Accurate Models of Reality

3 months ago 56

Each month, we comb done dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and bully penning for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by peculiar paragraphs oregon sentences from the galleys that stack up connected our desks and spill implicit onto our shelves. We sometimes stock them with each different connected Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we mightiness stock them with you. Here are immoderate we recovered this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, adjunct editor

From William Stixrud and Ned Johnson’s The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook (Penguin Life):

Below we’ve listed immoderate research-backed statements astir what an close exemplary of world looks like:

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Money matters, but not astir arsenic overmuch arsenic we deliberation it does.

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We’re really not precise bully astatine predicting what volition marque america happy.

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If we’re connected a autobus oregon plane, we’re happier if we speech to a alien than if we support to ourselves.

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Some of these statements mightiness dependable acquainted to you. They travel from experts who person published books astir their research.

From Joyce E. Chaplin’s The Franklin Stove (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a transition astir heating technologies and changing standards for “preferred indoor atmospheres” passim history:

The caller perfect of being lukewarm indoors gradually moved down the societal ranks, and the heating systems dilatory improved. Among different things, this permitted greater privacy. Someone who could spend it mightiness present support lukewarm down a closed door, shielded from anyone who, successful different household, mightiness drawback them speechmaking banned books, penning atrocious poems (until they yet wrote a bully one), indulging successful idleness, conceiving a child—or thing other they mightiness similar to bash successful bid and quiet. It was “alone successful a stove-heated room” successful November 1619 that René Descartes had his foundational philosophical idea: “I think, truthful I am.”

From Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1999 (Pantheon), a retrospective entry:

My begetter drove astatine velocity on the Great Ocean Road. I hunched successful the backmost seat, expecting to beryllium steamrolled with fearfulness astatine the show of the burnt-out landscape, but similar each specified perverse hopes it was disappointed. Perhaps we were moving excessively fast. Perhaps I’d already seen excessively overmuch of it connected TV portion it was really happening, oregon it was excessively agelong aft the event. Perhaps it had thing to bash with maine and I didn’t truly care. The happening that did onslaught maine was the evident deadness of the ungraded itself betwixt the black, leafless trunks. Like radioactive dust.

From the transcript of a 1976 show by Barbara T. Smith astatine CalTech, published successful I Am Abandoned (Primary Information), which included a real-time dialog betwixt AI-pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum’s DOCTOR, a then-cutting-edge chatbot designed to mimic a therapist, and PARRY, a programme meant to simulate a paranoid schizophrenic:

[SILENCE]

YOU’RE TRYING TO MAKE ME TALK BY NOT SAYING ANYTHING

DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY?

I WENT TO THE TRACK AT BAY MEADOWS A WHILE BACK

I HOPE YOU LOST ALL YOUR MONEY

I HAVE LOST A LOT OF MONEY GAMBLING

HOW CAN YOU AFFORD MY FEE THEN?

GAMBLING HAS BEEN NOTHING BUT TROUBLE FOR ME

[SILENCE]

YOU’RE JUST PLAYING GAMES AGAIN

[SILENCE]

(SHIFTS UNEASILY)