The Sea, the Sea

From the cafe at Inch beach, Co Kerry, one Sunday morning.

Quote of the Day

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no-one was listening, everything must be said again.”

• Andre Gide

(Useful quote for those of us who write for a living. Thanks to Andrew Curry for reminding me of it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Ecossaises in E-Flat Major, WoO 83

Link

Lovely, and hitherto unknown to me.

Long Read of the Day

What Elon Musk’s favorite game tells us about him

Terrific critique by Dave Karpf of Musk’s biographer.

This is how it begins…

Elon Musk really likes the game Polytopia. He has skipped birthday parties and international business meetings to play the game. He has effused that it is “the best game ever.” He has posited that it is more complicated than chess.

Walter Isaacson treats Polytopia as a window into Musk’s unique, brilliant mind. He devotes nearly as many pages to the game as he does to the Boring Company. (Which is, y’know, one of his actual companies. It has a multi-billion dollar valuation.) He even prints eight “life lessons” that Musk and his hangers-on think you can distill from the game.

It’s… a bit much.

I left Polytopia out of my original review of the book. It seemed like a bit of a strange personality tick. The parallel to SBF’s mobile gaming habit was a little interesting. But I had never heard of the game. I’d never played it. And I already had more than enough material to work with.

A few months later, while visiting some family on the west coast, I noticed my brother-in-law playing Polytopia on his phone. “Y’know, Elon Musk says that’s the greatest game of all time,” I said to him. My brother-in-law gave me a quizzical look. He’s a pretty well-adjusted fellow, neither addicted to Musk nor Polytopia. He just thought the game was reasonably fun.

So I tried it out…

Read on to find out what he concluded. (Spoiler alert: Isaacson doesn’t come out of it well.)

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy have an interesting new book out.

Here’s the blurb:

We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the raw material for predictions about everything from our purchasing power to our character. The Ordinal Society shows how these algorithmic predictions influence people’s life chances and generate new forms of capital and social expectation: nobody wants to ride with an unrated cab driver anymore or rent to a tenant without a risk score. As members of this society embrace ranking and measurement in their daily lives, new forms of social competition and moral judgment arise. Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality. While we obsess over order and difference—and the logic of ordinality digs deeper into our behaviors, bodies, and minds—what will hold us together? Fourcade and Healy warn that, even though algorithms and systems of rationalized calculation have inspired backlash, they are also appealing in ways that make them hard to relinquish.

Diane Coyle admired the book in her review. And Henry Farrell has a thoughtful essay about it. Which are two powerful arguments for buying and reading it.

My commonplace booklet

The Sam Altman Playbook

Gary Marcus’s insights into Sam “Babyface’ Altman’s modus operandi.

A sample:

Undergirding all is this often a sense that without AI, we are screwed. As Geoffrey Miller put it on X, “[Altman’s] implicit message is usually ‘We need AGI to solve aging & discover longevity treatments, so if you don’t support us, you’ll die.” Longevity is the carrot; death is the stick.

In order to make it all plausible, Sam uses a unique combination of charm, soft-spoken personal humility and absolute confidence in outlandish claims.

He seems like such a nice guy, yet he implies, unrealistically, that the solution to AGI is within his grasp; he presents no evidence that is so, and rarely considers the many critiques of current approaches that have been raised. (Better to pretend they don’t exist.) Because he seems so nice, pushback somehow seems like bad form.

Absurd, hubristic claims, often verging on the messianic, presented kindly, gently, and quietly — but never considered skeptically. That’s his M.O.

Good piece, worth reading. I’ve always been sceptical about Altman. A few months ago I wrote about his plan to raise $7 trillion to build AGI.

He is deeply conscious of the responsibility he carries. “Democracy only works in a growing economy,” he told Friend in 2016. “Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail.” If it does, though, Altman will be ready. In a discussion about aggressive AI and nations fighting with nuclear weapons over scarce resources, he said: “I try not to think about it too much. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israel Defense Forces, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

Such a nice, innocent lad.

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Wisteria

Such an amazing plant. Comes back year after year. There are some really ancient ones in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”Comparative religion is an admirable recipe for making people comparatively religious.

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Adagio for Strings

Link

Long Read of the Day

(Spoiler alert: it’s a really long read!)

Universities as factories

If you’re puzzled about what the so-called ‘leadership’ of Columbia University is up to, then join the club. The President of the institution is Minouche Shafik, described by Wikipedia as

a British-American academic and economist. She has been serving as the 20th president of Columbia University since July 2023. She previously served as president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics from 2017 to 2023.

From 2014 to 2017, Shafik served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and also previously as permanent secretary of the United Kingdom Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011. She has also served as a vice president at the World Bank and as deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. She was created a life peeress by Elizabeth II in 2020.

(Footnotes: Actually Shafik was the Director of the LSE; it’s only since her departure that the role has been rebranded as “President and Vice-Chancellor”. Also, it’s not clear how much of an ‘academic’ Shafik is. She was an Adjunct (i.e. unpaid) Professor in the Economics department of Georgetown University for five years, and an Associate Visiting Professor at the Wharton School, but the bulk of her career thus far suggests someone who is basically an administrator. This may be relevant to what follows.)

On April 30 Shafik wrote to the NYPD asking them to “help to clear all individuals from Hamilton Hall and all campus encampments.” She also also requested that they remain on campus through at least May 17, 2024 — two days after the school’s commencement ceremony is set to take place on May 15.

The cops were reportedly puzzled by this request, but they duly turned up in riot gear. Adam Tooze, who is a Professor at Columbia (and a Financial Times columnist) witnessed what followed and wrote a thoughtful piece about it on his blog. Here’s excerpt from his narrative.

There was no riot last night at Columbia any more than there has been at any other point. The violence came from the police side and it came at the invitation and request of the University administration.

My colleague at the FT Edward Luce is right. It was the adults not the students that caused the real disorder. It is the University administration not the student protestors who have seriously disrupted the end of term and examinations.

When the violence came last night, it was sudden.

When the sign came to force the passage of one of their vehicles, the police first formed up, moving close to the barrier, face to face with the protestors. The protestors formed a soft chain, many reversed, turning their backs to the police ready for what was about to come, knowing they would need to retreat under massive physical pressure.

On an order from their commander, the police pushed. They pushed hard. Very hard. They move fast, as quickly as their bulk and equipment would allow, maximizing momentum. The officers use waist-high steel barriers as plows to drive the protestors back and to pin them in side streets and against walls. Then, after the vehicle was through and the shouting and chanting of the protestors rose to an extreme crescendo, they pulled back and rearranged themselves again, across Broadway behind their barriers. The shouting and staring resumed.

The scene was static. But I would not be honest if I did not say that my stomach churned watching it. The sheer force of the movement, the relentless and sudden drive of the steel barrier against human bodies, moved the air.

Tooze’s point is that riot police are a blunt instrument. They don’t do finesse. As I read that, an episode from my own past came to mind. When the so-called ‘Troubles’ erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, and the province’s sectarian police force (and their part-time auxiliaries) viciously attacked civilian demonstrations modelled on the US Civil Rights movement, we in the Republic watched in astonishment as the UK government stood by and apparently did nothing while rampant lawlessness reigned in what was — formally — as much a part of the UK as Yorkshire or Northamptonshire.

Eventually, London sent in the army and for a few weeks an uneasy stability was restored, before the army embarked on clumsy and sometimes clueless action against Catholics and republican sympathisers — repressive actions that boosted recruitment into the Provisional IRA, the ruthless and effective terrorist group that then plagued the province for the next three decades.

Many years later, I found myself sitting at a dinner next to the late Merlyn Rees, a prominent British politician who had risen to be Home Secretary (i.e. Minister for the Interior) in a Labour government. As we chatted, I put to him a question that had been on my mind since the late 1960s: “What took you so long to respond to the disorder on the streets of Northern Ireland?” Well, he said, mildly, “What you have to remember is that an army is an extremely blunt instrument.” And so indeed the British army proved to be in Northern Ireland, though it got smarter as time went on.

But back to the question that had puzzled Tooze and many of his academic colleagues: why did the university’s administration take such action to deal with what were essentially peaceful demonstrations of support for Palestinians and criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza?

To this question the economist Branko Milanovic provides a perceptive answer in a blog post entitled “Universities as Factories”. As someone who grew up in Serbia, he had seen quite a lot of the blunt instruments of state power. “The novelty, for me, in the current wave of freedom of speech demonstrations in the United States”, he writes,

was that it was the university administrators who called for the police to attack students. In at least one case, in New York, the police were puzzled why they were brought in, and thought it was counter-productive. One could understand that this attitude by the administrators might happen in authoritarian countries where the administrators may be appointed by the powers-to-be to keep order on campuses. Then, obviously, as obedient civil servants, they would support the police in its “cleansing” activity although they would rarely have the authority to call it in.

But in the US, university administrators are not appointed by Biden, nor by Congress. Why would they then attack their own students? Are they some evil individuals who love to beat up younger people?

No, he says. They’re not necessarily evil. They’re just in the wrong job.

They are not seeing their role as what traditionally was the role of universities, that is to try to impart to the younger generation values of freedom, morality, compassion, self-abnegation, empathy or whatever else is considered desirable. Their role today is to be the CEOs of factories that are called universities. These factories have a raw material which is called students and which they turn, at regular annual intervals, into graduates. Consequently, any disturbance in that production process is like a disturbance to a supply chain. It has to be eliminated as soon as possible in order for the production to resume. Graduating students have to be “outputted”, the new students brought in, moneys from them have to be pocketed, donors have to be found, more funds to be secured. Students, if they interfere with the process, need to be disciplined, if necessary by force. Police has to be brought in, order to be restored.

Which is why it matters that Shafik is really just an administrator. She has done what a CEO of Walmart or Burger King would do in the same circumstances. These people, says Milanovic, are not interested in values, but in the bottom line. That doesn’t mean of course that they won’t

use the talk about values, or “intellectually-challenging environment”, or “vibrant discussion” (or whatever!), as described in a recent article in The Atlantic, as the usual promotional, performative speech that top managers of companies nowadays produce at the drop of a hat.

Yep. One wonders how long it will take the Columbia Trustees to fire ‘Professor’ Shafik.

A more general thought is that the ‘elite’ university system — at least in the US — is in deep trouble. This, at any rate, is the conclusion I draw from a long essay by Louis Menand in the current issue of the New Yorker.

Here’s his conclusion:

The fact remains that all the emphasis on diversity and inclusion did not prevent October 7th from becoming a powder keg. The real problem is that all these issues are playing out in the public eye, and universities are not skilled at public relations. Since 1964, they have been adapting to a legal environment created largely by Democratic Congresses and a Supreme Court still marginally liberal on racial issues. Now a different political regime is in the saddle, in Congress and on the Court, and there are few places left to hide.

Academic freedom is an understanding, not a law. It can’t just be invoked. It has to be asserted and defended. That’s why it’s so disheartening that leaders of great universities appear reluctant to speak up for the rights of independent inquiry and free expression for which Americans have fought. Even after Shafik offered up faculty sacrifices on the congressional altar and called in the N.Y.P.D., Republicans responded by demanding her resignation. If capitulation isn’t working, not much is lost by trying some defiance.

Yep. The trouble is that CEOs don’t do defiance.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of what’s been happening to elite American universities, there’s also the extent to which they are being ‘presidentialized’ — as this terrific post by David Pozen puts it.

It therefore came as a rude awakening for many faculty members at Columbia to learn just how little decisional authority we collectively wield at the university level. When the senate executive committee opposed Shafik’s crackdown on the student encampment, she went ahead and did it anyway — and there was nothing, under the University Charter and Statutes, that the committee or its formidable chair Jeanine D’Armiento could do about it. The full senate then considered a censure resolution. Had it passed, this act of resistance likewise would have had only symbolic effect. President Shafik was hired by, serves on, and reports to the board of trustees, whose members are largely chosen by … the board of trustees. Faculty are on the outside looking in.

To simplify somewhat, we might say that professors are granted a number of basic rights within the university, including rights to free speech and due process and quasi-property rights in the job itself. Students and staff are granted a partially overlapping, though weaker, bundle of rights. What none of us have are governance rights against the trustees who really run the place. We enjoy various individual privileges and protections, but not the franchise.

And that’s definitely enough about universities for today.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Totem pole?

On a Norfolk beach.

Quote of the Day

“You feel that its words are coming of out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.”

• The late Paul Auster on why he preferred composing in longhand.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Sympathy For The Devil (Live at Tokyo Dome 1990)

Link

Well, the devil has always had the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

The Tyranny of Content Algorithms

Nice essay by a fellow-photographer, Om Malik, on what seems to be an endemic feature of the online world.

No matter who you are, how skilled you may be, or how much knowledge you possess, excessive activity will inevitably lead to a return to the average. This phenomenon is observable every day on the Internet. Before Instagram became a competition for the lowest common denominator, there were a few photographers I followed. They consistently shared captivating images, always managing to evoke a sense of inspiration with each viewing of their work.

I wasn’t alone in this appreciation—over time, they gained more recognition and accumulated larger followings. Or perhaps it was the other way around. The ‘larger following’ meant they were able to monetize their audience. However, soon the tail was wagging the dog.

As the years passed, I noticed them sharing more frequently, yet the quality of their work declined. They gradually transitioned from being exceptional to merely average…

Perceptive piece.

The internet needs rewilding

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The internet was, as one scholar later described it, “an architecture for permissionless innovation” or, more prosaically, a global machine for springing surprises. The first such surprise was the web. And because it was decided the web would grow better without profit considerations, Berners-Lee released it as a platform that would also enable permissionless innovation.

However, the next generation of innovators to benefit from this freedom – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple et al – saw no reason to extend it to anyone else. They built fabulously profitable enterprises on the platform that Berners-Lee had created. The creative commons of the internet has been gradually and inexorably enclosed, much as agricultural land was by parliamentary acts from 1600 onwards in England.

The result, as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon put it in a striking essay in Noema magazine, is that our online spaces are no longer open ecosystems. Instead “they’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farms that madden the creatures trapped within”…

Read on

Books, etc.

This one of the most remarkable books on my shelves. Francis Spufford is a gifted polymath who can not only write great fiction (see his On Golden Hill) but also really good history of technology (see his Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin — published in 2003). Red Plenty, though is something else: tech history interwoven with imaginative fiction, it’s about a moment in the 1950s when some scientists and officials in the USSR thought that their country would eclipse the US with a non-capitalist model that would bring greater prosperity. (Adam Kotska’s review gives a pretty good idea of the book.)

I read it some time after it came out in 2010, but I’ve been re-reading it because in a strange way it has become salient again. As Kotska puts it,

it’s more interesting to read Red Plenty as a fairy tale about our own age, where we are stuck in an economic system that is clearly no longer delivering on its promises, but attempts to reengineer it are either squandered through half-measures or, more often, simply dismissed out of hand. People more or less live their lives in this system, as they did in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, yet with the melancholy, forcibly retired Khrushchev, we hear a rustling in the wind asking: “can it be otherwise?”

In May 2012, Henry Farrell and his fellow-bloggers on Crooked Timber organised a fascinating seminar on Spufford’s book with essays by (among others) Kim Stanley Robinson, Cozma Shalizi, George Scialabba, Antoaneta Dimitrova, Carl Caldwell, Felix Gilman and Rich Yeselson, plus responses by Francis Spufford.

Last month there was a discussion at the Santa Fe institute on the question of whether advances in computation might make possible the dream (memorably described by Spufford) that Soviet Planners had in the 1950s — of running a command economy without markets. In conjunction with the event, Henry Farrell and Francis Spufford had a fascinating conversation in the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Sante Fe. It’s an hour long, but worth eavesdropping on if you’re interested in this stuff.

My commonplace booklet

Musk loses the plot — again

One of the smartest things Tesla did at the beginning was to start building a charging infrastructure — the ‘Supercharger’ network — so that if you bought a Tesla you could charge it on the move. It was, for many of us (me included), the clinching reason for buying a Tesla rather than one of the nicer alternatives. That network was what Warren Buffett would call a ‘moat’, something that protected the company against competitors.

And now, guess what?

After firing its entire Supercharger team, Tesla has sent out an email to suppliers which shows just how chaotic the decisionmaking leading up to the firings must have been.

Earlier this week, Tesla abruptly fired its entire Supercharging team, leading to an immediate pullback in Supercharger installation plans. Now we’ve seen the email that Tesla has sent to suppliers, and it’s not pretty.

“You may be aware that there has been a recent adjustment with the Supercharger organization which is presently undergoing a sudden and thorough restructuring. If you have already received this email, please disregard it as we are attempting to connect with our suppliers and contractors. As part of this process, we are in the midst of establishing new leadership roles, prioritizing projects, and streamlining our payment procedures. Due to the transitional nature of this phase, we are asking for your patience with our response time.

I understand that this period of change may be challenging and that patience is not easy when expecting to be paid, however, I want to express my sincere appreciation for your understanding and support as we navigate through this transition. At this time, please hold on breaking ground on any newly awarded construction projects and planned pre-construction walks. If currently working on an active Supercharging construction site, please continue. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. Additionally, hold on working on any new material orders. Contact (email redacted) for further questions, comments, and concerns. If waiting on delayed payment, please contact (email redacted) for a status update. Thank you for your cooperation and patience.”

How not to run a business.

Source

Chart of the Day

 AI hype has echoes of the telecoms boom and bust

Interesting chart from the FT drawing a parallel between the first Internet boom (1995 – 2000) when Cisco routers were hot property in the same way that Nvidia GPUs are nowadays.

We’re in a bubble. Funny how nobody seems to acknowledge that.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Bumblebee nests are overheating to fatal levels Link

One year recently, bumble bees took over one of the nest boxes in the garden — a box that was bathed in bright sunlight for hours during the day. We were astonished to see stationary bees flapping their wings at the entrance to the box, and then twigged that they were trying to cool the nest.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Present at the Creation

Screenshot

This is a pic of the world’s very first Web server — Tim Berners-Lee’s NEXT machine at CERN. Note the handwritten note on the machine.

(Source: Jeremy Reimer on ArsTechnica.)

Quote of the Day

”The rain will stop, the night will end, the hurt will fade. Hope is never so lost that it can’t be found.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Solace | Phillip Dyson

Link

Long Read of the Day

We Need To Rewild The Internet

This essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berton in Noema is the best thing I’ve read in ages. It’s about how diversity was stripped out of the original Internet, and the perils of the resulting monoculture. It starts with the story of how, in the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees, and the ecological disaster that ensued.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future…

It’s terrific, and worth your time.

Books, etc.

I’m reading Dan Davies’s new book and am blown away by it. In it he examines why markets, institutions and governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. From my point of view, the most interesting thing is the way he casts new light on the writings of Stafford Beer, a legendary thinker who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members. Since I’m working on a book about corporations as “Slow AIs” (as Charlie Stross calls them) this is right up my street.

Chart of the Day

From Tortoise Media’s newsletter:

The campus protests have revealed shifts in US opinion on Israel that have been developing for years. A 2023 Gallup poll found net sympathy towards Israel at +46 points among those born between 1946 and 1964; that drops to -2 among those born after 1980. In a 2021 survey of Jewish voters, respondents under 40 were twice as likely to agree that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians as those over 64.

In 2011 the American historian Daniel Rodgers published The Age of Fracture, an astonishingly perceptive book about how American society was changing in during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. His argument, neatly summarised by one reviewer (Doug Rossinow in The Journal of American History), was that

the major intellectual trends of the twentieth century’s last quarter, ranging from the ascendancy of microeconomics and market fundamentalism to the explosion of postmodernism in cultural theory, were of a piece. The weakening of social structures as perceived determinants of human life and the “thinning” of conceptions of society, to use a term favored by Rodgers, crossed inherited political boundaries.

What was so remarkable about the book was the way it tried to pin down subtle shifts that we often perceive only with the benefit of hindsight. My hunch is that we’re now living through another period of major cultural change and the best we can do is to catch glimpses of things that might yield clues to what’s happening.

IMO, the response of US students (and of citizens in a raft of Western democracies like Ireland) to the Hamas atrocity — and the Israeli response to it — is one of those clues. And it has taken the ruling elites of these societies completely by surprise. After the atrocity, the prevailing expectation was that the West would fall into line behind Netanyahu’s policy (even while collectively holding its nose). That has kind-of happened. But it has not resonated with entire generations, as we’re seeing. So maybe this time is different (to coin a phrase). Something’s up.

My commonplace booklet

Misha Valdman on the philosopher Derek Parfit:

I met Parfit on several occasions but I got to know him mainly through Larry Temkin – my thesis advisor and Parfit’s former student – who’d regale us with tales of Parfit’s eccentricities and brilliance. Under Parfit’s tutelage, Temkin wrote a dissertation on the nature of inequality. As Temkin tells it, Parfit had him write 50 pages on the topic, which Parfit returned without comment and a request for 50 more. This continued until Temkin had written about 300 pages, at which point Parfit systematically tore it all to shreds. It was the philosophical equivalent of a massacre. A year’s labor lay in ruins. He then told Temkin to begin anew, as he was now prepared to write in earnest.

In 2002 I attended a Festschrift in honor of his 60th birthday. Many of the world’s top ethicists were there. Most of them had worked with Parfit or had been trained by him. In one way or another, they were all his students. I was there for the philosophy but mostly for the spectacle. Parfit was being honored in the only way philosophers know how: by being publicly eviscerated. Speaker after speaker would rise, approach the podium, and launch into a withering critique, trying to do to Parfit what he had done to Temkin two decades prior. Parfit would sit in stony silence and then leap to his feet the second they were finished, well into rebuttal before even reaching the podium, as if he were a gladiator determined to show that none of his opponent’s blows had landed and that not a drop of his blood had been spilled. Occasionally the proceedings would veer into eulogy – it was, after all, a celebration of a lifetime’s worth of achievement – but Parfit would have none of it. “I’m not dead yet,” he’d remind the room. In all it was a riveting performance full of pageantry and drama and what I’m sure was some top shelf philosophy, though nothing comes to mind in particular. In the end the weary scholars shuffled out of the arena but Parfit was as spry as ever. It seemed the only way to beat him was to outlast him or to render him speechless. By that standard, there was no doubt who had won.

He was a truly extraordinary person. I never met him but, late in life, he married a friend and former colleague of mine, Janet Radcliffe Richards. From her I learned that Parfit was also a keen, nay fanatical, photographer. As a New Yorker profile puts it,

There were only about ten things in the world he wanted to photograph,… and they were all buildings: the best buildings in Venice —Palladio’s two churches, the Doge’s Palace, the buildings along the Grand Canal — and the best buildings in St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace and the General Staff Building.

When he came home, he developed his photographs and sorted them. But,

Of a thousand pictures, he might keep three. When he decided that a picture was worth saving, he took it to a professional processor in London and had the processor hand-paint out all aspects of the image that he found distasteful, which meant all evidence of the twentieth century—cars, telegraph wires, signposts—and usually all people. Then he had the colors repeatedly adjusted, although this was enormously expensive, until they were exactly what he wanted—which was a matter of fidelity not to the scene as it was but to an idea in his head.

They don’t make them like that any more.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Many happy returns

Quote of the Day

”Anxiety is the price we pay for the ability to imagine the future.”

• NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Deep River (Arr. Coleridge-Taylor, Kanneh-Mason) | Sheku Kanneh-Mason

Link

Long Read of the Day

Technological risks are not the end of the world

Terrific essay by Jack Stilgoe in Science on the obsession with existential risk of AI which — deliberately or inadvertently — sucks the oxygen out of the discourse we should be having about the technology, namely the harms it’s already doing, and the future harm it will do to the environment of the planet.

Worth your time.

Social media’s business model is incompatible with the elimination of online horror

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Way back in the mid-1990s, when the web was young and the online world was buzzing with blogs, a worrying problem loomed. If you were an ISP that hosted blogs, and one of them contained material that was illegal ,sor defamatory, you could be held legally responsible and sued into bankruptcy. Fearing that this would dramatically slow the expansion of a vital technology, two US lawmakers, Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, inserted 26 words into the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which eventually became section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of the same year. The words in question were: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The implications were profound: from now on you bore no liability for content published on your platform.

The result was the exponential increase in user-generated content on the internet. The problem was that some of that content was vile, defamatory or downright horrible. Even if it was, though, the hosting site bore no liability for it…

Read on

The real threat…

(In a nutshell)

AI doesn’t have to be sentient to pose a threat — sentient actors are the threat. The 2024 election is going to be the World Cup of online disinformation, as AI supercharges these tactics. Social media bots sound like real people and can engage one-on-one in real time with millions. Deepfake audio and video clips show candidates saying hateful or foolish things. India offers a preview: A skilled AI content creator says hundreds of politicians have asked him for fake material. Some even want badly produced fakes of themselves they can release to discredit any bad press, even legitimate press. China used fake AI content to attempt to sway an election in Taiwan and is using the same tactics in the U.S. Congress is considering legal barriers, but nothing will come of it before the election. The people running the platforms that will deliver these threats to our screens are predictably claiming “it’s too complex” and “this is government’s problem” and “free speech” — all of which is bullshit. However, the liability shield of Section 230 will be enough to keep them unaccountable for another cycle.

Scott Galloway

My commonplace booklet

Why Jonathan Haidt and Andrew Przybylski might BOTH be right about social media and teenagers 

From Charles Arthur:

What the research data (such as it is) suggests:

• children who spend low amounts of time online tend to be unhappy. They’re missing out, they’re shut out of online discussion, they’re unable to participate as others do.

• those who spend a moderate time online are connected, participating, happy. Of course the key thing is that they don’t spend all their time online. The big question is what the top and bottom limits of “moderate” are.

• those who spend a large amount of time online are connected, over-participating, unhappy. Whether their unhappiness is due to the amount of time they spend online, or if they spend a lot of time online because they’re unhappy (and in effect seeking people who they can connect with, to make friends).

This means that both Haidt and Przybylski could both be right: using social media does make some children unhappy, and using social media hasn’t got a global association with well-being.

Linkblog

Some things I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

*  Hunting for AI metaphors. Nice blog post on one of my pet obsessions. (h/t to Laura James)

• Neil Turok on the simplicity of nature. Fascinating and informative interview with one of of the great theoretical physicists of our time.

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Warning!

I often think I should put this cautionary pic up as a spoiler alert when writing about stuff that’s above my intellectual pay-grade.

Quote of the Day

”You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

• Evelyn Waugh

Probably true. The problem is that he was also a gifted satirist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Kate Rusby | Who Will Sing Me Lullabies

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is generally thought of as an economic project, but in fact it’s something much more pervasive — a mindset that has infected most institutions in Western societies. Which means that it has also been a cultural project, and we are living with the cultural wreckage brought about by neoliberal policies and ideology. The Roosevelt Institute has produced an interesting 50-page report on the pervasiveness of this mindset, which I guess is a bit of a stretch for busy subscribers. But the Executive Summary usefully lays out the basic arguments of the report.

Long video of the Day

A TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection and now — I think — working for Microsoft. It has the usual TED bugs/features — including the illusion that wisdom can be compressed into 20 minutes. It’s also imbued with the boosterish tech pretence that machine-learning technology is somehow weightless in environmental and societal terms. But his metaphor — which is basically that we should think of AI as a new ‘digital species’ that has arrived on earth — at least provides a different lens for thinking about this stuff. Hence this recommendation.

My commonplace booklet

Legal Fiction

If you want a striking illustration of the degeneration of the UK over the last two decades then this LRB blog post by Nicholas Reed Langen would be hard to beat. It’s written in the aftermath of the passage into law of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which has been relentlessly pushed by the Tory Prime Minister to appease his party’s xenophobic base. In passing the legislation, Langen writes, the UK has effectively become a rogue state which violates international treaties to which it is a signatory. It also runs counter to the judgment of the country’s Supreme Court. So much for the rule of law.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From Quanta Magazine…

In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun.

The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited today, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before.

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Quai d’Orsay

But not the one on the bank of the Seine. This one found its way to Ely, Cambridgeshire!

“Quai d’Orsay” is often synonymous with the French Foreign Ministry, which occupies a magnificent building there. I remember a veteran Foreign Correspondent (I think it may have been the BBC’s John Simpson) once saying that he “never believed anything was true until it had been denied three times by the Quai d’Orsay.”

Quote of the Day

“I don’t necessarily agree with everything that I say.”

• Marshall McLuhan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Williams | Schindler’s List Theme | Itzhak Perlman

Link

Long Read of the Day

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Lovely, astute assessment by Molly White, one of my favourite commentators on tech.

As someone known for my criticism of the previous deeply flawed technology to become the subject of the tech world’s overinflated aspirations, I have had people express surprise when I’ve remarked that generative artificial intelligence toolsa can be useful. In fact, I was a little surprised myself.

But there is a yawning gap between “AI tools can be handy for some things” and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that “well, they can sometimes be handy…” doesn’t offer much of a justification.

Some are surprised when they discover I don’t think blockchains are useless, either. Like so many technologies, blockchains are designed to prioritize a few specific characteristics (coordination among parties who don’t trust one another, censorship-resistance, etc.) at the expense of many others (speed, cost, etc.). And as they became trendy, people often used them for purposes where their characteristics weren’t necessary — or were sometimes even unwanted — and so they got all of the flaws with none of the benefits…

Full of good common sense. Worth a read.

Books, etc.

We’re reading — and enjoying — this fascinating group biography by Penelope Fitzgerald (neé Knox) of her four uncles, who were all (to put it mildly) er, distinctive. I had read and loved Evelyn Waugh’s biography of one of them — Ronald — but the others were a mystery to me. No longer.

My commonplace booklet

Every year on his birthday Kevin Kelly offers bits of homespun advice, and last year he collected them into a book — Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. He’s just coming up to his 73rd birthday, and so he’s issued 101 more. Here are a few that struck me.

• You owe everyone a second chance, but not a third.
• Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person
• Whenever you hug someone, be the last to let go
• Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be
• Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing
• There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
• Changing your mind about important things is not a consequence of stupidity, but a sign of intelligence.
• You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Back to the Future A new Huawei smartphone has a pop-out camera lens, just like ye olde point-and-shoot cameras — Ars Technica

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Lakeland

Glenteentassig Lake on the Dingle peninsula. One of Ireland’s loveliest hidden lakes.

Quote of the Day

“One of my best decisions was being born before the Internet and smartphones.”

• Robert Shrimsley

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Berlioz | Symphonie Fantastique | 5th movement

Link

I can never decide which is the more dramatic — the music or the acrobatics of the conductor (Leonard Bernstein)!

Long Read of the Day

Remembering Daniel Dennett

A remarkable and provocative thinker has passed away. Gary Marcus sums him up neatly as the man who “arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components)”, and who from then on,

was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well). Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.

Marcus has passed on a lovely memoir of Dennett written by his friend Douglas Hofstadter:

Dan was also a diligent and lifelong “student” (in the sense of “studier”) of evolution, religion, artificial intelligence, computers in general, and even science in general. He wrote extremely important and influential books on all these topics, and his insights will endure as long as we humans endure. I’m thinking of his books Brainstorms; The Intentional Stance; Elbow Room; Consciousness Explained; Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; Inside Jokes; Breaking the Spell; From Bacteria to Bach and Back and of course his last book, I’ve Been Thinking, which was (and is) a very colorful self-portrait, a lovely autobiography vividly telling so many stories of his intercontinental life. I’m so happy that Dan not only completed it but was able to savor its warm reception all around the world.

Among other things, that book tells about Dan’s extremely rich life not just as a thinker but also as a doer. Dan was a true bon vivant, and he developed many amazing skills, such as that of house-builder, folk-dancer and folk-dance caller, jazz pianist, cider-maker, sailor and racer of yachts (not the big ones owned by Russian oligarchs, but beautifully crafted sailboats), joke-teller par excellence, enthusiast for and expert in word games, savorer of many cuisines and wines, wood-carver and sculptor, speaker of French and some German and Italian as well, and ardent and eloquent supporter of thinkers whom he admired and felt were not treated with sufficient respect by the academic world.

Worth reading in full. I’ve Been Thinking is such a lovely title for a philosopher’s autobiography.

The big tech firms want an AI monopoly – but maybe the UK CMA can bring them to heel

Yesterday’s Observer column:

“Monopoly,” said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s answer to Darth Vader, “is the condition of every successful business.” This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley’s giants – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there.

One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put $13bn (about £10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a $1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup. Amazon put $4bn into Anthropic, the startup founded by refugees from OpenAI. Google invested $500m in the same outfit, with a promise of $1.5bn more, and unspecified sums in A121 Labs and Hugging Face. (Yeah, I know the names make no sense.) Microsoft has also invested in Mistral, the French AI startup. And so on. In 2023, of the $27bn that was invested in AI startups, only $9bn came from venture capitalist firms – which until recently had been by far the biggest funders of new tech enterprises in Silicon Valley.

What’s going on here?

Read on to find out.

My commonplace booklet

Two cheers for Immanuel Kant

The political philosopher Lea Ypi had a nice essay on Kant in the FT on Saturday. I was struck by this passage:

To be free, in a Kantian sense, is to be able to take a critical distance from your passions and inclinations, and to ask yourself if they contribute to “enlightened” thinking: the exit, as Kant puts it, from “humanity’s self-incurred own immaturity”. The process of enlightenment rests on three maxims: to think for oneself, to think putting oneself in the place of everyone else, and to always think consistently. Such maxims, he believed, could be advanced through “the public use of reason”, a modus operandi that is fundamentally different from the “private” use people make of it in their professions (say as students, teachers, doctors, politicians, lawyers or asset managers). While the latter is premised on the acceptance of authority, the former requires pluralistic, impartial and critical engagement.

It is difficult to relate to Kant’s aspirations in an age like ours where public-spiritedness is constantly threatened by the clash between private interests. Our mode of communication is wider and more inclusive than in the 18th century (for example, political participation is formally no longer limited to property-holders) but it is also shallower, more certain of itself and less critical. Dissent manifests itself more in clamorous acts of individual self-expression (preferably recorded on a mobile phone) and less in collective critical engagement.

Like us, Kant lived in an age of crisis marked by great advances in science and technology but a collapse in values. Yet he carved out a role for reason as a universal communicative capacity that tries to steer a middle path between scepticism and dogmatism: between having faith in nothing and blindly following trends. That conception of reason seems harder to revive in our societies, strangled as they are between destructive interests and the individualisation of political commitment.

Yep.

Linkblog

What is it about fancy wristwatches?

As a (cynical) reader of publications which target people with more money than sense, I am continually intrigued by the advertisements for expensive men’s wristwatches, and in particular by the way so many of them make a song-and-dance about the water depth that they can allegedly withstand. I’m looking at one which is even badged as “Fifty Fathoms” to indicate that it will still tell the time 300 feet below the ocean surface. But here’s the strange thing: I’ve never seen a man wearing one of these watches who has been closer to ocean depths than you get in an infinity pool on the French Riviera. So, basically, these things are just male jewellery. Pathetic, really.

One cheery thought, though. Apparently, it’s not a good idea to flaunt your flashy status-symbol in some parts of London nowadays. At any rate the FT reports that “the Metropolitan Police is grappling with a spate of muggings that has sent jitters as far as Delhi and Geneva.”

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Gateway to ‘Global Britain’

Heathrow Airport Terminal 2, on a quiet Saturday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”He who hesitates is poor.”

• Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Two Pairs Of Hands

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why trade unions matter

Interesting and perceptive Long Read by Neil Bierbaum.

During performance related workshops, the question comes up about expectations; what to do about bosses and colleagues who send out emails late at night, expecting an immediate answer—or latest by the next morning? And what to do about the need to prove that you’re on top of things by meeting that expectation? I call it the “cult of busyness”, and point to “wearing busyness as a badge of honour”. What are we to do about that, comes the question.

What I notice is that everybody is looking for an individual answer, a personal solution, as though it’s their problem to resolve. I always ask myself; can nobody see the naked emperor? It’s all very well doing all you can to manage yourself, but what if the system doesn’t leave you alone? I try to steer people towards the idea that it’s a systemic problem and needs a systemic solution, but mostly I get met with blank stares. (I hope by writing it down here and showing some graphs, it will land with more impact.)

The short answer I would offer is that the epidemic of busyness and the dearth of work-life balance is driven systemically by what I call the “primacy of shareholder value”. In other words, placing profit over people. Despite all the talk of the “triple bottom line” (profit, people, planet), it seldom happens in practice. The systemic solution is to make people matter at least as much as profit. To achieve that, we need our leaders, those high priests of profit, to do more than just pay lip service to the “triple bottom line”. To get there, we ourselves need to stop worshipping at the altar of efficiency for the sake of shareholders. We need to start walking and working among the time poor (as much as I dislike that term, I shall use it here for its poetic ease).

This is an interesting and sharp essay (and I’m not saying that because at one point Bierbaum quotes me). One of the axioms of the neoliberalism that took hold of Western governing elites in the 1970s was that corporations needed to reduce operating costs sharply, which meant in practice reducing labour costs, which in turn meant curbing union power. And both Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK took this to heart. One of the first things Reagan did after taking office, remember, was to sack 11,359 unionised air-traffic controllers workers overnight on August 5, 1981. And over in the UK Thatcher introduced legislation curbing trade-union power (by outlawing secondary picketing, for example) and, later, by taking on — and defeating — the National Union of Mineworkers.

And then came the tech industry, to which the very idea of unionisation was anathema, resulting in the growth of gigantic firms which were effectively neoliberal wet dreams in which the idea of a counterveiling power to managerial fiat was ridiculed as a quaint throwback to the era of Fordist mass production.

In that context, one of the most interesting findings to emerge from Acemoglu’s and Johnson’s magisterial survey of society’s thousand-year experience with technology is that the only periods in which technology-generated wealth was more equitably shared with the non-owners of capital coincided with the growth of counterveiling powers like unions together with societal mobilisation against overweening corporate power.

Chart of the day

Source: Tortoise Media, which commented that:

Despite the attack’s apparent failure, Tehran gathered useful information about Israel’s defences and forced Israel and the US to spend more than $1 billion in one night to counter an attack that cost around one tenth of that to launch.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• From The Economist, 26/03/2024

“China’s government spends $6.6bn a year censoring online content, estimates the Jamestown Foundation, a think-tank in America. In one two-month period last year the authorities claim to have deleted 1.4m social-media posts and 67,000 accounts (ironically, they branded many of the posts “misinformation”). More recently officials launched an investigation into short-video platforms that were spreading “pessimism” among young people, many of whom are struggling to find jobs.”

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