Betjeman Towers

Every time I pass through St Pancras station I think of him.

Quote of the Day

”War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

• Ambrose Bierce

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fleetwood Mac | The Chain

Link

Long Read of the Day

Short-Form War

Extraordinary blog post by Scott Galloway which throws light on the widening gap between how Western political establishments view the Israel/Gaza conflict and how young people see it.

This is his starting point.

This is not unique to the Hamas attack. The older you are, the more likely you are to be pro-Israel: In March 2022, 69% of Americans over 65 had a favorable view of Israel, while just 41% of those under 29 did. Worries about increasing antisemitism in the U.S. are similarly correlated: 85% of seniors say it’s growing; 52% of Gen Zers say it’s not.

Young people are resistant to the views of their elders. And that’s a good thing. As kids enter adolescence, they develop a healthy gag reflex triggered by anything associated with their parents. This helps them develop their own opinions and beliefs about the world, and it’s also good for the parents, because by the time kids are 18, they can be such assholes that everyone’s ready for them to leave the house.

But that doesn’t explain students at my employer (NYU) holding up protest signs reading “keep the world clean” with images of the Star of David in trash cans. I’d like to think this is a fringe view, but when 51% of their cohort believe the murder of 1,200 people is justified, something more serious is happening…

It is. Read on to see his theory. (Spoiler alert: it has something to do with China.)

The ‘Other’ Mendelssohn

On Wednesday evening last we went to see the premiere of Sheila Hayman’s terrific film about her great-great-great grandmother, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, a spectacularly gifted composer who lived most of her short life in the shadow of her brother Felix. He was the Lang Lang of his day, feted everywhere he went, while his sister was obliged by social convention and the misogyny of the Victorian era to keep her talent to herself. Among the ironies of her story is the fact that when Felix was invited to perform at Buckingham Palace, the song that Victoria chose to sing from a collection of his work had actually been written by Fanny!

Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn is an entrancing film which interweaves Fanny’s life with a fascinating piece of academic detective work — the search for the manuscript of Fanny’s Easter Sonata, which had been torn in its entirety from a collection of her work lodged in a Berlin museum. The film tracks the music scholar Angela Mace as she follows the tangled path of the manuscript through eccentric dealers and auction houses before it finally wound up in the collection of a wealthy American collector (who has since donated it to the J.P. Morgan library in New York). And, as an emotionally satisfying coup de grace, the film concludes with the premiere performance of the Sonata by Isata Kanneh-Mason before an audience in Birmingham.

Full disclosure: Sheila is a friend and a member of the Advisory Board of our Research Centre, but you don’t have to take my word that this is a remarkable movie by an exceedingly talented director (see here for her other work). She’s now embarked on a film about AI, so stay tuned.

And here’s the trailer.

My commonplace booklet

Grok Cometh

Grok is an AI modeled after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so intended to answer almost anything and, far harder, even suggest what questions to ask!

Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!

A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.

Grok is still a very early beta product – the best we could do with 2 months of training – so expect it to improve rapidly with each passing week with your help.

Note the idea of having “real-time knowledge of the world, via the X platform”.

And guess whose brainchild it is? Hint: think Rishi Sunak’s new Best Friend.

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Now, what shall I play?

Kettle’s Yard, some years ago.

Quote of the Day

”Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much”.

• Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Beatles | Here Comes The Sun

Link

One of the fab-four’s loveliest songs. I still remember the first time I heard it — on a crude stereo kit I had rigged up the front room of our College flat.

Long Read of the Day

Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here

Striking Noema essay by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Peter Norvig.

Early AI systems exhibited artificial narrow intelligence, concentrating on a single task and sometimes performing it at near or above human level. MYCIN, a program developed by Ted Shortliffe at Stanford in the 1970s, only diagnosed and recommended treatment for bacterial infections. SYSTRAN only did machine translation. IBM’s Deep Blue only played chess.

Later deep neural network models trained with supervised learning such as AlexNet and AlphaGo successfully took on a number of tasks in machine perception and judgment that had long eluded earlier heuristic, rule-based or knowledge-based systems.

Most recently, we have seen frontier models that can perform a wide variety of tasks without being explicitly trained on each one. These models have achieved artificial general intelligence in five important ways…

These authors are a formidable pair. Blaise works in Google on basic research, product development and infrastructure for AI. Peter is a computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-author with Stuart Russell of the most popular AI textbook —Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach*. I first encountered him via his wonderful satire on how Abraham Lincoln would have presented his Gettysburg Address if he’d had Powerpoint.

Their argument is that so-called ‘Frontier’ LLMs have achieved a significant level of general intelligence, according to the everyday meanings of those two words. But most commentators have been reluctant to concede that for “four main reasons”, when they then proceed to explore.

Interesting throughout.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for pointing me to it.

Books, etc.

Because of something a friend said at breakfast the other morning, I dug out Noel Annan’s book about his wartime career from the library and am riveted by it. Among other things, it’s fascinating about his time in Whitehall, when he worked as an intelligence officer at the heart of the British war machine in close proximity to Churchill. It’s also fascinating on his role in the Control Commission which ran the British sector of the defeated Germany after the war.

His picture of Churchill as wartime leader is particularly interesting, not least because some of the time he was as exasperating as Boris Johnson was during his brief premiership. Churchill had about fifty ideas a minute on how to conduct the war, many of them impractical, and his military chiefs and officials spent a lot of time trying to make him see logistical sense.

Linkblog

Apple’s 1999 ad for the PowerMac G4

Link

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Serious shopping

Swiss Cottage, London.

Quote of the Day

“For most of history the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped; the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring that it continues to serve us and our planet.”

• Mustafa Suleyman

Topical, given that the ‘AI Safety Summit’ opens in Bletchley Park on Wednesday.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vaughan Williams | Just as the tide was flowing | arranged by John Rutter | Cambridge Singers

Link

Long Read of the Day

Beyond the Myth of Rural America

Lovely — and thought-provoking — New Yorker essay by Daniel Immerwahr about the way the reality of rural life in the US has been misrepresented and misunderstood by the wider world.

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us can’t help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who “would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, “American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States.

The painting was also decidedly enigmatic. Was it biting satire? Grim realism? Proud patriotism? In the words of the late Thomas Hoving, a longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the image served as a “Rorschach test for the character of the nation.”

For Wood, however, the meaning was clear. Although he faced “a storm of protest from Iowa farm wives”—one threatened to “smash my head,” he recalled—he had painted “American Gothic” with sympathy. Cities dominated culture, he wrote, yet they were “far less typically American” than the rural places “whose power they usurped.” In 1935, Wood, who was born on an Iowa farm forty-four years earlier, published the manifesto “Revolt Against the City.”

I had always taken the picture at its face value. Silly me. And this piece has a nice photograph which includes the two models Wood used for the couple in the picture.

Artists may make AI firms pay a high price for their software’s ‘creativity’

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Let us examine how Midjourney and its peers do their tricks. The secret lies mainly in the fact that they are trained by ingesting the LAION-5B dataset – a collection of links to upwards of 6bn tagged images compiled by scraping the web indiscriminately, and which is thought to include a significant number of pointers to copyrighted artworks. When fed with a text prompt, the AIs then assemble a set of composite images that might resemble what the user asked for. Voilà!

What this implies is that if you are a graphic artist whose work has been published online, there is a good chance that Midjourney and co have those works in its capacious memory somewhere. And no tech company asked you for permission to “scrape” them into the maw of its machine. Nor did it offer to compensate you for so doing. Which means that underpinning the magic that these generative AIs so artfully perform may be intellectual property (IP) theft on a significant scale…

Read on

Books, etc.

If the opinion polls are an accurate guide, Britain’s next Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka Finance Minister) will be a double first: the first woman to hold the post, and the first Chancellor who seems interested in the history of economics. Her book came out this week and has attracted attention, mostly from hacks who are looking for clues to what a Starmer government might do, and critics who delightedly discovered that a few passages appear in the book appear to have been copied from unreferenced sources, including Wikipedia — mistakes that both Reeves and her publisher have acknowledged and which apparently will be fixed in a second edition (if there is one).

The review that most intrigued me was in the Financial Times, which concluded thus with a nice piece of ambiguity:

The Women Who Made Modern Economics is an audition piece, clearly intended to demonstrate that Reeves is a serious, thoughtful contender to run Britain’s economy. It also does the valuable job of challenging readers’ preconceptions of what an economist it. But perhaps the most important lesson to come out of it is the importance of giving credit where it is due.

Nice sting in the end, eh? And the author of the piece? Why one Soumaya Keynes, who is an FT economics columnist — and also the great-great-niece of John Maynard Keynes!

My commonplace booklet

A Message from your Batty Old Hungarian Vampire Granny

Or why Margaret Attwood’s Substack blog is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

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Pavement view

As seen by Fiona from the limestone pavement above Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales.

Quote of the Day

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

• Edgar Allen Poe

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Mayer and Ed Sheeran | Slow Dancing in a Burning Room

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress

If you follow these things you will know that the UK government is hosting an ‘AI Safety Summit’ on November 1st & 2nd in, of all places, Bletchley Park. Lots of people have been using this as a peg on which to hang essays on various aspects of “the AI problem”.

Having waded through a good many of these, I’ve come to the conclusion that this paper by an interesting group of experts is the most useful background read.

Here’s how it opens:

In 2019, GPT-2 could not reliably count to ten. Only four years later, deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots. As AI developers scale these systems, unforeseen abilities and behaviors emerge spontaneously without explicit programming. Progress in AI has been swift and, to many, surprising.

The pace of progress may surprise us again.

Worth your time.

Books, etc.

My definition of ‘ideology’ is that it’s “what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking”. Musing on its role in politics the other day I came on Thomas Sowell’s book, A conflict of visions: ideological origins of political struggles, which looks interesting. Here’s how its publisher described it:

Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature that lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times)

Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the “constrained” vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the “unconstrained” vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

Hmmm… Sowell is at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a bastion of conservative thinking. It’ll be interesting to see how this mindset plays out in the book.

My commonplace booklet

The semiotics of kitchen design

The FT had a nice piece recently (behind the paywall) on the relentless expansion of kitchen ‘islands’ in the dwellings of the affluent bourgeoisie.

“These days, the more luxury dwellings I visit, the more I find that the size of the kitchen island is in direct proportion to the lack of cooking (or eating) actually done in the kitchen. The nuclear family has atomised and mealtimes happen elsewhere — on the sofa, in the bedroom, at a desk while checking emails — with everyone eating at different times. The island is a symbol, an idea of informal family life embodied in a deathly slab of marble, a funeral bier for food.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

A day in Pompeii

Amazing computer animation of what happened in 24 hours. Obliteration in 8 minutes. Reminded me of Robert Harris’s thriller, Pompeii — which I strongly recommend.

UK politics update

From the Daily Telegraph a year ago.

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You don’t say!

A serious conversation in a London cafe.

Quote of the Day

“He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”

• Divorce complaint of Richard Feynman’s second wife

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622 | II. Adagio

Link

I think this was the first LP I ever owned — before I even had a turntable, so I had to play it on a friend’s system!

Long Read of the Day

Absolute Powerpoint: Can a software package edit our thoughts?

And yeah I know Monday’s Long Read was about Powerpoint, but Tim Harford had mentioned this New Yorker essay by Ian Parker, and of course I followed the link and was entranced by it. As I hope you will be too.

It’s beautifully written and full of witty and insightful observations. For example, he discovered that Whitfield Diffie, the legendary cryptographer who with Martin Hellman invented public-key cryptography, played a small role in the genesis of Powerpoint. “I recently had lunch with him in Palo Alto”, Parker writes, “and for the first time he publicly acknowledged his presence at the birth of PowerPoint. It was an odd piece of news: as if Lenin had invented the stapler.”

Do read it.

Books, etc.

I’m working my way through Mike Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried, the alleged wunderkind who was responsible for the FTX implosion and who is now on trial in New York. I’m only part-way through, but as a portrait of an exceedingly complicated, clever and weirdly-detached human being it’s interesting and well done.

However, the book has attracted a lot of fierce criticism from people who are (rightly) angry about the FTX fiasco, and cross with Lewis because they think he’s been suckered by his subject. So it was interesting to stumble across a long (too long, IMHO) review essay by Cody Kommers who argues that Lewis got the balance just right. In effect, Kommers is spitting into a critical hurricane, summarised thus:

Pretty much everyone who reviewed this book agreed on two things: (a) Lewis is generationally great at narrative journalism, but (b) this time he got it wrong. Jennifer Szalai, of the New York Times, called Lewis’s book “strange”—in her opening sentence. A number of reviews said that the book on crypto you really want to read is Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up, including a compare-and-contrast in a very helpful Economist article, which notes that Lewis’s book “reveals little about the inner workings of crypto.” Even money people (as opposed to, like, literary people) really didn’t like it: Fortune declared that Lewis had unprecedented access to SBF but failed to reveal any new information. The original title of Helen Lewis’s piece for The Atlantic was “Michael Lewis is Buying What Sam Bankman-Fried is Selling.” Ouch.

All that is bad. But you know it’s really bad when Noah Smith weighs in without having even read the book…

I can’t help thinking that there’s such a moralistic force-field surrounding SBF (as the lad seems to be universally known) that people have difficulty being objective about the book. But sometimes, when you find a noisy consensus, it’s worth being sceptical.

I’ll read on to see what I think.

My commonplace booklet

Responses to Tim Hartford’s essay on PowerPoint (Monday’s Long Read) included this interesting reflection:

I’m a civil servant and unsurprisingly we use PowerPoint a lot, most often when we really shouldn’t. Tim Harford’s argument is that we use it because it’s easy and within reach.

That may be a part of the explanation. But another part of the explanation for PowerPoint’s ubiquity has to include expectations. When a senior leader asks for something, they often ask for a slide or two, regardless of whether it’s appropriate or not.

Another part of the explanation has to include the now default meeting mode – video calls. It’s even harder to sit in meetings with cameras off if there’s no slide deck to look at, just our colleagues’ bizarre choices of profile picture.

And then finally, what else can we use to cover up the void where charisma should be. Not everyone that presents has the charisma necessary to present without something to lean on. Similarly, not everyone writes well enough to put a plain document together. Not everyone can build an infographic that captures the imagination. PowerPoint slide decks are the lowest common denominator.

And the payoff: “Poorly made slide decks put audiences at ease.”

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Evening in Norfolk

Brancaster Staithe (where I hope to be again fairly soon)

Quote of the Day

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils”

• Hector Berlioz

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Mayer & Steve Miller | The Joker

Link

Exuberant audience but a great performance.

Long Read of the Day

 Why You Can’t Trust X for News

It’s not news that the “company formerly known as Twitter” is a shell of what it once was, but the transcript of this interview with Casey Newton, a veteran observer of these things, is illuminating and insightful.

A video was recently posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) with a caption informing viewers that they were watching footage of Hamas fighters shooting down an Israeli helicopter in Gaza. The video has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and reposted more than 2,500 times. The issue? It’s totally fake. The clip is from a video game called Arma 3. It’s not in Gaza. It’s not in Israel. Nothing about it has anything to do with the current conflict.

Other videos, horrifying real ones from Israel and Gaza, are all over X with little or no warning. It has turned the platform—a place people used to go for news—into a ghastly brew of suffering and confusion over what’s real, what’s not, and what’s being posted just for clicks.

On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Casey Newton, founder and editor of the technology newsletter Platformer, about how the war between Israel and Hamas is revealing how broken X really is. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Do read on.

Books, etc.

This is an interesting book to come from a political scientist. Landemore argues that democratic leadership is determined by a method roughly akin to jury service: every now and then, your number comes up, and you’re obliged to do your civic duty by taking a seat on a small-scale legislative body. For a fixed period, your job is to work with the other people in the body to solve problems and decide on action. And when your term is up, you go back to normal life and work.

Nathan Heller has an interesting piece about the author in the New Yorker.

On my reading list.

My commonplace booklet

James Payne’s trailer for his YouTube treatment of Alice in Wonderland in his ‘Great Books Explained’ series.

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Last rose of Summer?

I wonder. Taken the other day in very bright evening sunshine.

Quote of the Day

”To achieve greatness, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

• Leonard Bernstein

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jackson Browne & Billy Strings | Running On Empty (live), San Francisco, Sept. 29, 2022

Link

Long Read of the Day

How Generative AI reduces the world to stereotypes

Way back in February, Ted Chiang likened ChatGPT to “a blurry JPEG of the Web”. It’s a nice metaphor but maybe a bit too generous. LLMs are more like blurry JPEGs of lots of stereotypes. That, at any rate, is the conclusion that the admirable Rest of World site came to when it analysed 3,000 AI images produced by Generative AIs to see how these tools visualise different countries and cultures.

The results — outlined in a visually imaginative report are fascinating — and depressing. And instructive. They remind me of something I overheard a while ago: “If you want to know what the Internet thinks, just ask ChatGPT.”

This is well worth your time. Thanks to Sheila Hayman for spotting it.

My commonplace booklet

 After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff

Wow! Stack Overflow used to be one of the wonders of the online world. But ChatGPT. Now, according to ArsTechnica,

Stack Overflow used to be every developer’s favorite site for coding help, but with the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, chatbots can offer more specific help than a 5-year-old forum post ever could. You can get instant corrections to your exact code, optimization suggestions, and explanations of what each line of code is doing. While no chatbot is 100 percent reliable, code has the unique ability to be instantly verified by just testing it in your IDE (integrated development environment), which makes it an ideal use case for chatbots. Where exactly does that leave sites like Stack Overflow? Apparently, not in a great situation. Today, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff.

Errata

In last Friday’s edition I reproduced the first two stanzas of W.H. Auden’t great poem 1 September, 1939 and wrongly stated that it had been composed on the first day of World War II. Not so, says Pam Appleby (Whom God Preserve) who wrote to point out that the war started on September 3, and that she remembers the day well: she was 11 at the time! So, thanks to her, and apologies to readers everywhere.

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