I was curious how well it would work, so here's the summarize result from Kagi:
Philip K. Dick explores questions about what is real and how reality can be manipulated through advanced technology and propaganda. He is fascinated by these topics and writes fiction exploring them.
Dick believes that bombardment by fake realities can turn people into "spurious humans" who no longer know what is real. Fake realities breed fake humans.
Scenes and elements from Dick's novels sometimes mirrored or predicted real events, even though he did not intend them to. This included mirroring biblical stories which he was unfamiliar with.
Dick had vivid experiences where he seemed to relive or foresee scenes from his own novels, like a man hiding behind a tree outside his home.
He wonders if our universe started as an illusion but God is slowly making it real through love and wisdom.
Manipulating words is a powerful tool for manipulating reality, as George Orwell showed in 1984.
Reality and fiction blur together, with fiction mimicking truth and truth mimicking fiction.
Ancient philosophers like Heraclitus, Xenophanes and others had insightful views on reality and God's role that modern people simplify.
Ordinary people say no to tyrants through small acts of resistance like Dick mailing a fortune cookie slip to the White House.
A metal lantern Dick was given echoed the shape of a fish, reminding him of biblical stories in strange ways.
Fascinating! Kagi managed to automatically omit and abstract away all the Christian-specific perspective leaving us with something purely deist in its presentation.
I wonder if that’s a coincidence, or something inherent in the way LLM synthesizes word frequencies from the trainer’s chosen corpus that leads to that tendency/outcome.
Did you read the article? It's still Philip K. Dick. It's absolutely bonkers. It starts normal, story about a dog biting the garbage man from PoV of the dog, story about surgeons discovering reality altering tape in a man, the question of what is reality, then descends into PKDs ramblings about being stuck in Satan's Tesseract Labyrinth, that it's actually AD 50 and people wearing pisces are real Jesus' followers, that his son is reincarnation of a prophet, and so on.
Here are these gems:
The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real (snip) it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.
“I am a fisherman. I fish for fish.” Christopher, at four, had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.
In all fairness, it is a long article. Articles submitted to HN should ideally not be much longer than the title, because people don't have time nowadays - time has somehow shrunk to the point of near disappearance. It's not an accusation, it's just an observation, a fact of life. But once in a while a wormhole to another existence opens where there is still time to read a whole story, not sure how but some people seem to be able to. Alien tech?
> time has somehow shrunk to the point of near disappearance
"The Magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In those days, the only public conveyance was the street car. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt and wait as she shut the window, went downstairs, put on her hat, found an umbrella and told the girl what to have for dinner. Too slow for us nowadays, for the faster we are carried, the less time we have to spare."
I was about to agree with you and lay on them too, then I asked myself why I alt-tabbed to read HN comments midway through.
If that was printed or I was reading it on my e-reader, I'd probably enjoy it just like I did enjoy reading some of his novels, but as of now I'm not lounging on a couch with a cup of tea and some cookies. Reading on a screen is way less comfortable and many of us will be reading HN stories as a momentary distraction as work - attention spans not primed for this sort of long-form writing.
Hope that answers your question as to why someone would not read it right now. Since we're human it is no surprise one would be curious as to what it is about anyways - and request a summary.
Time investment? There is also no context? Fiction, nonfiction? As a reader how would I know what I am getting myself into? and how would I know on first click this a talented artist.
> Popular films based on his works include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), Screamers (1995), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010).
If you’ve not heard of P.K. Dick before it’s kind of weird to be worried about “is this a talented artist”… you really need to push your boundaries in any way possible.
If you are a Sci-Fi fan, then you should now already or learn now, that Philip K. Dick is "a talented artist" in the American canon. Or you could ask Wikipedia who he was. Or chatGPT if you don't mind fake knowledge.
That is what makes the essay interesting, not the mildly paranoid musings about synchronicity, fakes, human kindness and drug dealing.
If you're not a Philip K. Dick fan or a Sci-Fi fan, walk on.
Artists aren't infallible; their intentions don't have to be held sacred. There is nothing wrong with someone not caring for a particular piece of PKD's writing or any of it for that matter.
I would argue that this text is very hard to compress as it is already a compressed version of PKD's thoughts on reality, religion, perception, philosophy, and more.
I thought about why I'd want an AI summary or even a human-made summary of a long text and realized there's a deep wrongness this need stems from..
I like a summary so I can know if I like the article and agree with it. If I would like and agree with the summary (thus reinforcing my worldview) I'll most likely read the whole article. If the summary is uninteresting or does not support my worldview, I'm more likely to skip the article.
And this is the grave problem of the matter. I'm selecting things to read and learn about that I am already familiar with and agree to. That's no way to learn new things and new perspectives. This action repeated over many times over many days and years leads to a person who's very closed minded and starts to think of themselves as the main character of their reality. I'm noticing that in myself and it's really hard not to do.
I can add a use-case for that. I'm trying to read Joe Dispenza "Breaking a Habit of Being Yourself". The book starts with Joe Dispenza views on a quantum nature of our world, and I see that the author knows about quantum even less then me. Moreover he tries to make me to believe in something similar to Philip K. Dick, except everything unexplainable is explained not by references to Holy Spirit, but by slipping a word "quantum" somewhere in a sentence. He kinda believe in a magic world where you can change the world by thinking hard about the desired change, but instead of "magic" he says "quantum". Sometimes he uses word "quantum" twice in one sentence.
It was bad enough so I was fighting my desire to stop reading the book and to never try it again. I persisted because his bullshit was far outside of his supposed area of expertise and I thought he could become better when he gets to a point. But then Dispenza refers to a study showing that you can change past with a prayer: if you pray for a random sample of patients from a decade ago, then this random sample does better than a general population[1]. Then he refers to a study showing that people can unwound DNA by a force of mind[2]. Dispenza starts his book by asking a reader to keep an open mind, but there are limits of mind openness, and if you go beyond the limits then what is the point of having a mind? Am I ready to break a habit of being myself and start believing in bullshit?
After I'd found [1] and [2] with a search engine, I searched for Joe Dispenza. He is not a neuroscientist but a fraud[3]. I think I need to make my fraud detector more sensitive. But the point is: if I had an AI summary, I'd probably never wasted my time trying to read the book. Though I'd better get from an AI not a summary, but a chat, so I could ask questions about the book and get answers (was it a butler who did this? lol).
Btw, reading Philip K. Dick I noticed that I can read through such a concentrated bullshit without fighting an urge to stop wasting my time. I'm still thinking what is the key difference in my attitude to different authors. For now I think it is about my expectations: Philip K. Dick started with a question what is real, and so I'm happy to give him a license to talk some bullshit, while I expect from a scientist to have beliefs compatible with science.
