Weeding the personal collection

One of my first nationally published professional articles celebrated the benefits of weeding books. Published in School Library Journal in 1990, "Weeding the Neglected Collection" tells the story of why and how I reduced a small high school print collection from 13,500 to 7,000 volumes - and the effort’s benefits. All in a rather amusing style, if I do say so myself.

If weeding is good for public and public school collections, is it not also good for home collections? But I find selecting books for discard from the bookshelves in my own living room, home office, and bedroom to be even more challenging. These are my books after all.

And my books are not just stories or information. They are touchstones of memory as well. That old travel guide from the 90s is not just about Paris, but about my son’s and my visit to the Louvre. The books of quotations and advice like The Peter Principle remind me of lessons that I learned while beginning to manage others in my role as technology coordinator. That old novel still conjures up the joy of the protagonist’s wins and the sadness of their losses. The picture book is an autographed copy, acquired after having a beer at a library conference with the author themselves.

Perhaps the most difficult books I got rid of were those in which some of my own writing appeared. I wrote many chapters or introductions for books over the years such as Ethics in School Librarianship: A Reader edited by Carol Simpson. While I long ago tossed the boxes and boxes of magazines and journals in which my regular columns and articles appeared, I kept these books, despite not having opened them for a couple decades. Their presence, I suppose, symbolized the same thing as the small plaques from professional associations adorning my home office - that I was once a contributing member in the field of education. 

For those of us who love books, getting rid of the physical object feels immoral. Happily my old children’s books and novels and travel books were graciously accepted by the public library to be sold at book sales they hold to raise funds. But the public library made it clear they did NOT want textbooks or books in poor physical condition. My quick research showed conflicting advice on whether to recycle (glue in bindings of books is not good) or simply add old books to the landfill. (Magazines went into recycling; books to the landfill.) Tossing books in the garbage bin hurts.

If such agony is involved, why weed personal collections at all then? I do it for the sake of my kids who will one day have to deal with my physical junk as my siblings and I are dealing with my mother's junk after having downsized to a senior living apartment. My children and grandchildren have too busy and interesting lives to spend time reading decades old professional writings outside their fields anyway. And overstuffed bookshelves have never been my thing. 

Now on to thinning out my DVDs and CDs!

Tough puzzle or puzzled brain?

 

In retirement one does not have any particularly serious problems to which to apply one’s intellect. So those of us who still like to test our cognitive abilities turn to puzzles and games.

I faithfully enjoy solving the Jumble each morning. I’ve taken to completing the Connections puzzle of the NYTimes. And my friend Heidi and I like to challenge each other with Isaac Asimov’s Super Quiz.

Some days the puzzles are simple to solve. Other days, insolvable. 

Usually, I easily unscramble the four words and answer to the Jumble in just a minute or two. Ah, a good day ahead, I rationalize. Other days, there are words or clues that simply defy a solution. And when I find the answer in the next day’s newspaper, I wonder why I didn’t immediately “get it.” My overall solution rate is about 95%.

NYTimes Connections is a simple game of dividing 14 words into four related categories. The creators make it more challenging by including a few words that could be put in multiple categories, so some deduction is needed. At other times, the relationship among the words is less than obvious. (From this morning, what do these words have in common - cars, swimmers, trees, and elephants? Some require a bit of factual knowledge such as familiarity with the names of sports teams. My solution rate is about 50% with a rate of 10% for perfect scores.

With Isaac, everything depends on the subject of the quiz. Literature I rock; Canadian provinces I suck. I’d guess my overall solution rate is about 75%. 

What I often wonder if it is the difficulty of the puzzle itself - or the condition of my brain that leads to success or failure on each puzzle. I am at the age where I monitor my cognitive abilities, looking for small slips. Should I miss a simple jumbled word or not see an obvious relationship among words or fail to remember the occupation of a classic book’s main character, should I just pack it up and find a memory care unit before I hurt myself or others?

I will have to say that I sometimes overcome my decline through cleverness. For example, on a recent trip on which I drove senior residents to grocery stores in a 12 passenger van, I locked the keys in the vehicle. Duh. My own car only requires a fob that just stays in my pocket - no messing with keys. Luckily, the van has a wheelchair lift accessed through doors that swing apart. Those doors were not locked and I was able to get this old body up and over the folded lift and into the van. No calling the office or AAA. Whew. I didn’t even hurt myself squeezing through the narrow opening between the folded lift and the ceiling of the van. 

Perhaps dumb luck may delay senility as well.

Has AI already taken over?

It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest “is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.” Ted Kaczynski (1995) quoted in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil https://a.co/0bpkNFO

Are we humans the frog in the pot of water slowly being heated until we don’t realize we are boiling? Have we, as the Unabomber suggests in the quote above, turning our decision-making over to technology, and thus turning the control over lives to chips and software? Is it dependence, not force, that will give machines the upper hand in the human/technology relationship?

In some respects, I have personally turned decision-making over to my AI overlords:

1. I let GoogleMaps tell me where to go.
2. I let Amazon choose the products that I wish to purchase.
3. I let social media, to a large degree, determine what news I read. 

I get some pushback from some of my older clients for whom I drive when I use the online map that shows up on my car’s dashboard screen rather than taking their suggestions on how to get to the doctor appointment or hair salon. I explain to them that while GoogleMaps may not always recommend the shortest route, it will always choose the fastest route, knowing traffic jams, road construction, etc. I usually compromise by using the navigation system to get to the appointment and using my rider for recommendations on how to get back home.

As I read the news of politics and street violence and warfare and climate change, I wonder if AI making choices for the human race might be the more (ironically) humane thing to do. Sure seems like we people are messing things up.

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Given all the discussion about AI lately with ChatGPT available to the masses, I thought re-reading a little Ray Kurzweil might be enlightening. I’ve been a fan of his since the mid-1990s. (Yes, I read his work on stone tables in cuneiform.) Alternately too damn thick and technical and light and quite readable, Kurzweil does a better job of suggesting possibilities than predicting the future. (His 1999 predictions about 2019 are pretty off-base - no mention of the impact of social media.) But read him anyway.