brettworks

• An essay on algorithms and cultural flattening.

“We have never had more individual data and naive intuition says all that granular personal data should fragment us, splinter the world into a billion niches. And yet the opposite is happening. The more the machines learn about us as individuals, the more alike our worlds look.”

“A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”

• An article on technique, skill, and decision-making in tennis.

“Here is the part that is harder to see. How do technique and skill inform what they can do, not just in this precise moment, but if they replayed this point 1,000 or 10,000 times? At the absurd speed of elite tennis, when is what looks like a decision not really a decision at all, but rather a measure of a player’s instincts — what they have trained to do and what they can trust under pressure.”

“A player’s split-second choice in this kind of moment is the accumulation of their instincts and intuition, their self-knowledge about what their technique and their skill allow them to do under pressure. When asking whether or not a player has done the right thing on a crucial point, it is necessary to consider what that player can reliably do.”

• Another essay about writing in the age of AI.

“A model optimizing next-token probability cannot do your thinking. If you trust it to hold the pen, no thinking would get done. As everyone turns their thinking down and becomes a meat-proxy for generated text, if you still keep writing yourself, you would still be thinking for yourself. So writing is now a comparative advantage, and a widening one!”