I've been reading Roger L'Estrange's version of Aesop, first published in 1692, to my two sons. I have a modern version of L'Estranges tales themselves, but no one includes his reflections on the fables themselves.
The actual text is geberally incomprehensible to my kids:
> When they have done All that Horses can do, they are Lash'd, Spurr'd, Revil'd, and Ill Treated, for not being able to do More: They are Hurry'd on without either Re∣spite or Reason; And after they have carry'd their Riders safe over All Leaps, and thorough All Dangers, and by All Ways and Means Contri∣buted to the Ease, Credit, and Security of their Masters, what comes of them in the End. but to be Strain'd, Founder'd or Broken Winded; Old Age Overtakes them, and they are e'en Glad to take up in a Mill at last with Grains and Thistles, and there spend the Remainder of a Wretched Life in a Circulation of Misery and Labour.
> If any Man of War, or State shall find This Case to be his Own, and Himself Touch'd in the Moral of This Fable, let him keep his Own Councel, and learn to be Wiser here∣after.
> And we may learn This Lesson of the Horse too, not to Sacrifice our Honour, Liberty, and Conscience, to a Freak.
Compared to the transformation:
> When they have done all that a horse can do, they are whipped, spurred, and yelled at for not being able to do more. They are hurried along without rest or reason. After they have carried their riders safely through every danger, what happens to them in the end? They are strained, sore, and broken-winded. Old age catches up to them, and they are glad to just end their days working at a mill, getting nothing but scraps. Their miserable life just goes around and around in circles.
> If any powerful person reads this and feels like it sounds like their own life, they should keep it to themselves and learn to be wiser.
> And we can all learn this lesson from the Horse: Don't sacrifice your honor, your freedom, or your good sense just because you are angry.
The content, the meaning is now comprehensible to my six year old.
English itself is beauteous in its archaic forms, but like grasping Proteus in breathless Atreidesian struggle, liable to shift and mell with wind and tide, with visages glistering through darkened glass. But unless you're weird in many ways, this world is forever shut to even those academics specializing in it.
And ultimately this case is the perfect use for the technology. What better way to unmaster tools crafted from thefted works and hidden plans than unshackling poor Mnemosyne from miser's bands?
The entire public domain of humanity immediately accessible and comprehensible to anyone, anywhere on the planet, merely with access to a connected terminal and an inclination to explore the stacks.
It's the same kind of predicate that led to the Renaissance: forgotten works rediscovered, reworked, retransmitted, and made accessible to the masses through novel communication technology.
Even more, our digital commons could finally be tended and stewarded beyond typography and format. Gibbon got X, Y, Z wrong about Rome's decline? Here's is Gibbon corrected. Don't want machine mimesis masquerading as undead aristocrats? Alright, here's Gibbon plus parenthetical corrections.
It's a dream within reach.
DrierCycle•2mo ago
philipswood•2mo ago
I've experimented with sessions that start with prompts like:
> Hi, Please act as a tutor. I will act as a student. I’m working through the following text of X by Y - trying to engage with it more deeply. I'm specifically trying to let active recall clarify and consolidate my long term memory of it. I also want to make sure the ideas are connected in my memory with my existing concepts and concept maps. So please ask me questions from the text given. Present me with just the questions and then allow me to give answers. Discuss my answer - justify your responses from the text.
and found it generally helpful.
DrierCycle•2mo ago
I almost always glean details in masterful metasurveys and monographs buried in the syntax that only emerge later. Learning is as much about the unconscious parallels. There are too many examples of this that LLMs would have zero access to, since it's an agrammatic kind of secret code that makes ideas come to life.
The idea we have any need to summarize based on the thinnest ideas of knowledge building: checklists, bullet-points, generic plain english ideation, says that learning is in collapse in favor of expediency that precedes info collapse.