48 Weekly Review

hello again I'm Dr grippin it's time for

our weekly review before we get into it

there's my email address as always

please email me if you have any

questions or comments about the course

at aaronin

gmail.com now we started off looking at

one of our main literary texts in the

course this week was Amy Tan's essay

mother tongue She Wrote the very

successful book Joy Luck Club which was

made into a movie and she talked in

talks in her essay mother tongue about

how she came to find the appropriate

audience for her writing and in turn

then she realized what kind of language

she needed to use to become a successful

writer and one of the things she

realized was that she was using the

wrong kind of speech when she was going

around talking to Big groups of people

and one day when her mother was in the

audience she found that the the wrong

the speech was wrong because it was not

the kind of speech that was most

meaningful to her and the speech that

was meaningful to her was her personal

speech that she used with her mother and

that was related to her identity as well

and that she had been losing both the

effectiveness of her speech and the

special qualities of her identity when

she was using this other kind of wrong

language she calls it and let's take a

look at what she identified as the wrong

language that was she was using before

she became a successful writer and what

she moved away from to eventually become

the writer that that she is today one of

them was nominalized forms she said her

language was burdened with these and

that means noun forms for example taking

a verb like intersect and changing it to

intersection and imagine to

imagination and so some of the examp an

example of this kind of nominalized form

that she was using was the intersection

of memory and Imagination and she

thought that she says in mother tongue

that that is the wrong kind of language

for her I know many people want to write

this way they like to use the bigger

words because uh uh standardized tests

like the college entrance exam expects

us to use these kind of words but they

were not for her what happens with these

nominalized forms is that you take a

verb which expresses motion and motion

happens in time and you take away the

action and the sense of time when you

convert it to a noun so now there's no

more sense of movement and no sense of

time and you lose a sense of Life

literally because life occurs in time

changes happen and nouns remove some of

that sense so nominalized forms were one

thing that she wanted to get away from

another was past perfect tenses and we

know from the example of some other

languages like Chinese you don't need a

past perfect tense and this is another

thing that was burdening her language

and a reason why probably is that it

removes us from the present and sends us

to somewhere that we can't see even we

can't imagine it many times so imagine

we we are reading this essay mother

tongue now at this moment we're reading

mother tongue and Amy Tan tells us about

a time in the past when she was giving

another speech so our imagination goes

to the past and then at that time she

had given the speech six other times in

different places or whatever so now our

imagination divides into six different

pieces what time we don't know six

different times we don't know what

places we don't know six different

places so our imagination just dissolved

into six something and we don't know

what they are she took us from the PE

present back back again and our our

attention divides into six pieces and so

this is less effective kind of language

it's taking us away from our present

experience and she she gives an example

of this she uses it herself the past

perfect tense the same talk I had

already given half a dozen times and

that divides our attention takes it away

from the present she also talks about

conditional phrases which are usually if

then phrases and that has those have the

same type of effect that we're talking

about the actual fact and then from the

fact we take our attention move it away

to something else that's not the fact

but if possibly maybe this happens then

something else so instead of having our

attention in one place it's divided over

with a second place which is not even

real it's just simply a possibility so

these are ways of dividing our attention

and in general the things that Amy Tan

did not like in her old style of

language usage was that her language

makes make made things more complicated

than they needed to be they also used

more time and space than necessary if

you take a meaning and instead of

expressing it in a short word you

express it in a longer word you're

you're using more space to express the

same amount and more space also takes

more time language exists exists in time

so when you're making longer words

you're using more time and becoming less

efficient you want to use less time and

less space to express your meaning

that's the more efficient and more

powerful way the wrong kind of language

she had been using Amy Tan she had been

using words that take away the sense of

action instead of using verbs she was

using nouns and so we don't have this

sense of motion of life and the some of

the language that she was using was hard

to picture we just have nothing to see

in our mind According to some of these

uses uses of language that she had

before she became

successful and she uh makes a point

which I agree with I want to reiterate

that the English that she had been

learning as a 15-year-old student the

English for the ESS at test and the

college entrance exam and all that

that's not the English of everyday

communication not the English that she

uses with her mom not the English that

normal people use to communicate with

each other just remember on the uh

college entrance exam or this SAT test

there's a lot of math on there too math

problems right that's not the math that

you use in everyday life it's the same

thing with English there's English for

the test that's not the English for

everyday life so let's just not get

confused when we're in everyday life

let's use Simple language that everyone

can understand instead of trying to

confuse people and use more time and

space to say the same meaning we'll just

try to focus on getting some good ideas

and saying them clearly so everyone can

understand

now this week we also talked about Sir

Isaac Newton and the very famous book

that he published in

1687 one of the most influential books

in The History of Science called

mathematical principles of natural

philosophy and in it he uh endorses the

idea of induction or inductive reasoning

and you remember what that is is

beginning from specific observations in

the material world

and then using the power that human

Minds have is generalizing trying to

find a pattern or a rule and

generalizing some kind of main idea or a

rule a law um or a a basic thought a

main idea uh by the process of inductive

reasoning or induction right so for

example back in 1687 when Sir Isaac

Newton was publishing Maybe maybe a

scientist discovered that when you raise

the temperature of ice to 0° then it

melts and also a scientist in China

discovered when you raise the

temperature of ice to 0 degrees it melts

and likewise in Germany someone

discovered the same thing then if we

take these three pieces of data by the

process of inductive reasoning we can

reach the conclusion that ice melts at

zero Sir Isaac Newton said this is the

way that scientists should proceed and

uh decide on what is true they'll take

this process as a determiner of the

truth and that made a big contribution

to helping Europe go forward get out of

the Dark Ages and get into the

enlightenment in which there was rapid

industrial and scientific progress after

that um in our case we're not uh like

scientists measuring temperature or

weight or distance but we are looking at

pieces of the material world again in

our case we're looking at Words which

someone else put onto a page or into

digital form which we can then

experience from the physical world the

same way so these words these quotations

that we find are

also moments of experience of the

physical world but they're just

expressed through words rather than

numbers and measurements right and we do

the same process when we're writing an

essay use inductive reasoning to reach

some kind of conclusion right and then

the conclusion will be our claim and

these quotations that we found through

research are our supports for our claim

and in Aristotle's terms of rhetoric

logos ethos and pathos this process is

logos it's just common sense reasoning

or

logic now also when we were talking

about this kind of process we saw a very

common kind of bad process that happens

a lot in the liberal art side of the

University not in the Sciences side

scientists are very clear that what

we're seeing in this picture is a bad

research method but people in The

English Department and a lot of the

liberal arts side of the University do

this all time they'll do their research

and find seven quotations for example

and then they just say well I don't like

that one it doesn't agree with me okay I

like these two I don't like those two I

like these two well I'll use four and

then three of them I'm just going to

ignore them I won't pay attention to

them that is terrible science we

shouldn't do that but people do it all

the time when we're writing essays this

is called cherry picking and and we

don't want to do it the best way to

write the essay would be to use all

seven of these pieces of research

instead of just

four now we also discussed this week how

to incorporate AI into our research and

the best places to do that are at the

very beginning and the very end you just

have your traditional process that

you've always done by doing some

research on the internet using a a

search engine in like Google or BYO or

something now when we're using AI we

insert that as the first step before

going to the internet sear search engine

and AI will give us directions or

suggestions on what we should be

searching for and AI can help us become

more scientific because we will not do

that process that we just talked about

the cherry picking and choosing four out

of seven things and AI helps us to avoid

doing that because in the old way before

AI uh somebody they want to write an

essay they'll just say well I want to

write an essay that says guns are bad

and then they start researching and if

they find stuff that says guns are bad

then they keep it if they find stuff

that says guns are good then they don't

pay any attention to it and that's the

wrong way of cherry-picking that we

don't want to do now with AI we can say

to the AI I'm writing a college essay on

the topic of guns can you please give me

the most common topics on both sides of

the question of guns and then AI will

tell us all of the reasons on both sides

of the issue of guns and we'll know

we'll understand our own point of view

better but we'll also know all of the

points of view on the opposing side of

the argument and that will make it

stronger because maybe we naturally know

the reasons why we believe something but

we don't naturally know the reasons why

other people totally disagree with

us AI can also be used at the end of

this writing process after you have done

your research and organized the research

into parts of the essay and then written

the essay once the essay is done you can

upload that into something like chat GPT

and ask it for suggestions or ask it

where your argument is

weak AI is good for those one-step kind

of questions that would take a lot more

time if you tried to answer them on the

internet using something like Google for

example what was the reaction to Swift's

amatus proposal when it was published if

you ask this question to chat GPT it'll

give you an answer in 30 seconds if you

try to answer this question using

internet searches and Google it can

easily take you an hour or more to

figure this out so we want to turn to AI

like chat GPT with this kind of question

or what are some some examples of pathos

or inductive reasoning cherry picking

Etc chat GPT is great for this or can

Amy Tan speak Chinese it'll tell us in

15 seconds it would take a lot longer if

we're trying to find this out by doing

Google searches and what do Plato's

allegory of the Cav mean these kinds of

questions are suitable for AI and AI can

give us a big advantage in in this kind

of

case so we don't want to over rely on AI

because in your mind are thought

structures made of language and you can

improve them this is my imagination of

how our thoughts are something like this

you can improve your own thought

structures through the process of

research and writing and what happens is

you have some stuff in your mind maybe

they're words or not but when you write

you need to put these things into the

material world you make them into words

that other people are able to read

because they go into the physical world

and this process of you taking what's

floating around in your mind and putting

it into material form that other people

can experience in the physical world

actually helps you to develop these

connections like we're seeing in the

picture here and you can develop your

mind so this is a way that you can make

your own thinking evolve is by doing

research and writing out your thoughts

and if you avoid doing this by relying

on AI too much you miss this opportunity

of developing your thoughts be Beyond

where they are right

now so that's what we talked about in in

this past week of videos uh next week is

going to bring it all to a conclusion

until that time take care everybody