AI) a lot, but I try not to put anything in The Whippet I think you'll have all heard a hundred times before, so I cut most of it.

Instead, this is just one single aspect that I haven't heard people talking about. It's not remotely my entire opinion on LLMs, just one thing. And if you don't want to hear about LLMs, scroll down, there's a hummingbird.

An under-discussed risk of individuals turning to ChatGPT(etc) too often
ChatGPT has a distinctive, and in my opinion very annoying, style of speaking.

Have you ever started at a workplace that uses a lot of business jargon, and at first you're like "wtf people, do you know how you all sound?" But then a few months later, you find yourself using the same jargon - ironically at first, and then habitually. Humans adapt to the language of the people they talk to regularly.

Going even further:

You know how you have this voice in your head that witnesses and responds to your actions? It starts out as mostly your parents' voice and ends up a dynamic amalgam of your partner, mentors in specific fields, the media you're heavily engaged with, formative books, some of your personal lessons, etc etc. (I have one voice from a writer-boss that solely pops up to say 'actor' every time I write 'actress'.)

The development of this voice been really stark for me, because my parent was abusive, and my current and longest-term partner is incredibly supportive, and so I had quite a clear view of the voice in my head changing from harsh to kind. (PhilosophyTube has a moving video about her experience with the voice in your head, but she was in an abusive relationship, so the voice turned from kind to cruel.)

But actually the PhilosophyTube video shouldn't be in parentheses, because it's the point: the people you spend a lot of time talking to inevitably end up part of that amalgam voice in your head – this very personal and important space – whether you want them to or not.

And, okay, ChatGPT isn't abusive typically, I'm not trying to suggest that. It's, if anything, uncomfortably sycophantic. But regardless, using it a lot, as a kind of go-to whenever you have an idea or question, is going to make it part of the voice in your head, I think even if you hate how it speaks (cf the business jargon).

So you should factor that into your decisions about how often to turn to it. Do you want it to be part of the voice in your head? (Maybe yes! But you should at least consciously decide.)

But regardless, perhaps you can tell me about one of your minor head-voices, that just pops up to say a particular thing in a particular circumstance?

The Earth was silent for 4 billion years

Animals made no noise for 90% of the planet’s life.

Animal communication is a relatively complex thing to evolve, so, of course, for much of animal life, it didn't happen. 4 billion years isn't really fair because there was no life for most of that. But it was still a very long time, and it's eerie to imagine forests for all those millennia with no birdcalls or chirps or barks, just leaves rustling, every creature hunting and eating and raising their young in silence.

A mini-history of hearing

Hearing developed a long time before deliberate sound-making. There's no point speaking if no one can hear, but there's a LOT of point in hearing other animals even if you can't speak to them.

Our human ears evolved, via a very long path, from the gill slits of an ancient fish. It had fluid sacs in its skull that helped it keep upright in the water (our inner ear is still responsible for balance). The movements of other fish also vibrated the fluid sacs, which it could feel, but not hear.

Early amphibians had proto-ears that could hear very low-frequency sounds – the kind of sound that vibrates through the ground. Then reptiles, which crawled low to the ground and could hear low frequencies too. The first animals to be able to hear high-pitched sounds were birds; high-pitched sounds travel further through the air. This paper goes through the whole story to humans, if you like. [PDF]

A mini-history of speaking

The first animal to deliberately communicate with sound was an insect, a katydid that rubs its wings on its spiky legs to make a 'raspy trill'. They know it was communication rather than random sounds, because only the males evolved them. So males could announce their presence to females, but without endangering themselves, because the sound was too high-pitched for other animals to hear.

Except of course, now any animal with a mutated ear that CAN hear high frequencies, gets to feast on katydids without competition, and outlive its peers. And the fossil record shows mammalian ears changing shape shortly after katydids with raspy legs show up.

Once other animals can hear them anyway, high-pitch katydids have no advantage over mid-range katydids, so they begin to diversify.

There is a sound 'ecosystem' where different animals use different parts of the audio spectrum, just like they find different habitat and dietary niches.

The black Jacobin hummingbird = a giraffe reaching the very top leaves

This hummingbird's secret vocalisations were first discovered by neuroscientist Dr Claudio Mello, who had observed black Jacobins in the wild opening and closing their beaks in the same manner that other hummingbird species did when singing, but he couldn't hear any sounds emerging from the black Jacobins' beaks.
Only when he employed specialized recording equipment normally required to detect and record the ultrasonic squeaks of bats was he able to confirm that they were indeed singing, but at a pitch beyond the upper threshold of human hearing and also above the pitch of all calls previously documented from birds.
Mello believes that its incredibly high-pitched calls may give the black Jacobin hummingbird a private line of communication in a noisy forest that is home to 40 other hummingbird species.
[Guinness Book of Records]

• [Source for the headline: Paywalled, also sad because it's a lot about the damage noise pollution is doing to ecosystems]
• [Source for katydids stuff]

Okay sorry, but I just read this other black Jacobin hummingbird fact on the Guinness World Records site:

Jacobins practice nectar robbing when accessing certain flowers, piercing holes in the corolla to steal nectar rather than properly pollinating the bloom.

That seems so very mean! It's not like the hummingbird loses anything by helping it pollinate! I'm enjoying this Wikipedia article though.

From the 'Golden Thread' fiber arts exhibition.

Excellent fact about French courtiers in the 1700s

(If you don't really have a picture of that, think, like, the second season of Blackadder. That's a bit earlier but same vibe. Throne room, king, Mary Antoinette, a bunch of sycophantic aristocrats hanging about.)

So, lots of rules: you could not speak to the king unless he spoke to you first. You could not clap in the presence of the king. You could not knock on the door of a room containing the king.

Which meant that courtiers in the Palace of Versailles used to scratch at the door to be let in.

That's the entire fact but I can't tell you how it warms my heart. It doesn't say they whined as well, but one assumes.

From a longer piece about life at court, answering the question "what did courtiers actually DO all day?"

Cloudy days are measures in oktas

You know when the forecast says 'Partly Cloudy' etc? Weatherpeople are surprisingly quantitative about this! I'd assumed it was just vibes-based.

An okta is an eighth of the sky.

"The sky is visually inspected to produce an estimate of the number of eighths of the dome of the sky covered by cloud. A completely clear sky is recorded as zero okta, while a totally overcast sky is 8 oktas. The presence of any trace of cloud in an otherwise blue sky is recorded as 1 okta, and similarly any trace of blue on an otherwise cloudy sky is recorded as 7 oktas." [Bureau of Meteorology]

They measure from 9am-3pm and average it.

• 0-2 oktas = 'Fine' or 'Sunny'
• 3-5 oktas = 'Partly Cloudy' (3 can also be 'Scattered Clouds')
• 6-7 oktas = 'Cloudy'
• 8 oktas = 'Overcast'

That's the official World Meteorological Organization standard. I would guess that 2 & 7 oktas are what Australian forecasts calls 'Mostly Sunny' and 'Mostly Cloudy'.

(And some places have a secret, 9th okta which means the sky is completely obscured, but it's by fog, smoke, volcanic ash or, I don't know, bees.)

Do good deeds for selfish reasons

I agree, that when someone does a good deed and doesn't try to get any credit, or donates to charity anonymously, that's very noble.

But I think we should be way more supportive of people who do good deeds and then actively seek the credit and/or adulation.

If you are getting a blood transfusion, you cannot tell the difference between the selfish blood and the altruistic blood. Drowning people can't tell if their rescuer became a lifeguard just to impress women.

People sometimes react to good deeds with like, "oh he's just doing it because he wants to be the hero." Okay!

If someone is about to run into a burning building to save my life, I don't want them to stop and say "no no no, I'd be doing it for the wrong reasons."

Save my life for your personal ego, please! Whatever motivates you to do good, let it motivate you.

I also think, in a way, it's more narcissistic to care about people having pure motives. If you give to a child poverty charity, then that's about them, right? About the children getting the help they need?

If you think your motivations are important here, then you're making it about you.

(Please note, I am talking about getting credit by society at large, not by the recipient of your good deed. Do not bring a casserole to a bereaved neighbour and then brag to them about how generous you are. They will rightly hate you. But go home and brag to your spouse, for sure. That's what spouses are for.)

Also, yeah, some people will find it obnoxious (although I'm trying to help by writing this). But again, what's better:

• Tangibly improves other people's lives, but obnoxious about it
• Does not improve other people's lives

Next time someone is being really annoying about doing a good deed, try to swallow your irritation and focus on their actions, not their words. (But you've heard that before, right? Actions speak louder than words? This is the other half of it.)

Maybe we will come to a point where everybody is doing so many good deeds all the time that we can start to picky about the contents of their hearts, but until then: by any means necessary.

Do something good for the wrong reasons and be really smug about it. It still counts <3