principles – Treehouse Writers

The other day on social media, I saw an article in SF Gate about a San Francisco bookstore that decided it would no longer sell Harry Potter books. The store, Booksmith, told the reporter they didn’t want to contribute in any way to J.K. Rowling’s new foundation that provides funding for those fighting inclusion of trans people in single sex spaces.

Since I saw the story first on on social media, there were, of course, comments, one of which said it was “sad” that bookstores were “banning” books.

That’s ridiculous, of course. A bookstore is not obligated to stock any book it doesn’t want to, particularly since no bookstore – except maybe Amazon – can stock everything. All booksellers curate what they sell. That’s not banning.

Now generally most bookstores try to stock books that they think will sell well that are in keeping with the kind of store they want to be. A science fiction bookstore won’t bother with nonfiction bestsellers, but might well offer obscure editions by a revered author.

And many indie bookstores won’t sell small press books because the publishers can’t offer the return deals that big publishers give them. Both indie bookstores and small presses have tight budgets.

But bookstores, perhaps more than most businesses, reflect the taste of the people who own and run them, so it’s no surprise to me that a given store might decide not to stock books by an author they despise.

What makes it a story is that they said exactly why they’re doing it, instead of just not having the books in stock.

This reminded me of an old friend of mine, known all over the state of Texas as Tiger, though his given name was David, who for a couple of years in the late 1960s owned and ran a record store in College Station, Texas. Continue reading “Principles and Retail”…

Tools can be useful,
but don’t count on them to think.
Use them mindfully.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the discussion of guns for self defense all seem to start — and end — with the purchase of said gun. Perhaps a few of those who hold the view that “an armed society is a polite society” (to quote Robert Heinlein) also advocate serious training, but it’s easy to get the impression that too many people think owning the gun is all you need to protect yourself.

I wrote a story about this called “Survival Skills.” In it an Aikido sensei told the protagonist that no tool is ever ultimately the answer. The protagonist had to learn the core truth of that the hard way, though.

I bring this up because all the furor about the AI chat bots has skipped over analyzing them as a tool that has both benefits and flaws. Some people are already using them to replace humans, without paying any attention to some of their significant flaws. (A writing program that makes up facts and cites non-existent articles is not a tool to rely on.)

And the scammers are already out in full force: people are submitting chatbot written stories to magazines. The biggest problem from the magazine POV is not separating them out from real stories — that’s pretty easy — but the fact they flood the inbox, exhausting the editor who has to deal with them.

Nobody’s going to make any money sending chatbot stories to magazines, but someone’s probably making money teaching people how to do that.

My Aikido teacher used to occasionally say, “I teach philosophy,” meaning that Aikido is so much more than a physical practice. I try to apply the principles of Aikido to other aspects of life.

I just applied two Aikido principles to the discussion of chatbots: relying on a tool when you don’t understand what you’re doing with it and acting without integrity. Aikido teaches you to avoid both of those things. Continue reading “An Aikido Approach to Chatbots”…