Agalia Tan

Absorb or create a critical vocabulary

If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions, it’s hard to draw lines and isolate the particular areas and causes of enjoyment. So, having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolutio... See more

Don’t Leave the Silly Out of the Serious, or the Serious out of the Silly

Everything done at an agency has several audiences. Bad work happens when you pick the wrong one, and unfortunately, you will be constantly encouraged to pick the wrong one.

How can we reclaim data as a tool for clarity instead of submitting to its chaos?

Just because we can measure everything doesn't mean we should. Digital media gave way to instant metrics which led to instant expectations on results but a CTR, a bounce rate, or even a conversion doesn’t always tell the whole story. The obsession with short-term, ea

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For an idea to resonate, it needs to do the following:

Something in my subjective experience or previous insight connects to the idea in front of me and gives it potency. The connection between two ideas always carries the possibility of a third, new idea.

It moves me through language. I might find the phrasing particularly harmonious, the choice of ... See more

. “If that was the only way that I was able to be allowed to make films, then I’d have to stop. Because the results weren’t satisfying. It was at times extremely difficult, and I wouldn’t survive it. I’d be dead. And so I decided it was over, really.”

The main point of concern here is not that an LLM such as GPT-4 is reductionist in its representation of reality per se; it is that various AI models, each reductionist in their own way, are converging. An echo chamber of echo chambers of echo chambers.