Monday 19 May, 2025

Lending a hand


Quote of the Day

”Life is a picnic on a precipice.”

  • W.H. Auden

 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Overture to Egmont | Kurt Masur and the Gewandhaus Orchestra

Link


 

Moving fast and breaking things wasn’t always a recipe for destruction

This week’s Observer column:

Reid Hoffman’s best-known book is Blitzscaling, which he co-wrote with Chris Yeh. When Hoffman talks about its striking title, he acknowledges its unsavoury echoes of the blitzkrieg, the innovative form of warfare practised by Germany in the 1940s. “Before blitzkrieg… armies didn’t advance beyond their supply lines, which limited their speed. The theory of the blitzkrieg was that if you carried only what you absolutely needed, you could move very, very fast, surprise your enemies, and win.

“Once you got halfway to your destination, you had to decide whether to turn back or to abandon the lines and go on. Once you made the decision to move forward, you were all in. You won big or lost big. Blitzscaling adopts a similar perspective.”

It’s about prioritising growth above everything else. It involves taking more risks than is prudent, making mistakes all the time but learning and recovering from them quickly, stressing people out with the aim of getting so many users that potential competitors lose their nerve. And it’s not for the faint-hearted: those seeking a healthy work-life balance need not apply.

Which, oddly enough, describes what it’s like to work for Elon Musk, who is possibly the most difficult boss on the planet…

Read on


 

Long Read of the Day

The Last Humanist: Nicholas Carr on What the Digital Age Can’t Replace

Screenshot

Erik J Larson’s long, thoughtful review of Nicholas Carr’s new book.

In an era where “content” is measured less by substance than by shareability, Nicholas Carr remains a rare figure: a cultural critic who engages the digital age without succumbing to its tempo. His work resists the attention economy even as it dissects it, a kind of elegant irony that seems increasingly scarce. Carr writes not to provoke but to understand—a posture that feels almost antique in the age of the algorithm. If most Internet writing today is tuned to the viral frequency of outrage or affirmation, Carr’s essays hum at a different register: explanatory, deliberate, steeped in a long view.

Reading Carr, one is reminded of an earlier generation of critics—Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag—figures who treated technology not merely as a suite of tools but as a cultural atmosphere. Like them, Carr asks how our instruments change us. And like them, he brings a literary sensibility to his diagnosis, eschewing jargon for prose that is as precise as it is lucid. If Carr sometimes seems out of step with the dominant cultural tempo, it’s because he’s marching to a longer rhythm. That’s exactly what makes him so essential…

In the early days of the Web, Carr was one of the network’s most persuasive public intellectuals. Like Larson, I saw him as a continuation of the cultural criticism practised by Neil Postman, Eric Mumford, Marshall McLuhan et al. I read everything he published, and photographed him at a book-launch event for him in October 2010 at Toppings wonderful bookshop in Ely.

But then — as Larson observes in the essay, he disappeared from view. So it’s thrilling that he’s back in print, and Superbloom has joined my reading list.


My commonplace booklet

Neal Stephenson has a Substack. If you want to know why this is interesting news, try it. It is, he says “Mostly about the intersection of tech and art, with some excursions, digressions, and tangents”. Which, for those of us who admire his work, is reason enough. I first discovered him when I read his essay on Linux — “In the Beginning Was The Command Line” — aeons ago.


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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!


Friday 16 May, 2025

Lake view

Killarney, sometimes known as “Ireland’s Lake District”.


Quote of the Day

”A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.”

  • Thomas Macaulay

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper (as Evelyn Waugh might have said).


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sibelius | Impromptu for Strings Op. 5

Link

Mesmerising. And fascinating to follow the score.


Long Read of the Day

 Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

One of the things that really bothers me at the moment is the way Humanities teachers and scholars seem to be freaked out by LLMs and ‘AI’ generally.

Which is why I was exhilarated to find this fabulous New Yorker essay by D. Graham Burnett. It’s long, but worth it. Here’s how he sets it up:

Let me offer a dispatch from the impact zone. When I first asked a class of thirty Princeton undergraduates—spanning twelve majors—whether any had used A.I., not a single hand went up. Same with my graduate students. Even after some enthusiastic prodding (“Hey! I use these tools! They’re incredible! Let’s talk about this!”), I got nowhere.

It’s not that they’re dishonest; it’s that they’re paralyzed. As one quiet young woman explained after class, nearly every syllabus now includes a warning: Use ChatGPT or similar tools, and you’ll be reported to the academic deans. Nobody wants to risk it. Another student mentioned that a major A.I. site may even be blocked on the university network, though she was too nervous to test the rumor.

In one department on campus, a recently drafted anti-A.I. policy, read literally, would actually have barred faculty from giving assignments to students that centered on A.I. (It was ultimately revised.) Last year, when some distinguished alums and other worthies conducted an external review of the history department, a top recommendation was that we urgently address the looming A.I. disruptions to our teaching and research. This suggestion got a notably cool reception. But the idea that we can just keep going about our business won’t do, either.

On the contrary, staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular…

It is. And we have to get past what Henry Farrell calls “the AI Fight Club” to use these tools as the ‘cultural technologies’ that they are.


So many books, so little time

Reid Hoffman was in Cambridge last week, and I went to an event in which he was the star guest and was intrigued by one of the books he’s written or co-authored over the last decade.

Screenshot

It’s a book he wrote in conjunction with GPT-4, so it’s a kind of ongoing conversation between human and machine. I’m half-way through, and am impressed. It’s an example of a creative partnership at work. Not quite Lennon and McCartney, but interesting nevertheless. We’ll see a lot more of this, and it was astute of Hoffman to spot it early.


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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!


Wednesday 14 May, 2025

Floater

An experiment in depth-of-field.


Quote of the Day

”Never underestimate the confidence of a mediocre man.”

  • Rebecca Solnit

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Miles Davis | Autumn Leaves

Link

I know, I know: it’s not Autumn. But I really like this piece.


Long Read of the Day

 Blitzscaling for tyrants

Terrific essay by Henry Farrell on “the lightning-fast path to tearing down due process” currently being followed in the US.

Here are some features of DOGE’s approach to changing government:

DOGE looks to scale through data. Humans don’t scale well – hiring and firing take time and come with a lot of politics. Data and algorithms can be scaled up much more easily.

DOGE is highly tolerant of mistakes. You can’t build big and build quickly without making messes along the way.

DOGE looks to overwhelm the opposition before the opposition can even figure out what is happening. Scale up fast enough, and you will be able to set the rules of the game before the other players even realize that there is a game to win.

DOGE relies on a small elite team to completely reshape a much larger organization.

DOGE is hostile to regulation. Rules are made to be broken.

Guess where those ideas came from. Read on…


My commonplace booklet

The French company Mistral has released its own chatbot. It’s called Le Chat, which is nicely ambiguous.

I really enjoyed how the company demonstrated its image-generation capacity.


Corporate nomenclature

Sheila Hayman (Who God Preserve) pointed me to (where else?) Wikipedia.

A popular poster for The Three Stooges features the Stooges as bumbling members of such a firm, with the actual episode using the name “Dewey, Burnham, and Howe”. The 2012 Three Stooges film uses this example, among similar ones such as proctologists “Proba, Keister, and Wince”, divorce lawyers “Ditcher, Quick, and Hyde”, and attorneys at law “Kickham, Harter, and Indagroyne”. In the film Heavenly Daze, Moe and Larry deal with a crooked attorney named “I. Fleecem” (I fleece ’em). Catherine O’Hara used the phrase in the premiere 1986 edition of HBO’s telethon “Comic Relief”, and Soupy Sales claimed that it was the name of his law firm in 1972. “Sue, Grabbitt and Runne” recurred in the British satirical magazine Private Eye. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, of NPR’s Car Talk radio program, named their business corporation “Dewey, Cheetham & Howe”. In 2001, a banker in Texas, who had experience coming up with gag names for staff training, reported a cashier’s check to the FBI when he noticed it was payable to “Howe” or “Howie Dewey Cheatham”, leading to the client’s conviction for money laundering and fraud.


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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!


Monday 12 May, 2025

The Loner


Quote of the Day

”I drink to make other people more interesting.”

  • Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Sonata in G Major HWV 363a | IV. Bourreé

Link

I heard my wife playing this yesterday and thought it’d be a cheery way to start the week.


Long Read of the Day

Two long reads today, both about the Catholic Church and strange things that are going on around it. One is Colm Toibín’s LRB essay about the street-wisdom of the late Pope Francis. The other is Róisín Lanigan’s fine Observer column about the creepy way Catholicism is suddenly cool and chic for reactionary conservatives in the US and elsewhere. These two trends come together in the person of J.D. Vance, a recent high-profile convert to the Church of Rome.

Toibín is very perceptive on the late Pontiff’s dislike of Vance & Co, who came to Rome ostensibly to see him.

Since the pope was ill, he had every excuse not to see Vance. While it’s tempting to claim that the sight of Vance, all humble and obsequious, might have hastened Francis’s demise, it would be more plausible to suppose that seeing Vance for a few minutes, and hearing his expressions of gratitude, allowed the pope to die slightly more content. The footage of Vance being received by the ailing and unsmiling pope, with Vance looking like an attack Chihuahua who had lost the will to live, must have given the pontiff and his followers some comfort. The meeting ended with a gift of Easter eggs for the three Vance children and Vance saying that he would pray for the pope. Vance’s prayers go far. Attentive readers will know that the last time Vance’s prayers were reported, they had been to seek the ‘victory’ of US military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. He did this in a Signal chat with other members of the Trump administration on 15 March, a chat that was shared with the editor of the Atlantic magazine.

But even if Vance went away with his tail between his legs just as Francis ascended to heaven, his antics make clear how deeply divided American Catholicism is. By concentrating on the plight of immigrants and by openly opposing the Trump regime, the Church has, for the main part, embraced the poor. The problem is that many American Catholics are not poor; they include six members of the Supreme Court – all the justices save Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The fact that John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor are all Catholic may speak to the idea of diversity and variety within the Church, but it also shows how little Catholics in America have in common with one another. These justices may agree on the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth and the Assumption, on transubstantiation and the divinity of Jesus, but hardly on abortion law, the death penalty and the right to shoot up a school.

In an interview on his way to Francis’s funeral, Trump boasted that he received 56 per cent of the Catholic vote at the last election. Which he did, a 9 per cent increase on 2020…

At this point, I suddenly remembered something an academic friend had told me. He had been on a fundraising tour for his (Irish) university a couple of years ago, and one of the events was a lunch with a group of ultra-rich Catholics in Texas. At one stage, he mentioned Pope Francis admiringly, only to be interrupted by the wife of one of the potential donors who shouted that “Francis is a communist!”

Cue Róisín’s column. She’s been wondering where all these new catholics are coming from. Answer: from the political Right

I would not mind the Catholicism boom if it was strictly down to this perception of coolness. In some circles of the internet, being a young Catholic is simply a kind of cosplay, a new genre for theatre kids who a decade ago might have been dressing up as the Doctor or running Sherlock blogs or saying that they believe themselves to be wolves. There’s an odd sexual undertone to it all, sure: kneeling by bedsides; twiddling Rosary beads between cleavage; dressing solely in slip dresses and knee socks; communicating that you’re not allowed to have sex before marriage while constantly oozing a sort of Nabokovian, Virgin Suicides vibe from your every alabaster-skinned pore – but it’s ultimately harmless. It’s dark academia for bored Protestants who spend too much time on Pinterest.

The aesthetic appeal is understandable, but sadly, that’s not all there is to it. Some newbies take Catholicism Very Seriously Indeed. They know the theology. They’ve read the Bible (nobody I know has ever read the Bible). They love Latin Mass (again, weird). They think we need to go back to basics, toughen up, remember our fire-and-brimstone roots. For those on the right, Catholicism can offer a fast-track to a number of things; not just traditionalism and aestheticism – a sort of mystic chicness – but also a cloak for less than savoury unpopular opinions. The alliance between the Catholic church and the new Republican era in the US is not just theatrical and embarrassing, it’s chilling. It’s emboldened the public endorsement of reactionary and sinister ideas, particularly from the pro-life lobby.

These are interesting essays, not least because — as Toibín notes at one point — in an interview on his way to Pope Francis’s funeral, Trump boasted that he received 56 per cent of the Catholic vote at the last election. Which he did, a 9 per cent increase on 2020.


Lessons of Europe’s blackout moment

This week’s Observer column:

Electricity grids are the most complicated large machines in the world – systems into which millions of different units (generators) inject power, which is then distributed to billions of end users. Grids are also the most critical machines societies possess because, when electricity is cut off, suddenly nothing, but nothing works.

If you doubt that, try talking to any one of the 768,000 Irish citizens who were abruptly disconnected by Storm Éowyn in January – some of them for up to 17 days. Or ask Ukrainians, whose grid Vladimir Putin has been trying to destroy since 2022.

In some ways, though, grids are also surprisingly delicate, and therefore potentially fragile. This is because they are synchronous machines: every component part has to be in sync with all the others. How come? Basically, because the electricity they transmit and distribute comes in the form of alternating current, or AC, which periodically reverses direction and changes its magnitude continuously with time.

In Europe, this happens 50 times a second, or at a frequency of 50 hertz, which means that every device on the system has to keep time with that metronome. If it doesn’t, bad things happen very quickly…

Read on


My Commonplace booklet

The historian Niall Ferguson had an interesting reflection on Trump’s attack on Harvard.

The pen is sometimes mightier than the sword, the gown more powerful than the crown. King James II learnt this the hard way in 1687 when he attempted to impose a new president on the fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford. The college still celebrates its victory over the last Stuart monarch each year at its Restoration dinner.

James had thought he could insert a Roman Catholic as president. The fellows refused, instead electing one of their own number, John Hough. The king would not stand for it, though he picked a less controversial candidate for president: Samuel Parker, the Bishop of Oxford. He even went to Oxford in person and harangued the fellows, as Macaulay recounts in his History of England. “You have not dealt with me like gentlemen,” exclaimed the King. “You have been unmannerly as well as undutiful … Go home. Get you gone. I am King. I will be obeyed. Go to your chapel this instant; and admit the Bishop of Oxford. Let those who refuse look to it. They shall feel the whole weight of my hand. They shall know what it is to incur the displeasure of their Sovereign.”

On October 20, three royal commissioners (with three troops of horse) arrived at Magdalen. Bishop Parker was forcibly installed. On November 15, twenty-five fellows were expelled and declared incapable of receiving any future ecclesiastical employment. And yet the king had overreached… Hough was restored to the presidency on October 25, 1688, and the fellows to their seats at high table. Just 11 days later, at the invitation of a group of Protestant aristocrats, James’s son-in-law William of Orange landed at Brixham. On December 23, James fled to France.

So here’s the question du jour: who will be the USA’s King Billy (as he is still known to some in Northern Ireland).

Corporate nomenclature

The flow of intriguing business names continues. John Skrine mentioned Wright Hassal. Andrew Arends thought that the American firm Dewey, Cheetham and Howe might be a contender. Euan Williamson cited Bodgit & Scarper (allegedly a haulage firm).


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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!


Catching up…

Apologies for intruding on your Saturday morning.

Thank you for the messages wondering why my Observer columns had suddenly disappeared from this newsletter — and indeed apparently also from the Web. Some wondered darkly if it might have had something to do with the fact that the Guardian had dumped sold the Observer to Tortoise Media?

If it’s any consolation, I too initially wondered what had been going on.

As it happened, the move from one proprietor to another was involved, but the disappearance of the columns from the online edition of the paper was accidental. Tortoise had done a herculean task in creating a new Observer website from scratch under fierce deadline pressure and tagging my ’Networker’ column seems to have been one of the tasks that was accidentally overlooked.

So here are two of the ‘missing’ columns.


AI can crunch data but to evolve, it needs the human factor – learning by experience

24 April 2025

Artificial generative intelligence has taken another step forward with chatbot maker OpenAI’s latest model but it will only become truly smart by interacting with its environment OpenAI, that curious profit-making nonprofit oxymoron run by Sam Altman, recently released its newest large language model (LLM), coyly named o3. Cue the usual chorus of superlatives from Altman’s admirers. Tyler Cowen, a prominent economist who should know better, kicked off early on the theme of artificial general intelligence (AGI). “I think it is AGI, seriously,” quoth he. “Try asking it lots of questions, and then ask yourself: just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be?”

So, I dutifully asked it lots of questions, and pushed back a bit on some of its answers, and found it quicker and a bit slicker than other LLMs I regularly use. It’s multimodal – that is, it handles text, images, and audio input and output. It produces near-human speech, engages in lively interactions, and seems quite good at the kind of knowledge tasks that researchers use to test LLMs.

It can “see”, and seems to understand, images (charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs). But was it as close to AGI as Cowen thinks? Answer: no – unless one accepts the ultra-narrow definition of AGI that OpenAI uses; that it can “outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. The “G” in AGI is still missing…

Read on


Why US scientists are suddenly using ‘burner’ phones (please destroy after reading)

Sunday 4 May 2025

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a supposedly independent agency of the US federal government that was set up in 1950 to support fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering.

Today, it funds about a quarter of all federally supported basic research that goes on in American colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, the NSF is the main source of federal funding.

And in recent decades, it has devoted billions of dollars to attract more women and members of other underrepresented groups into the Stem fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

On 18 April, though, the research community that depends on the agency had a nasty shock. Henceforth, the NSF announced, those latter initiatives were “no longer aligned with its priorities” and it was terminating any existing grant designed to improve the demographics of the scientific workforce.

Oh, and grants related to “misinformation/disinformation” were also being axed because that kind of research “could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the US in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate”.

So if you were a researcher thinking of applying for funding to estimate the percentage of AI-powered bots now operating on X (neé Twitter), forget it…

Read on


Enjoy the weekend. Normal service resumes on Monday.

John

Friday 9 May, 2025

Kubrick in Venice

I took this photo to mark the moment I realised that Kubrick had been a serious photographer before he went into movies.


Quote of the Day

“Money doesn’t talk, it swears/ Obscenity, who really cares.”

  • Bob Dylan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Elgar | Nimrod

Link


Long Read of the Day

Glowing lava hardened into memory: The ends of Reinhart Koselleck’s war.

A truly remarkable translation by Adam Tooze of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck’s memoir of the ends (plural) of the Second World War as he experienced them. “The bells that rang out on May 9th, 1945, rang in the peace,” he wrote. “The question was, which peace for whom?”

The end of World War II in Europe on the night of May 8-9th 1945 was experienced in different ways. It depended on the side you were on, on the place you were in, your nationality, gender, social class and age.

Born in Görlitz Saxony in 1923, Reinhart Koselleck would later become a brilliant historian of the Enlightenment and the early 19th century, as well as preeminent theorist of history – some would say philosopher of history – of his generation in West Germany. He was the editor and intellectual inspiration behind the multi-volume Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe – a massive dictionary of conceptual history. His work best-known in English is Futures Past: On the semantics of historical time.

Do read it. It seemed to me to be the most appropriate piece to choose for yesterday’s anniversary.


So many books, so little time

This arrived yesterday. Subject matter: “The bad science and sinister ideas behind Silicon Valley’s foolish obsession with immortality, AI Paradise and limitless growth”. Which means, I guess, that it’s about how extreme wealth rots your brain. I thought that was an old story. Maybe I’ve missed something.


My commonplace booklet

Life Imitating Art

Well well. The day before the Pope’s funeral, we watched Conclave, the film based on Robert Harris’s thriller of the same name.

And guess what? We weren’t the only people wanting to get up to speed on what happens next. Politico reports that “Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave’ the movie for guidance on the actual conclave. The 2024 movie is proving a useful primer for clerics about to take part in the real thing to choose the next pope”.


Errata

Re the photograph of the nameplate of the Dutch law firm in Wednesday’s edition, my friend Gerard writes:

I’m afraid that’s incorrect, sir.

This firm whose brass plate you have photographed is located in Utrecht (not The Hague) at Nieuwegracht, just around the corner of my house. The Atlas figure on the brass plate is a picture of the Atlas statue which happens to be (for reasons unknown to me) on the roof of the house where the firm takes office.

With English having become a kind of official second language in Holland (in shops, restaurants and cafes in Amsterdam, even when one is clearly Dutch, one is standardly addressed in English – preferably its TikTok dialect), Boor, Boor & Boor will have had more comments on its name, similar to the one you made. So, a few years ago, the firm was renamed “Booor advocaten” (three o’s indeed). I’m not sure it’s an improvement. The website – www.booor.nl – mentions that the firm was founded in Utrecht, in 1945, and is currently led by three senior lawyers, all female, none of who has the surname Boor.

I’m sure that there will be more where that came from. For example, another reader told me about Argue & Phibbs, a legal firm in Co Sligo. And there’s a well-known architectural practice in Cambridge called Pleasance Hookham & Nix.


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 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!


Wednesday 7 May, 2025

Legal niceties

This is (or was when I photographed it in January 2011) the brass plate of an august Dutch law firm in The Hague. It brought to mind Private Eye’s cod London law firm, Messrs Sue, Grabbit & Run, of blessed memory.


Quote of the Day

”Everything is controlled by a small evil group to which, unfortunately, no one we know belongs.”

  • Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | I’m Beginning To See The Light

Link

I’m glad someone can.


Long Read of the Day

Kim Jong Trump

Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the date of the unconditional surrender of Nazi forces in Europe on May 8, 1945. The historian Adam Tooze had a nice piece (Gift article) on anniversaries in the Financial Times. But he didn’t anticipate how Trump would exploit the anniversary, so he’s written an interesting Substack post as a follow-on.

Basically, Trump has decided to appropriate not only VE Day but also Armistice Day (November 11) for his own purposes!

Screenshot

This isn’t just trolling, but also historical revisionism on steroids. Tooze does some nice work on itemising the extent of Trump’s authoritarian delusions, and both of his pieces are worth reading.

Also, just to underline what Trump learned from Kim Jong Un in his first term, there is going to be a huge military parade in Washington on 14 June, which happens to be the US Supreme Leader’s birthday!


My commonplace booklet

Screenshot

Matt, the Daily Telegraph’s cartoonist is a genius. He’s also just about the only reason for buying the paper.


Linkblog

Following the Trump Administration’s new-found interest in managing universities, Ryan Weber, has been getting on board with the new reality

Introducing Our University’s New, Totally Reasonable Criteria for Promotion and Tenure

Teaching

Teaching is a cornerstone of this university, as evidenced by the mission statement posted on our website, which currently leads to a 404 error page. We have no idea how to evaluate teaching, so to receive tenure, you must accomplish all of the following, plus several additional things we haven’t thought of yet:

  1. Lose a month of sleep over one negative student evaluation despite receiving thirty-seven positive comments from the same class.

  2. Win at least three teaching awards from our university and at least one teaching award from another university you don’t work at.

  3. Get students to embrace at least three disappearing cultural touchstones from your youth, such as Rocko’s Modern Life, the Cabbage Patch dance, that “Summer Girls” song by LFO, or the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito film Twins.

  4. Inspire at least twenty students to throw their lives away by going to graduate school…


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Monday 5 May, 2025

Over there

On the Donegal coast.


Quote of the Day

Last Friday’s ‘Quote of the Day’ prompted Kevin Cryan to email me about one of the most widely shared anecdotes about Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22.

At a party in the Hamptons, a friend of his remarked, “Joe, you know, this hedge fund manager makes more money in a single day than Catch-22 has made in its entire history.”

Heller, without missing a beat, replied, “That may be true, but I have something he will never have.” His friend asked, “What’s that?” Heller grinned and said, “Enough.”

— which, Kevin wrote, “highlights his wit and ability to poke fun at himself … proving that for him, success wasn’t just about financial wealth, but about creating something enduring and meaningful”.

It does. But Heller’s answer also triggered an epiphany I had way back in the 1980s. I remember asking myself the question how will I know when I earn enough?. And one gloomy November afternoon, sitting in our house in central Cambridge, I came up with the answer: “when I can buy hardback books in Heffers (then the leading bookshop in town) without worrying about the price.”


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Delorentos | Home Again

Link


Long Read of the Day

This is going to be a week of anniversaries related to the Second World War, and I thought it might be appropriate to start with a striking essay by a great military historian, Anthony Beevor. His books — on the battle of Stalingrad, and the taking of Berlin — are masterpieces, though very grim reads in places.

This essay isn’t grim in that sense. But it’s a vivid reminder that hindsight is really the only exact science.

Eighty years ago this week, American troops liberated Dachau concentration camp just north of Munich. German forces in Northern Italy surrendered. And Hitler dictated and signed his last will and testament in the bunker. Yet although the Third Reich was collapsing on every front, the end of this war, which had killed millions of human beings, still depended on the life of just one man.

The Allies had made a fundamental mistake when they believed after the bomb plot of July 1944 that an army which had tried to kill its own commander-in-chief must be in a state of collapse. What they could not grasp was that the failure to kill Hitler meant that he, the SS, Gestapo and Nazi Party would force everyone to fight on until his death. It was once again the problem of democratic confirmation bias, which prevents us from properly understanding the mentality of dictators and their entourage.

The Allies, or more specifically the Americans, made a similar mistake understanding Stalin. Roosevelt, with the arrogance of his great charm, thought he could make Stalin a friend. Eisenhower also thought that he could win Stalin’s trust by passing on his plans for the western Allies’ advance across Germany. Both were misled in return…

Hope you enjoy it.


So many books, so little time

Screenshot

Just bought this. Two reasons: (a) I really liked her earlier book The People’s Platform; and (b) Ethan Zuckerman has chosen it as a set book for his course on ‘Defending Democracy in a Digital World’ at Mass Amherst.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • Jensen Chang: ”First thing to understand: 50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese”. Link

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Friday 2 May, 2025

En vacance…

In France, in the days of The International Herald Tribune (of blessed memory).


Quote of the Day

”At the end of the day, real wealth isn’t about flashing cash. It’s about moving through the world with an invisible safety net most people don’t even realize they’re missing.”

  • Ashley Fike in Vice

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ernest Chausson | Pièce Op. 39 (1897) | Anssi Karttunen (Cello), David Lively (Piano)

Link

New to me, but I was struck by its peacefulness. And I love the cello.


Long Read of the Day

 AIxDemocracy: What are the politics of AI?

Wise and thoughtful lecture by Ethan Zuckerman. In a way, it’s really a helpful introduction to a MUCH longer piece by Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor (which is almost too long even for this section of the blog). But even if you don’t follow that link you’ll get a lot from Zuckerman’s piece. Sample:

Let’s posit for a moment that the next age is unfolding, the age of AI. What might we expect a public sphere transformed by AI to mean for democracy?

I’m going to constrain that question by embracing some language proposed by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor at Princeton, the authors of an excellent book called AI Snake Oil. Their book is not nearly as hostile towards AI as the title might suggest – it’s helpful in understanding why some areas of AI, like image generation, are developing so quickly, and others are making little if any progress, like prediction of uncommon events. Arvind and Sayash released a paper last week called “AI as Normal Technology”, which is simultaneously a description of how AI is now, a prediction of how it will evolve in the near future and a proposal for how to regulate and live with it.

Their core idea is that while AI may be important and transformative – they offer comparisons to electricity and the Internet as similarly transformative general technologies – it’s not magic. They dismiss both the scenarios where artificial general intelligence makes most human jobs obsolete and necessitates universal basic income and the scenario where superintelligent AIs unleash killer robots to exterminate the planet’s population as unlikely and worthy of less consideration than a scenario where AI is important, but ultimately just another technology.

What does the future of AI and democracy look like if you take scenarios that are fun to think about, but unlikely to happen, off the table?

Great piece. Worth your time.


So many books, so little time

Abundance” is a book for an alternate timeline

Ezra Klein is an interesting commentator on what’s going on in the world, and he’s now co-authored a new book with Derek Thompson.

Screenshot

It’s on my to-read list, but so are many other titles at the moment and life is short, so I thought I’d read some of the reviews and then decide whether to move it up the list or not.

This review essay by Dave Karpf has caused me to press the ‘pause’ button. It’s thoughtful, fair and well-informed. But…

There is a jarring, stray passage in chapter 4 of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance:

Today NIH, along with NSF, are irreplaceable. If these institutions had never been created or expanded, the lives of millions, even billions of people around the world would be shorter than they are today, and people would be sicker. If they disappeared tomorrow, the world would instantly be worse.

But it is precisely because the NIH stands above every bioscience institution in significance that we should scrutinize the way it shapes the practice of science in America and around the world. (page 152)

Abundance is a good book. It has its flaws. All books do. But its most glaring weakness is not the fault of the authors: It is not a timely book.

As recently as a few months ago, NIH and NSF were indeed irreplaceable. But here, now, they are effectively being bulldozed and scrapped. It was timely and worthwhile last fall to wonder about the ways these massive institutions shape the course of scientific discovery. Today the call-to-action is to rescue whatever datasets we can. The Library of Alexandria is being burned. Salvage what you can…


My commonplace booklet

BlueSky thinking…

I’ve been on Bluesky for a few months, largely because I abhor Musk’s megaphone. In practice, you get what it promises on the tin — a feed produced by people you follow rather than a farrago that’s algorithmically curated to increase the profits of the platform you’re on.

And it’s fine — but it’s still an attention-sink. Ethically, it’s properly social-media rather than the anti-social media of X, Threads, Instagram, et al. But life is short and I hate scrolling. Result: I now look in on my feed only now and then. And I still can’t understand how so many people appear to be on it all the time: how do they get any work done?


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Wednesday 30 April, 2025

Vatican Roulette

Screenshot

Terrific photograph, taken, I think, by Zelensky’s photographer.

It made a brilliant front page for the Observer in its latest incarnation.


Quote of the Day

”Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.”

  • Sinclair Lewis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart| Kegelstatt-Trio KV498 1. Andante |

Link

Played with historic instruments, so this is probably how Mozart heard it.


Long Read of the Day

Old ways of thinking about new problems

If you’re as pissed off as I am with the current fatuous discourse about ‘AGI’ (Artificial General Intelligence) then you’ll enjoy this marvellous essay by Rob Nelson.

Instead of treating AGI as something up for debate or assuming it (whatever it is) will happen one day, we should collectively giggle at the idea that a machine that applies probabilistic mathematics to giant cultural datasets can only be explained using the terminology of human cognition. As Cosma Shalizi pointed out, attention, as it is used in that famous paper, does not mean what you think it means. “Calling this “attention” [is] at best a joke. Actual human attention is selective.” Brad DeLong highlights this wonderful collection of insights about attention on his way to exposing the lazy thinking that anthropomorphizing large AI models affords otherwise smart people. DeLong offers his own “more accurate and useful framework,” which is “to understand LLMs as flexible interpolative functions from prompts to continuations.” Thinking in those terms requires greater cognitive effort than using the tired analogy of AI models as confabulation-prone research assistants or weird interns, but it has the benefit of agreeing with the reality of what we know about how large AI models actually work.

With every chatbot interaction, with every picture, song, or video generated, the evidence for understanding large AI models as social and cultural tools gets harder to ignore. Shalizi and DeLong are contributing to what Henry Farrell calls “a shared terrain of ideas coming into view,” which places generative AI within history rather than as the leading edge of an epoch-making inflection point that changes everything…

Do read it.

Footnotes:


So many books, so little time

There’s an interesting passage in this conversation between Henry Oliver and the economist Tyler Cowen about reading.

Henry: Are there diminishing returns to reading fiction or what are the diminishing returns?

Tyler: It depends what you’re doing in life. There’s diminishing returns to most things in the sense that what you imbibe from your teen years through, say, your 30s will have a bigger impact on you than most of what you do later. I think that’s very, very hard to avoid, unless you’re an extreme late bloomer, to borrow a concept from you. As you get older, rereading gets better, I would say much better. You learn there are more things you want to read and you fill in the nooks and crannies of your understanding. That’s highly rewarding in a way where what you read when you were 23 could not have been. I’m okay with that bargain. I wouldn’t say it’s diminishing returns. I would say it’s altering returns. I think also when you’re in very strange historical periods, reading fiction is more valuable. During the Obama years, it felt to me that reading fiction was somewhat less interesting. During what you might call the Trump years, and many other strange things are going on with AI, people trying to strive for immortality, reading fiction is much more valuable because it’s more limited what nonfiction can tell you or teach you. I think right now we’re in a time where the returns to reading more fiction are rapidly rising in a good way. I’m not saying it’s good for the world, but it’s good for reading fiction.

I agree with him about fiction being more interesting and oddly relevant at the moment. Just after Trump was elected I chaired a discussion with a number of journalists at the Other Voices festival in Dingle on what we might expect from Trump 2.0. At the end of the event, I said to the audience that if they wanted some insight into what the future might be like then a good place to start might be Paul Lynch’s novel, Prophet Song. From what people have said to me subsequently, it was a good tip.


Remembering Julia

Julia Ball, a remarkable landscape painter — and a dear friend over many years — passed away in February. Monday’s Guardian carried a nice obituary of her by Elspeth Owen. Julia was a socialist and a committed feminist who took part in numerous political actions over the years: in support of the Grunwick demonstrators; the 1984-85 miners’ strike; CND; the Greenham Common peace camp; and in opposition to the Iraq war.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • Yale’s administrator/student ratio seems to be approaching one-to-one.

In 2003, when 5,307 undergraduate students studied on campus, the University employed 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike. In 2018, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that Yale had the highest manager-to-student ratio of any Ivy League university, and the fifth highest in the nation among four-year private colleges.

Link

Bureaucratisation is a pernicious disease of modern organisations, and it’s been chronic in universities worldwide. But this takes the biscuit.


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