In the era of big data, we’re obsessed with statistical distributions. When we think of what people think or what they want, we try to predict it by correlating it with various dimensions of their identity.
This has proven to be a winning strategy for extracting attention, but it’s a horrible plan of action for building relationships. This week I want to share a different way to think about the people around us.
Don’t settle for the simulated relationship of personalization. Be a dreamweaver.
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Personalization is a mirage
You’ve probably heard the phrase “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Ever since we monetized attention to power the web, the thirst for information about us has grown unabated. Consider the Internet services you use every day: Google search and Gmail, and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. These companies collect as much information about you as possible to personalize your experience and sell you targeted ads.
The difference between personal and personalized is significant. Given the personalization of everything around us, it’s easy for us to fall into this trap as well if we’re not careful. The danger begins when we start to see the world through the lens of statistical distributions. Whether we realize it or not, when we do this, the people around us become, to us, a shadow of their true selves.
Generative AI is the latest tool offering us the ability to personalize everything. LLMs and other generative AI tools make personalization trivial. Just type a short prompt and get back tailored text, images, or even videos. Forget about emails with personalized greetings, we’re entering a world of personalized audio and video, faked to a level of simulated reality that will fool most of us. Hyperrealistic personalization will demolish the heuristics we rely on as markers of personal relationships.
In the face of this grim, nearly-present reality we desperately need to resist this push toward hyper-personalization. Every human possesses unique beauty and singular worth. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we recognize this as part of the imago Dei, the image of God. The problems begin when we start to see personhood as something to be measured and manipulated. While the fine details of personhood might not be relevant for effectively selling products, these facets are critical components of our worth and flourishing.
Unfortunately, we all too often aren’t paying attention to these intricate details in our own lives and the lives of those around us. Distraction is eating us alive.
As we enter this brave new world of generative AI-powered personalization, what would it look like for us to not only pay more attention to these unique details in each other but intentionally work to draw them out and highlight them?
One way to fight back is with unreasonable hospitality.
This idea has been on my mind lately because I just recently finished Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality last week. Y’all, it’s so good. My biggest takeaway was realizing in a new way the joy of going over the top to recognize and celebrate the little things about the people around us.
These unique aspects are so often lost in our modern technological age. It was Andy Crouch in his book The Life We’re Looking For who first brought to my attention the false equivalence between personal and personalized. It’s the difference between the email from my friend that opens with “Hey Josh" versus the opening “Hello Josh” of every email that Amazon sends me. Similar words with totally different meanings behind them.
Unreasonable Hospitality provides a lens for radically rethinking our work to be deeply personal, not personalized. Personalization is mechanical—it’s programmed customization. Personal connection, on the other hand, is built on relationship.
It’s about how you make them feel
In the book, Will tells the story of his journey as a restaurateur building the acclaimed restaurant Eleven Madison Park in New York City. If you want a quick overview of the main ideas from the book, I highly recommend giving his TED talk a watch.
Will possesses the type of drive and passion that is characteristic of many entrepreneurs, but his superpower is recognizing that the pursuit of excellence is not about what’s out there but what’s in here. It’s not about the product itself, but about how it makes us feel. If there’s one line that defines Will’s journey, it’s this quote often attributed to Maya Angelou. Although it’s origin is debated, the wisdom in the statement is undeniable.
People will forget what you do; they’ll forget what you said. But they’ll never forget how you made them feel.
What I took away from Will’s story is that when it comes to the things that matter most, we should be unreasonable. This will require being ruthlessly reasonable on the 95%, unlocking the ability to be unimaginably unreasonable on the remaining 5%. If we’re not treating other people with the level of attention that most people around us think we’re crazy, then there’s more that we can do.
Paying attention to the details of the people around us is the key to cultivating influence and shaping their lives. If you want to make a difference, be unreasonably hospitable.
Personal, not personalized
The importance of how an experience makes us feel is deeply human. It’s a big part of whether something leaves a mark on us or not. It’s going to become even more valuable in the age of machines.
I am who I am today because of the people who have had a personal influence on me. My grandfather taught me the value of hard work as he built his own business from the ground and created a foundation of financial provision that is continuing to ripple down through my generation to my kids. My parents provided the opportunities and resources for me to flourish, from all the years that my mom homeschooled my siblings and me to the thoughtful encouragement of our unique giftings as we matured to adulthood. My professors in undergrad at LeTourneau took the time not only to know me as a person in class but to invite me into their homes and lives.
As we increasingly think about integrating technology into our worlds, we’re losing track of the distinction between personal and personalized. Personalization gives the appearance of a relationship without any of its substance. It says that we are fundamentally defined by the way that we fit into certain predetermined categories, rather than by our relationships.
Be a Dreamweaver
Will and his staff at Eleven Madison Park were obsessed with curating all the little details of a guest’s experience. They looked for every opportunity to make the experience one-of-a-kind, from ensuring that the person who welcomed them to the restaurant was the same person who took the call for their reservation to playing Sherlock to learn whether their guest was celebrating a special occasion and using that information to tailor their experience.
Eventually, they got so over the top that they created a full-time role to manage the details: the dreamweaver. The job of the dreamweaver is to curate and execute these story-of-a-lifetime experiences for guests. While the experiences are certainly over the top—some highlights include creating a fake beach experience for guests who had their trip to the oceanside scuttled and buying sleds for a family from Spain experiencing their first snow—the point is not the experience itself, but the impression that it leaves on the guest.
The dreamweaver is a model for leveraging technology to create personal, rather than personalized experiences. The distinction is subtle but critically important.
The mission of the dreamweaver is not to create a personalized experience. The goal of dreamweaver is to support personal connection—between the guests and the other members of their party, between the guest and the restaurant staff, and between the guest and the experience of fine dining.
Personalization is arriving to find a tablet with your name on it directing you to your table. A personal connection is about using that same information to foster relationships between humans.
Teaching as dreamweavers
There are a lot of people working right now to replace human teachers with personalized chatbots. I’m going in the other direction. I want to be a dreamweaver. The future of meaningful work in our technology-saturated world is about curating real lasting influence through personal relationships. This doesn’t mean that we reject wholesale the tools used for personalization. But it does mean that we use them in a drastically different way. The goal is not automation but augmentation.
As an educator, I embrace technology, but only insomuch as it supports relationships. Digital technologies offer me helpful ways to connect with students. They provide me with tools to support student work and address questions conveniently and asynchronously. They allow me to more efficiently prepare and disseminate content to support the learning in my classes. But these tools must be conduits for deeper personal relationships with my students, not substitutes for them.
The temptation of generative AI and whatever comes after it is automation. It’s for teachers to outsource the work of teaching and for students to outsource the work of learning. Succumbing to this temptation will leave us wishing we hadn’t. Instead of using generative AI to create lesson plans or grade assignments, let’s use it to extend and expand our creativity and help us challenge our thinking. Let’s embrace it as a mechanical sparring partner, recognizing its flaws and inability to reason as human intelligence can while recognizing that even a broken mirror can help us see things in a new light.
Becoming a dreamweaver is hard work. It requires close attention and consistent effort. It requires a focus on process and the realization that the human endeavor of education is hard work for both teachers and students. It requires us to stretch ourselves in healthy ways. But the struggle is worthwhile.
Every human being is unique. No matter how similar we may be to the people around us, we are intricate and one-of-a-kind. The technological impulse is to blur and remove these distinctions. To represent people by reducing them. In the process, the details of their personhood are lost.
But this is not the only way. We have an opportunity to use technology to support human flourishing, highlighting rather than downplaying the elements that make us unique. The dreamweaver provides a template for using the tools at our disposal to cultivate deeper human relationships and augment rather than automate our relational work.
Don’t settle for the simulated connection of personalization. Be a dreamweaver.
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Links
Here are a few things I came across this week that are worth exploring further:
- in his Substack recently posted his 2024 State of the Culture. It’s a must-read. In it, he explains why TikTok is the equivalent of digital fentanyl and argues that we need to take our dopamine addictions seriously.
The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence by
.When Your Technical Skills Are Eclipsed, Your Humanity Will Matter More Than Ever from Aneesh Raman and Maria Flynn. The money line: “Today the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy, in which people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before.”
This article, AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class, from MIT economist David Autor in Noema Magazine is a fantastic read. In it, he explains in detail how AI can help us to become dreamweavers. (h/t to
for putting me on to this one!)You should all go read Will’s book, but if you’re looking for the 15-minute summary, I would highly recommend watching his TED talk where he covers many of the main lessons from the book.
The Book Nook
Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara was one of the best books I’ve read in recent months. Here are a few lessons I took away in addition to those I shared in the main essay above.
Being Present — stop caring about all the other things you need to do. Things they’re saying and the things they’re not saying.
Taking what you do seriously without taking yourself seriously
What you’re trying to do is give people a sense of belonging. One size fits one.
This is not rocket science. All it means is caring a little bit more and trying a little bit harder.
The Professor Is In
This semester, one of my big goals in E80 has been to revise the way we teach technical writing. In past years, we’ve had students write a full lab report each week with a specific focus on a particular section (e.g., introduction, methods, results) and graded it traditionally on a 0-100 scale with a rubric. We have a required 2-hour writing session set aside every Friday where students come to polish their work and get feedback from a peer, but this wasn’t working super well.
Inspired by my experiment with specifications grading last semester, we’ve been trying it differently this year. Each week, students get a writing assignment focused only on one specific element of a lab report instead of writing the whole thing. This format allows them to focus on a particular skill to practice, similar to isolating a particular muscle in the gym
Each assignment is assessed as one of three levels, not yet, effort, or completion, each accompanied by a checklist of specifications that the writing sample must meet. Students come into the writing section each week with raw data and relevant source code files from lab that week and then work to revise those and add the supporting to meet the specifications of the writing assignment.
The motivation for this approach is threefold:
To teach good taste in technical writing. When you’re learning something new, you don’t know good work from bad. The specs help to make this clear.
To provide opportunities for real-time oral feedback from instructors. Having an instructor there to answer your question directly instead of needing to wait to submit and then read and interpret feedback later is a big advantage.
To focus on one thing at a time. This is the same reason why learning to ride a bike via a scoot bike is much better than using training wheels. The scoot bike allows you to focus on the most important element of riding a bike: balance. In comparison, the training wheels shift the learner’s focus to pedaling along with balancing which is ultimately less efficient.
I’ll probably write something more detailed up about this experiment once the semester is over, but so far I’ve been pleased with how it has been going. If you’re interested in seeing some of the writing assignments, you can find them on the course website attached to each lab’s page. Here’s the link to Lab 1. The writing assignment is linked near the top of the page.
Leisure Line
A few results from the latest batch of pies.
Also, for those of you who didn’t know, I have another Substack where I write about my pizza adventures. Been a bit sporadic there, but my goal is to post something about once a month. Here’s the latest post.
Still Life
Had some family in town this last week and we took a trip up to Griffith Observatory. Beautiful day and everything is so green with all the rain we’ve been getting recently!
Great post as always. Just a quick note from my English professor self: check that Maya Angelou quote. It is usually attributed to her, and she might have expressed that sentiment, but there is no specific source for it linked to her writing.
I like the dreamweavers connections you make here. We need more of this kind of grounded, yet optimistic model for working with AI. And reverse h/t (is that a thing?) to you for pointing me to the Noēma article. I had only seen Autor's NBER working paper and missed the more accessible essay. Thanks!