Webbed!

Yeah, well it’s been cold round here.

Quote of the Day

”Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to free speech is as deep as Exxon’s commitment to clean energy.”

• Dave Karpf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Norah Jones | Don’t Know Why

Link

Long Read of the Day

Wrecking Balls

Tina Brown is on Substack, and bloody good she is too. Here’s how her latest blast opens:

In Trump Season Two, deranged masculinity is all the rage. It’s as if the New Orleans truck ramming and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion were the overture to what comes next. The former decorated Green Beret who chose to blow himself up in one of Elon Musk’s 6,000-pound electric cyber-monsters outside a Trump hotel could not have provided a more fitting pre-credit sequence for the new era. We are all playthings now in Elon’s daily Circus Maximus as he hurls his thunderbolts not just at us, but at the Brits, the Norwegians, and the Germans. “Don’t feed the troll,” warned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is now about to be out on his ass. Ditto Canada’s friendly feminist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dubbed by Musk “an insufferable tool,” who jumped yesterday before he was pushed…

Includes a pic of the Cybertruck inferno next to the entrance to Trump’s pad.

Note to No 10: one speed doesn’t fit all when it comes to online safety

Yesterday’s Observer column:

London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed (LFGSS) is an admirable online community of fixed-gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London. Sadly, this columnist does not qualify for membership: he doesn’t reside in (or near) the metropolis, and he requires a number of gears to tackle even the gentlest of inclines – and therefore admires hardier cyclists who disdain the assistance of Sturmey-Archer or Campagnolo hardware.

There is, however, bad news on the horizon. After Sunday 16 March, LFGSS will be no more. Dee Kitchen, the software wizard (and cyclist) who is the core developer of Microcosm, a platform for running non-commercial, non-profit, privacy-sensitive, accessible online forums such as LFGSS, has announced that on that date he will “delete the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, and effectively immediately end the approximately 300 small communities that I run, and the few large communities such as LFGSS”.…

Read on

Books, etc.

The Great Gatsby was published 100 years ago this Spring

Richard Ford wrote this about it:

“I believe it is one of the maturest, more sophisticated and seamless books I have read, and I don’t fault myself for not getting it back in 1964, since it has, I think, more to teach an older man than a young one.”

My commonplace booklet

John Banville, the distinguished Irish critic and novelist, is working on his memoirs.

The writer toiled as a subeditor in the 1970s. Recounting this period in the interview, he recalled returning home late one night to his then wife, the American artist Janet Dunham, who died in 2021.

“Janet had been asleep for hours and the house was in total darkness, so I didn’t turn any lights on. I just got undressed and crept into bed beside her, this lovely, warm body. And she turned over and things got amorous, as they do. Given the circumstances, it was quite quick and quiet, you know. And afterwards there was a bit of a pause, and then, with her superb sense of comic timing, my wife said: ‘John, is that you?’”

From a lovely Guardian interview

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• How Ernest Wright Makes Scissors.. Ever noticed how terrible mass-produced scissors are? Me too. Which is why I loved this video. The Kutrite model is what emerges from the production process. It might seem expensive, but it’ll last your lifetime, and maybe your grandchildrens’ too.

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Bread — and Circuses?

Arles, on a July evening in 2022

Quote of the Day

”Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”

• Clay Shirky (in Here Comes Everybody)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Decemberists | January Hymn

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to solve a problem like Elon Musk

Peter Geoghegan on why European democracies need to start taking action against foreign interference.

That elections should be protected from outside interference is a core principle in many modern democracies. In Britain, foreign donations are prohibited. It’s the same in the United States, France, Ireland and numerous other countries.

We are, however, quickly discovering the limits of the rules and regulations that are supposed to protect our democracies.

Especially when the foreign interference is coming from a multi-billionaire who has complete control over a social media platform where many voters get their information.

Few realised it at the time, but Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X in 2022 has given him an unrivalled power to influence politics. His increasingly erratic attacks on governments and public institutions are fast becoming the biggest driver of the news agenda.

Politicians are being forced to react…

Good piece by a great journalist. Time to think about using the Online Safety Act to regulate Musk’s abusive tweeting on Twitter/X

Books, etc.

Shapiro picked up an abused-looking iPhone from his desk. “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” Assigning “Middlemarch” in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.

James Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, talking to Nathan Heller in “The End of the English Major”

My commonplace booklet

A cautionary tale for Wall Street from China

From Stella Yifan Xie in Nikkei…

China has issued a directive to the country’s brokerage firms as it aims to change perceptions of its flagging economy: monitor speeches by top economists and fire them if necessary. Chief economists at Chinese brokerages must “play a positive role in interpreting government policies and boost investor confidence,” the industry watchdog Securities Association of China (SAC) told its members last week, according to the state-run financial newspaper Securities Times. However, if the individuals have “repeatedly triggered reputational risk over inappropriate commentaries or behaviors” within a certain period of time or caused “major negative impacts,” the company shall “severely deal with the person until termination of employment,” said the notice, without elaborating on the definition of inappropriate comments. The order marks a fresh attempt by Beijing to rekindle confidence and hasten growth by avoiding negative takes on the world’s second-largest economy. But some analysts and economists are concerned that censorship would only deepen the public’s frustration over the economy’s sluggish performance and increase the risk of policy missteps. One Chinese economist at a bank received an internal warning in recent months, in part for making public comments on the economy, Nikkei Asia learned. … At the annual economic work conference last year, Beijing urged officials to promote the “bright theory” of the economy, as it battled against a property market meltdown and slumping stocks. The country’s top intelligence agency warned the public against those who “denigrate China’s economy through false narratives.” Negative commentaries and articles about the state of the economy have vanished from Chinese media.

This should be interesting to some of the free-booting Tech capitalists fawning upon Trump. The First Amendment might come back to bite them when they seek to redact Wall Street analysts’ reports that are critical of their companies!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

 Jimmy Carter Says Best Part of Heaven is He Will Never See Trump

From Andy Borowitz…

HEAVEN (The Borowitz Report) — In a wide-ranging interview on Thursday, former President Jimmy Carter said that the best part of Heaven “by far” is the knowledge that he will never see Donald J. Trump again.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for the gift of eternal life,” he said. “But an eternity without Trump is the greatest gift of all.”

Carter said that he was “far from alone” in appreciating his Trump-free existence, adding, “Nelson Mandela just said the same thing.”

Asked if he had seen Trump on cable news criticizing his sale of the Panama Canal, Carter responded, “We don’t have cable news up here. I’ve heard it’s on nonstop in the other place.”

Seen and/or heard

In a friend’s guest bedroom.

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Window art

What a window-blind! Spotted on a walk through town after dusk the other night. Made my day.

Quote of the Day

”It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

• Frederic Jameson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

William Kroll | Banjo and Fiddle | Jennifer Pike with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales | BBC Proms, 2014

Link

Long Read of the Day

”Students who use AI as a crutch don’t learn anything” 

Transcript of an interesting El Pais interview with Ethan Mollick who is one of the most interesting and insightful writers on ‘AI’. He teaches at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, and from the outset has viewed the technology as an augmentation of human capabilities. His book, Co-Intelligence is one of the books I recommend to teachers who ask me how they can get up to speed on the technology.

Here’s a sample:

Q. You say that the best experts of the future will be those who make the most use of AI. Are people who are waiting to use AI making a mistake?

A. I get it, it’s an unnerving technology. People are freaking out. They’re getting a sense of three sleepless nights and running away screaming. It feels like an essential threat to a lot of careers. I think if you’re a good journalist, the first time you think, “oh no.” But then you start to see how this could help you do things better than before. And at least for the next few generations, it’s not going to replace you, even though the technologists say it is. We need to separate from the Silicon Valley noise. On one hand they’re completely right: this is a miraculous incredible technology that emulates thinking, but the other is it doesn’t understand our jobs….

Books, etc.

Diane Coyle’s Books of the Year

My colleague Diane Coyle has a terrific blog, The Enlightened Economist, which is one of the wonders of the world. It consists entirely of Diane’s reviews of the books she’s been reading. That may sound dull, but, believe me, it’s the opposite. As well as being a distinguished economist she’s also a voracious and perceptive reader. Her reviews are succinct and insightful, and often lead me to buying (or borrowing) books I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Every year, Diane publishes a shortlist of candidates for the ‘Book of the Year’ prize. The shortlist for the 2024 candidates is here. The 2024 prize (a free lunch, on Diane) has gone to the author(s) of two winning tomes: The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies; and The Ordinal Society by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy.

Diane’s reviews of the books are here and here. And she herself has a new book coming in April.

My commonplace booklet

When he retired to Edinburgh in 1769, David Hume wrote to a friend:

I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old House in James’s Court, which is very chearful and even elegant, but too small to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life; I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt for making Soupe à la Reine, copy’d with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me. I make also Sheep head Broth in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of it for eight days…

From Kieran Setiya.

A big deal in an age when everyone of Hume’s status employed a cook and did no cooking.

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Snowscape

A Cambridge scene that makes me think of L.S.Lowry, even though Cambridge is the last place Lowry would have though of painting.

Quote of the Day

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible”

• Margaret Drabble

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | “Better”

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Capital, AGI, and human ambition

I’ve been writing about technology and its impact on society for longer than I care to admit, and when someone once asked me what I was trying to do with my Observer column, I replied that I’m trying to break away from “the sociology of the last five minutes” (a phrase I got from the sociologist Michael Mann), which seemed to me the besetting sin of most tech journalism. Unsurprisingly, then, I’m constantly drawn to thinkers who try to take the long view of what’s happening to us — like the author of this remarkable essay who goes under the enigmatic pen-name ‘L Rudolf L’.

It’s about what could happen to us in the longer run if ‘AI’ gets a grip on society.

The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).

I will walk through consequences of this, and end up concluding that labour-replacing AI means:

1. The ability to buy results in the real world will dramatically go up

2. Human ability to wield power in the real world will dramatically go down (at least without money); including because:

• there will be no more incentive for states, companies, or other institutions to care about humans

• it will be harder for humans to achieve outlier outcomes relative to their starting resources

1. Radical equalising measures are unlikely

Overall, this points to a neglected downside of transformative AI: that society might become permanently static, and that current power imbalances might be amplified and then turned immutable.

Long but interesting throughout, and worth your time IMO.

My commonplace booklet

Ever since I lived and worked in the Netherlands in the 1970s (and seen how urban design and construction can be done well) I’ve been astonished by the abysmal standards of house-building of the British construction industry. But it turns out I only knew the half of it. Here’s an example from a Guardian piece about the industry which took even me by surprise:

British domestic architecture has also been shaped by idiosyncratic rules that contribute to its poor environmental credentials. For instance, in many parts of the UK, homes that face each other at the rear are required to be built 21 metres apart. This large distance means that instead of clustering buildings together around cool courtyards or shady streets, as is common in hotter climates, many homes in new neighbourhoods are directly exposed to the sun.

The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.

 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!

New beginnings

Quote of the Day

”The more machines start to ’reason’ the more unpredictable they will become.”

• Ilya Sutskever (in his NuIPS 2024 Keynote)

Just like humans, really.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland | at the Ateneul Roman, Bucharest

Link

Wonderful performance by the greatest piper of my lifetime, of the final movement of Shaun Davey’s orchestral suite, The Brendan Voyage.

Seems appropriate as we embark on our own hazardous voyage into a Trumpian future.

Long Read of the Day

 Jimmy Carter: An unlucky President and a Lucky Man

A nice memoir in The Atlantic by the distinguished journalist, James Fallows, who worked for Carter.

Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person…

What Hunter Thompson saw in Carter

That he was much shrewder and tougher than people realised. Thompson spotted this way before anyone else. His epiphany came when covering a speech that Carter gave to the assembled worthies of the Georgia and Atlanta Bar in which he excoriated the legal profession in terms no normal politician would use. Thompson wrote it up in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, the book that some people think won Carter the presidency.

Here’s a fascinating video about that epiphany.

As it happens, I once got into trouble because of Jimmy Carter. I told the story on my audio ‘Lockdown Diary’ for March 30, 2020.

If you’re interested, you can listen to it here.

My commonplace booklet

Why social media have an inordinate impact on contemporary politics

Insightful observation by Yascha Mounk. Basically, politicians and mainstream media forget that the people who inhabit Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky et al are a weird and unrepresentative sample of the electorate.

People spend an enormous amount of time and attention on social media today. But the real reason some platforms now influence everything including the contours of public discourse and the American presidential election is not that your cousin is addicted to Instagram; it is that key decision makers mistake the opinions of a small number of politically engaged—and ideologically extreme—people on social media for the views of the general public.

In decades past, newspaper editors knew that cranks and extremists were more likely to submit letters than average readers; they therefore took their opinions with a large grain of salt. Today, decision makers are obsessed with the modern-day descendants of those cranks. The recognition that Twitter and similar platforms do not represent the real world, however, might lessen the political influence of social media.

Feedback

My choice of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (composed as a birthday gift to Cosima) for Monday’s music slot prompted Tom Parkhill to send a link to an account of whom the Wagners had invited for Christmas that year — none other than Herr Friedrich Nietzsche who, it seems, had been in love with Cosima but Wagner had married her while the philosopher was on military service. Hmmm…

Cosima was … delighted with her Christmas gift from Nietzsche: the manuscript of The Birth of the Tragic Concept, an early draft of the philosopher’s own The Birth of Tragedy. In the evenings, Wagner read passages aloud. Wagner and Cosima praised it as being “of the greatest value and excellence.” Nietzsche purred…

He was the only guest and stayed eight days. I’m just thinking what a playwright like Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn could do with this account of Christmas Day in a villa on Lake Lucerne.

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Lest we forget

The Cambridge American Cemetery on a dull December day. It contains 3,809 headstones, with the remains of 3,812 servicemen, including airmen who died over Europe and sailors from North Atlantic convoys. The long wall on the right records the names of 5,127 missing servicemen, most of whom died in the Battle of the Atlantic and in the strategic air bombardment of northwest Europe. One of the names is that of the band-leader Glenn Miller.

Wikipedia says:

In 1943, the University of Cambridge gave 30.5 acres of land on the north slope of Madingley Hill to the American military forces for use as a temporary cemetery during World War II. After the war, the American Battle Monuments Commission chose Cambridge as the site for America’s permanent World War II cemetery and war memorial in the United Kingdom. America’s war dead from three temporary cemeteries in the British Isles were consolidated in the Cambridge cemetery during an extensive cemetery construction project, and simultaneously the United States government repatriated about 58% of the existing war dead at the request of their surviving family members. Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial was dedicated on 16 July 1956.

It’s a beautifully maintained but sobering place, and worth a visit if you’re ever in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.”

• La Rochefoucauld

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Sail Away

Link

Long Read of the Day

Maggie Smith remembered by David Hare

Lovely tribute to a great actress by a great playwright.

At the turn of the century, I wrote a play, The Breath of Life, in which Maggie appeared opposite Judi Dench. One night at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Hillary Clinton came with Madeleine Albright. They were both seated on time, but Bill Clinton and Chelsea, delayed by traffic, joined them in the middle of first act. Next day, I was eager to find out what the Clintons had been like. Judi had received them in her dressing room and been swept away by their charm. When I went to ask Maggie what she thought of them, she said she had refused to meet them. “Do you think I’m going to shake hands with anyone who’s late for your play?”

Maggie’s exact phrasing has stayed with me, because it was the use of the word “your” that pierced my heart. It is one thing to reject the opportunity to meet the most famous people in the world, but to do so from unforced loyalty to a playwright tells you everything you need to know about Maggie’s character…

Do read it.

AI as the Miss Moneypenny of the 21st century

Yesterday’s Observer column:

If 2024 was the year of large language models (LLMs), then 2025 looks like the year of AI “agents”. These are quasi-intelligent systems that harness LLMs to go beyond their usual tricks of generating plausible text or responding to prompts. The idea is that an agent can be given a high-level – possibly even vague – goal and break it down into a series of actionable steps. Once it “understands” the goal, it can devise a plan to achieve it, much as a human would.

OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, recently explained it thus to the Financial Times: “It could be a researcher, a helpful assistant for everyday people, working moms like me. In 2025, we will see the first very successful agents deployed that help people in their day to day.” Or it’s like having a digital assistant “that doesn’t just respond to your instructions but is able to learn, adapt, and perhaps most importantly, take meaningful actions to solve problems on your behalf”. In other words, Miss Moneypenny on steroids…

Read on

Books, etc.

The Cult of Jordan Peterson

From a nicely acerbic Economist review of Peterson’s latest 560-page doorstop, We Who Wrestle with God.

On November 18th a crowd gathered for the first night of his book tour in a village near New York City. It felt more like a concert. There was merch (Peterson posters and mugs) and a guitar warm-up act. When he came on stage, in a three-piece linen suit, the crowd — by no means all young or male -—whooped. The subject for this evening’s sermon, he told the congregation of fans, was sacrifice.

An entire Peterson industry has flourished for those willing to sacrifice their money: there is a Jordan Peterson newsletter (“Mondays of Meaning”), a “Peterson Academy” ($500 a year gets you lectures on manly things by people with beards) and a “self-authoring programme”. People who spend time writing about themselves, it promises, “become happier, less anxious and depressed”. Who knew? Certainly not Ernest Hemingway or Virginia Woolf—or, apparently, Jordan Peterson. As he reached the climax of the evening’s talk, his voice cracked. He is famous for weeping in speeches: YouTube offers a video compilation of “Jordan Peterson crying”.

Mr Peterson’s new book is as old-fashioned as his appearance. It reads as if it “could have been written in the 1950s”, says a publisher. Or, indeed, the 1850s…

Lovely.

My commonplace booklet

Patrick Collison, the Irish co-founder of Stripe, is that rare bird, a Tech billionaire and a keen reader. This year he’s read Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain. His reflections are here.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  English Wikipedia’s most popular articles of 2024 Link

If you haven’t donated to support Wikipedia, maybe you should. I do, because I use it every day — as you can tell from the links on this newsletter. It’s even more important to support it now, given that Elon Musk is targeting it as one of the sources of information that he can’t control.

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A Modernist duck-pond

In the gardens of the Barbican Centre.

Quote of the Day

”God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; Give me courage to change things which must be changed; And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.”

• Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner | Siegfried Idyll | Frankfurt Radio Symphony orchestra

Link

Entrancing. According to Wikipedia, Wagner composed it as a birthday present to his second wife, Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869. It was first performed on Christmas morning, 25 December 1870, by a small ensemble of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich on the stairs of their villa at Tribschen (today part of Lucerne), Switzerland. Cosima awoke to its opening melody. Not a bad way to start your day.

Long Read of the Day

AI Fight Club and what it hides

One of the most annoying things about the present moment is how it seems almost impossible to have a sane discussion about Large Language Models (LLMs) — or indeed about Generative AI generally. If you say that this is a powerful and interesting technology that needs to be taken seriously, then your ear is chewed off with a litany of downsides, dangers, complaints about corporate over-reach, environmental degradation and so on. On the other hand, if you observe that the technology has worrying flaws and that the corporations that own and control it are risks to democracy — and to the climate — then you get sneered at by VCs and boosters as an enemy of our old friend, ‘progress’.

Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) has written an interesting blog post in which he navigates these choppy waters with his customary adroitness.

My current cause for vexation is the controversy over AllDayTA.com, a new Large Language Model (LLM) based service for professors. Many academics are unhappy that this technology exists, and have expressed their feelings about the service’s creators (who are themselves academics) in plain and forceful language. The service’s creators have expressed their own unhappiness in turn.

Like so many other disputes, this one was swiftly pulled into the all-devouring maelstrom of what I call “AI Fight Club,” a ritualized combat, waged bout after bout between two highly stylized positions…

Do read the whole piece.

Books, etc.

Rory Cellan Jones is a journalist I’ve liked and admired for years, and when his wife Diane Coyle told me he’d written a book about a dog I was intrigued. So I bought it and am delighted I did. It’s the story of how he and Diane got a rescue dog from Romania which turned out to be chronically terrified of everything, and of how they were gradually able to cure the animal’s terror while their progress was being followed by hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. It’s beautifully written, and interweaves the story of Rory’s struggle with Parkinson’s with the tale of Sophie’s emergence into the light. If you’re looking a good news story in the midst of the current gloom, then this might be it.

In February last Rory was in Cambridge at his alma mater (Jesus College), and when we were going in to the event I suddenly noticed him making a last-minute phone call before going in to the auditorium for a public conversation with a couple of students before an invited audience.

My commonplace booklet

From The Economist:

To track academic writing over time, The Economist analysed 347,000 PhD abstracts published between 1812 and 2023. The dataset was produced by the British Library and represents a majority of English-language doctoral theses awarded by British universities. We reviewed each abstract using the Flesch reading-ease test, which measures sentence and word length to gauge readability. A score of 100 roughly indicates passages can be understood by someone who has completed fourth grade in America (usually aged 9 or 10), while a score lower than 30 is considered very difficult to read. An average New York Times article scores around 50 and a CNN article around 70. This article scores 41.

From “asymmetric allylation of aldehydes” to “pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations”, PhD abstracts had an unmistakably scholarly aroma. We found that, in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences (see chart), with average Flesch scores falling from around 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. From the 1990s onwards, those fields went from being substantially more readable than the natural sciences—as you might expect—to as complicated.

I’m not surprised, but abstracts are generally denser than the texts they describe, so the situation might not be as bad as the piece suggests.

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