This is a nicely phrased reminder...

 

Another thought on prompting Claude to tell me how to prompt Claude

I wrote a post last month about prompting Claude for sources on a topic, getting fabricated sources, asking Claude why it fabricated sources, and then asking it for a better prompt that would get me unfabricated sources. My question to my loyal reader(s) was, Should I believe the reasons Claude gave me for why it fabricated sources, and should I trust its "improved" prompt? (Well, an easy way to test the latter question would be to try it out, but for some reason I haven't done that yet!)

My loyal reader who shares the excellent name of Jonathan said "no" to both of those questions, and this post on the Anthropic website (they're the makers of Claude, in case you don't know) seems to agree with him (h/t Leon Furze). If I understand this article correctly, whether or not Claude's explanation for why it fabricates is plausible (I probably shouldn't even call it an explanation, at least not in the traditional sense of the word), and whether or not the AI-generated prompt is useful (I suppose I should test it sometime), there's no intentionality behind the texts generated. That is, Claude isn't actually "trying" to give me a good prompt that will result in better sources, even if it in effect does. And if Claude gives an accurate representation of its "thought" process, it's an accidental result of whatever predictions it makes about what pieces of text would go together to generate something related to the words in the prompt. 

Hmmm...

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Christopher Joby, Christian Mission in Seventeenth-Century Taiwan: A Reception History of Texts, Beliefs, and Practices, Brill, 2025.

This attractively bound (but super-expensive!) book made its way to me from Lahore, and unwrapping it from its tight multilayered plastic covering reminded me of when Kasper Gutman was tearing the layers of newspaper off the Maltese Falcon. 

Fortunately, I can confidently declare that it's not a fake, and I'm looking forward to reading it. The Dutch encounter with Taiwan is particularly interesting to me for its rhetorical dimensions, and Joby's book appears to address at least one side of it by discussing what rhetorical techniques Dutch and Spanish missionaries used to persuade (or coerce?) the Indigenous Austronesians in seventeenth-century Taiwan to adopt (or was it adapt?) Christianity.

But first I need to get back to work...

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

I'm trying to get some books with my professional development money before the fiscal year is over. No big trips abroad to give presentations, as I had last year. So the first bunch of books came this evening.

James Lin, In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan, University of California Press, 2025. 

I mentioned this book in a post earlier today about his book talk. The book looks great--it even has some illustrations in color! I don't usually see that in academic paperbacks.

Shelley Rigger, The Tiger Leading the Dragon: How Taiwan Propelled China's Economic Rise, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. 

I mentioned this book in a post from last Saturday when I was reminiscing about some changes I saw in Taiwan during my years there. It'll be nice to get into it and have some scholarly discussions to help deepen my own scattered observations. 

Clarissa Wei, with Ivy Chen, Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation, Simon Element, 2023. 

I haven't mentioned this book before, but I have been wanting to buy it for awhile. I am thinking about offering a short-term course at some point that would involve Taiwanese cuisine, and I might pair some of this book with the article I discussed a while back about cooking shows in Taiwan through the years. (And who knows? If I get up the nerve, we might even try some of these recipes!)

More books to come...

James Lin book talk, In the Global Vanguard

James Lin's new book, In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan, is available now for purchase and for free download. I'll be getting my copy later today (I hope!). Meanwhile, here's Prof. Lin talking about his book.

He gives a few insights into his research process and challenges, as well. My favorite part is where he describes why he became a historian (at 53:50). 

Some memories about Taiwan before I forget them

I've got tons of things that I should be doing right now (as usual), but on the way home from shopping, I caught some of this interview with NPR China correspondent John Ruwitch in which he reflected on his experiences in China since 1992, when he first visited Kunming (this is around 10:29 in the interview). That was about the time I started living in Taiwan, so I started thinking about what I might say about my own memories of those days. I'm at a point in life where I'm constantly worrying about forgetting things, so perhaps I should write down a few impressions before they're washed away.

Ruwitch was talking about the economic growth in China between the first time he was there and 2001, when he returned to report from there, so I'll mention a few impressions about what I saw (or what I think I saw) in Taiwan. (I realize that other people might have seen different things or disagree with me about what I saw, etc., etc. Feel free to add comments to this post or write about your memories on your own blog and send me a link.)

One thing that I often think of and mention about economic change in Taiwan was how it was reflected in the students I was teaching at different times. I remember that when I surveyed night school students in my class in the Foreign Languages & Literature Department in 1993, quite a few of them wrote that their parents were farmers or factory workers. 

Skip ahead to when I was teaching in the 2000s, and I recall more students whose parents were college-educated and/or were in more white-collar jobs. Some of their parents even owned factories, particularly in China. One student told us that her father had retired at the age of 44 after running a business in China. He was one of the 台商 (Taishang, or Taiwanese people running businesses in China). According to the Chinese-language Wikipedia article on Taishang, this was during the third investment peak of Taishang in China. 

One of the social phenomena regarding Taishang was how it complicated marriages. You'd sometimes hear about relatives or relatives' relatives or friends' friends who had gone to China to invest in a business and were living there for years. Somehow, the husbands who went, usually by themselves, would get involved with a local Chinese woman. Sometimes they would even get married. So there they'd have a wife, and in Taiwan, they'd still have a wife (and usually a family). These kinds of situations would also become material for the media to talk about, on the news, talk shows, and TV dramas. Some students in my Freshman English for Non-Majors (FENM) course even used it as material for an English-language play they wrote and performed. When one of the actors said to another, "He has a woman outside" (a direct translation of "他在外面有個女人"), I couldn't resist looking out the window, which got everyone laughing, including the actors. (I guess I had a bit of a mean streak.)

I don't know what has happened recently with the Taishang phenomenon; I've heard that a lot of them have moved to other countries in southeast Asia due to the political issues between China and Taiwan, and also due to the fact that salaries have gone up for Chinese factory workers, I believe. Maybe I should read this book by Shelley Rigger (reviewed in the Taipei Times). 

Anyway, I wanted to write down something of what I remembered from my days in Taiwan. Maybe I'll write a few more of these if I get the urge.