"I wonder whether we might profitably not get hold of somebody who reads foreign languages simply in order to tell us what to look for and what kind of things these people discuss in which chapters of their enormous works."
"There is a paper about this, An unrealised project? —Isaiah Berlin and the philosophy of history” by Renzhi Li, but I haven’t yet obtained a copy of it."
we get a LLM to do the first, and a LLM with privy corpus + RAG to realise the project.
There are all kinds of potential applications for these technologies that could greatly contribute to scholarship, but they won’t be free.
I’m listening to Seneca’s letters now, and he describes how some rich men would buy slaves to memorize Hesiod and Homer, and then the slaves would be always available to the master to supply him with a relevant quote. If you can buy another human brain, then you can have access to a lot more knowledge.
St. Thomas Aquinas is said to have dictated his works to four scribes. He would dictate to one, and while that scribe was writing down what he said, he would dictate to the second, and so on until he came back to the first, who by that time had finished writing what he had been dictated. And so, with medieval technology, it was possible to write the thousands of pages of Aquinas’ works. And this was done without slavery.
If I had the money to buy research assistants, I could make much more progress, but I must do everything myself, including tech support.
"I wonder whether we might profitably not get hold of somebody who reads foreign languages simply in order to tell us what to look for and what kind of things these people discuss in which chapters of their enormous works."
"There is a paper about this, An unrealised project? —Isaiah Berlin and the philosophy of history” by Renzhi Li, but I haven’t yet obtained a copy of it."
we get a LLM to do the first, and a LLM with privy corpus + RAG to realise the project.
There are all kinds of potential applications for these technologies that could greatly contribute to scholarship, but they won’t be free.
I’m listening to Seneca’s letters now, and he describes how some rich men would buy slaves to memorize Hesiod and Homer, and then the slaves would be always available to the master to supply him with a relevant quote. If you can buy another human brain, then you can have access to a lot more knowledge.
St. Thomas Aquinas is said to have dictated his works to four scribes. He would dictate to one, and while that scribe was writing down what he said, he would dictate to the second, and so on until he came back to the first, who by that time had finished writing what he had been dictated. And so, with medieval technology, it was possible to write the thousands of pages of Aquinas’ works. And this was done without slavery.
If I had the money to buy research assistants, I could make much more progress, but I must do everything myself, including tech support.
thank you for these examples! I'll be using them at work.