Gurteen Knowledge Letter August 2023 Issue 278

Gurteen Knowledge Letter
Issue 278 – August 2023

This is Issue 278 of my Gurteen Knowledge letter. If you do the math, you’ll realize I’ve been publishing it every month for over 23 years.

Currently, I have around 20,000 subscribers, but that number hasn’t changed much for several years. I gain about the same number of new subscribers each month as the ones I lose.

Considering the effort I put into the newsletter each month, I’d love to have more readers. So, if you enjoy this newsletter (which I assume you do since you keep receiving it), could you please take a moment to tell a friend or two about it?

Thank you,
David

1. Intergenerational Knowledge Café
   World Values Day 19 October 2023
2. Claude 2
   A new AI chatbot competitor to ChatGPT and Bard
3. The Story of the Chinese Farmer
   It’s impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad
4. How Tribes United and Divided Us
   From family bonds to friendships to tribes
5. Life is Difficult
   This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths
6. Modern-day Colonialism
   The dominance, control, and exploitation by a powerful group over a less powerful group
7. Writing with GenAI chatbots
   ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4, Bard and Claude 2
8. Help Keep My Work Alive
9. Unsubscribe
10. Gurteen Knowledge Letter

In partnership with Charles Fowler of World Values Day, I am running an online Knowledge Café in October for the seventh consecutive year. Our speaker this year will be Hank Kune of Educore.

This year's Café will be a little different as we aim to unite young people (youngers) and elders for an intergenerational dialogue about our values and what people would like the world to be ten years from now — focusing on the values that bring us together.

We are looking for two groups of participants:

1. Youngers between the ages of 16 and 18 years old.

2. Elders over the age of 60.

We plan to host one knowledge Café on October 19th in the European time zone, suitable for the UK, Ireland, continental Europe, Africa, and the Middle East participants. But if there is sufficient interest, we may run more cafes for other time zones.

We want an equal balance of youngers and elders. Our ideal is 25 elders from several countries and an equal number of 25 youngers.

As the Café will be during school term time, ideally, we would like five schools from a few different countries to participate, with each school contributing five students with a mix of genders.

If you are a school teacher (even if not in the European time zone) and you are interested in having your school participate in the Café, please get in touch (david.gurteen@gurteen.com). Elders will be able to register online at a later date.

You can learn more about the Intergenerational Knowledge Café here.

I have been experimenting with ChatGPT for some time now, but recently Anthropic released a competitor called Claude 2. It has been developed by a group of developers who split from OpenAI and bears a striking resemblance to ChatGPT.

It is currently available for free, and I find myself quite fond of the new chatbot, perhaps even more so than ChatGPT. The default language style used by ChatGPT tends to be somewhat flowery, and I am forever telling ChatGPT to tone things down.

In contrast, Claude 2 defaults to a more natural language style that aligns better with my own writing style.

Try it out for yourself.

Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away.

That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate.

They said, "We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away.

This is most unfortunate." The farmer said, "Maybe."

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, "Oh, isn't that lucky? What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!" The farmer again said, "Maybe."

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg.

The neighbors then said, "Oh dear, that's too bad, " and the farmer responded, "Maybe."

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg.

Again all the neighbors came around and said, "Isn't that great!" Again, he said, "Maybe."

Credit: Alan Watts

The natural world is a highly interconnected and intricate system. We cannot label any event as entirely good or bad, as we cannot predict all the consequences.

Something that may appear unfortunate at first may lead to unanticipated benefits later on, while something that seems positive may end up causing issues.

Due to the vast complexity of nature, our limited perspective makes it impossible to determine with certainty whether specific occurrences are positive or negative.

I recently came across an intriguing article, The Trust Paradox, exploring the evolution of human trust. It examines how early reliance on family bonds expanded to friendships and tribes as our ancestors' societies grew.

The article explores the fascinating concept of the Trolley Problem thought experiment, which reveals the tensions between different ethical intuitions in our minds. It provides an insightful perspective on the paradoxes of trust —  how our social wiring enabled cooperation and community, yet also violence against outsiders.

It offers a thoughtful view of morality and trust and shows how instincts from our evolutionary past still influence society today.

I'd recommend this article to anyone interested in exploring the concept of trust and how it shapes human behavior and ethics. It gives a nuanced look at the complexities of trust, cooperation, and morality.

Life is difficult.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.

It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.

Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult.

Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Credit: Scott Peck

This is one of my favorite quotations taken from the very first lines of The Road Less Travelled by Scott Peck. We often expect life to be easy without questioning this belief. Our thinking is rooted in the assumption that life should be devoid of problems. However, if we pause and reflect, we realize that life is not easy, and strangely, it becomes easier when we acknowledge this fact.

In the past year or two, I've noticed an increasing use of "colonialism" as a metaphor to describe forms of control and domination beyond the traditional meaning of one nation ruling over another.

This inspired me to write a short post about these modern forms of colonialism and the metaphorical use of the word. However, as often happens, my exploration took me deeper than expected. What started as a short post has become something larger and a more encompassing definition of colonialism.

Colonialism is the exertion of dominance, control, and exploitation by a powerful group over a less powerful group.

Take a look. We can learn a lot from the tragic history of colonialism and find ways to avoid perpetuating similar patterns of oppression today.

I can access ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0, Bard, and Claude 2. It's interesting to compare the content they generate for the same prompt. What I particularly like, though, is asking one chatbot to critique the text generated by another or even critique its own generated text.

One of my typical writing sessions unfolds like this:

First, I draft a post myself, often not paying much attention to grammar or spelling.

Next, I ask, say, ChatGPT 3.5 to clean it up and possibly expand on it as it sees fit. Sometimes, I will ask two or more chatbots to clean up the post, then choose the version I like most. Alternatively, I may select specific sections generated by different bots and combine them to create my desired result.

Afterward, I may request a chatbot to add or remove items and adjust the emphasis on certain aspects of the post.

Then, I ask one or more bots to critique what's been written.

Based on the received criticism, I update the text and put it through a bot for an almost-final pass.

Finally, I meticulously review the text, making further tweaks and changes I deem appropriate.

Oh, and one last thing — the consolidation takes place in Evernote before I transfer the final text to a post on my WordPress-based website. In WordPress, I can access Grammarly, which I use for one last edit.

Though slightly elaborate, it's an exceptionally productive approach.

Help Keep My Work Alive
For almost 25 years, I’ve been sharing the Gurteen Knowledge Letter each month, and many of you have been reading it for five years or more. My Knowledge Café also reached a milestone, celebrating its 20th anniversary in September 2022.

If my work has made a difference to you, I’d be grateful if you could consider supporting it. A small monthly donation or any one-off contribution would greatly help cover some of my website hosting costs.

Thank you to the 50+ patrons who already support me – your generosity means a lot.

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Gurteen Knowledge Letter

The Gurteen Knowledge Letter is a free monthly email newsletter designed to inspire thinking around Conversational Leadership and Knowledge Management. You can explore the archive of past issues here.

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David Gurteen
Gurteen Knowledge
Fleet, United Kingdom

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