On reflection…

Quote of the Day

”Courage is a banal consequence of a lack of imagination”.

• André Malraux

Vintage example of French cynicism.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Desmond and the Dave Brubeck Quartet | Take Five

Link

I’ve often listened to this but knew little about it. So I turned to Wikipedia:

The track emerged after Quartet drummer Joe Morello challenged Desmond to compose a piece in 5/4. Brubeck arranged Desmond’s melodies around Morello’s rhythmic ideas, creating a work in ABA ternary form. Its title refers both to the quintuple meter and the colloquial expression “take five,” meaning to take a short break.

Long Read of the Day

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

Good Guardian essay by Kevin T. Baker on how “LLMs gone rogue” stories often mislead the public about AI. Same things happen when self-driving cars kill or injure people. It’s always the tech that gets blamed, not the corporations that develop and operate them.

On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the building at least two times during the morning session. American forces killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12.

Within days, the question that organised the coverage was whether Claude, a chatbot made by Anthropic, had selected the school as a target. Congress wrote to the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker magazine asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

Eight years ago, Maven was the most contested project in Silicon Valley. In 2018, more than 4,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s contract to build artificial intelligence for the Pentagon’s targeting systems. Workers organised a walk out. Engineers quit. And Google ultimately abandoned the contract. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company and defence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, took it over and spent the next six years building Maven into a targeting infrastructure that pulls together satellite imagery, signals intelligence and sensor data to identify targets and carry them through every step from first detection to the order to strike.

The bombing, in which U.S. forces hit the school with Tomahawk missiles while targeting an adjacent military base, killed between 175 and 180 people, most of them young female students. … The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database that, according to CNN, had not been updated to reflect that the building had been separated from the adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps compound and converted into a school, a change that satellite imagery shows had occurred by 2016 at the latest. A chatbot did not kill those children. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal. By the start of the Iran war, Maven – the system that had enabled that speed – had sunk into the plumbing, it had become part of the military’s infrastructure, and the argument was all about Claude. This obsession with Claude is a kind of AI psychosis, though not of the kind we normally talk about, and it afflicts critics and opponents of the technology as fiercely as it does its boosters. You do not have to use a language model to let it organise your attention or distort your thinking.

Great piece. And AI psychosis is spreading.

Ten metaphors for AI

My piece from last Sunday’s Observer with nice illustrations by Chris Riddell.

ChatGPT was the first instantiation of AI that most people encountered, and it’s still what most of us regard as “AI”, much as they once learned to refer to internet search as “googling”. It’s a chatbot, a large language model (LLM) equipped with a conversational interface. And it came as a shock to its early users. As Terrence Sejnowski, an AI pioneer, put it: “A threshold was reached, as if a space alien suddenly appeared that could communicate with us in an eerily human way.” Some aspects of their behaviour appear to be intelligent, “but if it’s not human intelligence, what is the nature of their intelligence?”

In order to answer this question, users have inevitably fastened on to metaphors as the way to tether the abstractions of artificial intelligence to more tangible things. I’ve lost count of the number of metaphors for AI that have appeared since 2022 but I guess they now run into the hundreds. Here are 10 of the most interesting…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet

How to Live Beyond 80

Robert Reich has been thinking ahead:

Let me be very candid with you. I’ll be 80 in June.

Eighty!

When I was a boy, my grandmother had a friend named Jack who was 80. He was the oldest person I’d ever met. I was amazed he was still standing. And still able to walk and talk. I thought he was Methuselah. I regarded him as a fossil from a different time.

Now I’m about to become a fossil from a different time.

Trump will reach 80 ten days before me, but that’s small comfort. He’s not just a fossil. He’s a neanderthal with a reptilian brain. I’m embarrassed he and I are of the same generation.

But there are a lot of us, all hitting 80 this year. More babies were born in 1946 than in any other year in American history up until that time: 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before…

Verily, fossilhood beckons for us all.

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Tulip Mania

These amazing multi-coloured tulips which suddenly appeared in our garden a couple of years ago, give one a hint of why the Dutch went mad about the bulbs in the mid-1600s.

Quote of the Day

”The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S.Bach | Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Sleepers Awake) | Munich University choir.

Link

In the cantata (of which this is just a spectacular part), performed by the Netherlands Bach Society, everything revolves around the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. They wait throughout the night with burning lamps for the arrival of the bridegroom. Five of them have brought along extra oil to keep their lamps burning. The others run out of oil and go off to buy some more. The bridegroom arrives while they are away. Nice to wake up to it on Easter Day!

Long Read of the Day

It’s astonishing to watch from afar how Trump & Co are getting away with what they’re doing. A lot of it has to do with the extraordinary way that Congress has been cowed. But it also has something to do with the fact that cowardice is contagious (as people discovered in 1930s Germany).

This essay by historian Timothy Snyder outlines some of the grim possibilities that faces the American public over the months between now and November.

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth are stuck in the logic of escalation, according to which the feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. Trump is surrounded by people who are making money from the war; each day of war strengthens a warmongering lobby with personal access to the president. As the war lengthens, the chance that it will be exploited for a coup attempt increases.

Trump tells us that he is chiefly concerned with the permanence of his own comfort and power (think about ballroom and bunker), much of which he will lose when his party is defeated decisively in the midterms. He regularly declares his intention to meddle in the elections. His party backed a bill which would have turned elections into a sham. Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50% without any review of what the money is for; this is strategic nonsense, and has to be understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship. Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle.

It is up to us to put two and two together: Trump will seek to exploit the war (or the next one) to alter the elections. We bear responsibility for what comes next.

Chart of the Day

Screenshot

Which explains why it is important that the UK government continues to support the BBC as negotiations about the renewal of its Charter continue.

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An orchid by any other name…

… is still an Orchid. Seen on a windowsill in College.

Quote of the Day

”Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | My Wild Irish Rose

Link

An unexpected find.

Long Read of the Day

Paul Krugman on Trump’s speech on Wednesday

I really enjoy Krugman’s Substack. It’s interesting to see how leaving the NYT (where he had a widely-read column for years) has energised him. Here’s Thursday’s edition:

I’m not going to do a regular post today — it’s Thursday morning — because I wanted to wait and see what was in the big speech from Donald Trump last night. And I thought I could just do a short video about it.

It turns out that the speech was sort of an anticlimax, although not in a good way. Many people expected Trump to pull the mother of all TACOs, to declare victory and surrender. He did not do that. He declared victory, of course, but he did not actually announce an end to hostilities. On the contrary, he said we’re going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age. So add massive war crimes to your schedule.

There is clearly no strategy here. There’s no endgame. There’s nothing. It’s hard to tell, as always, whether Trump is delusional or just completely unable to admit something that he actually knows.

One of the moments that really struck me in the speech was him declaring that the whole world was extremely impressed by what happened. He said,

“the whole world is watching and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. The world can’t believe what it’s seeing.”

What it’s seeing is that the world’s greatest military power took on a fourth-rate power. Again, as I said the other day, Iran’s military budget is a rounding error in our military budget. And we lost…

Books, etc.

Ever since ChatGPT launched I’ve been thinking about Joe Weizenbaum, the computer scientist who created the world’s first chatbot — ELIZA — in the 1960s. And so I dug out his book (which now seems to be out of print, sadly) to re-read it. It’s as good as I remembered. And it’s fascinating to read it with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It’s an examination of what computers can and cannot do — and, more interesting in the present context — what they should not be used to do.

My commonplace booklet

The cost of Trump’s war to British households

Interesting numbers from the Financial Times

The International Energy Agency reports that the UK consumed 4.4mn terajoules of oil and gas products in 2024. Convert this into a rough barrels of oil equivalent and you get 720mn barrels of oil. These have gone up about $40 a barrel since the Iran war started leaving UK consumers $29bn worse off.

When converted into sterling, that is hit of about £22bn a year or roughly 0.7 per cent of national income. 

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  The Beginning of Programming as We’ll Know It

Given all the nonsense that’s being written about “vibe coding”, I thought that this little essay by a real programmer was a delight.

In the wake of AI coding assistants like Claude and Codex, which can seemingly perform the equivalent of a day’s work in a matter of minutes, many of us are wondering if the human role of “computer programmer” is coming to an end. Will the AI bots one day do all the programming for us?

Maybe so, but not yet. At this particular moment, human developers are especially valuable, because of the transitional period we’re living through. Just a few years ago, AI essentially could not program at all. In the future, a given AI instance may “program better” than any single human in history. But for now, real programmers will always win. Why? Because we are uniquely positioned to harness most of the power of AI while augmenting it with human taste, wisdom, and caution, among other qualities that an AI is thus far incapable of possessing…

Worth a read, if you’re interested in this stuff.

Feedback

From Mark Allan on bombing as entertainment…

Re: Fintan O’Toole’s article that you reference, Adam Tooze’s work on the German economy during WWII suggests a more nuanced picture than Galbraith’s older work. Tooze is bilingual in English and German and used German sources to come to very different conclusions, in his book The Wages of Destruction.

The Allied bombing was horrific – but there is a strong argument that it did hasten the end of the war, crucially by enabling the Soviet Union to defeat Germany in the East. See this from the MoD – not an unbiased source but not necessarily wrong.

However, this argument about WWII bombing doesn’t change the fact that current Iran cannot be compared to Nazi Germany. Israel and the USA are clearly conducting an illegal war, and one with very bad consequences for the world as a whole.

I haven’t read Tooze’s book, so I went looking at reviews of it to get a feel for his arguments. James Buchan’s review in the Guardian provides a useful glimpse.

In his long new book, the Cambridge historian Adam Tooze presents the Third Reich as an engine doomed to smash itself to smithereens not, as for Speer, from bureaucratic turf wars and Hitler’s chaotic office habits, but from its own birth defects.

To sum up: Hitler’s Germany was always too hampered by shortages of raw materials, notably crude oil and rubber but also iron ore and coal, animal feed and fertiliser, foreign currency and even labour, to attempt an independent industrial and commercial existence in peace, let alone a campaign of European conquest. For all the ingenuity of cynical opportunists such as Hjalmar Schacht, at the Reichsbank until 1939, and Speer, at Armaments after 1942, Germany passed through a succession of hair-raising financial and resource crises that hampered its armies and helped to bring on the final collapse.

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Figures on a beach

You have to squint to see the people. I love the limitless skies and huge beaches of North Norfolk. This is Brancaster.

Quote of the Day

“America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”

• Justice Louis Brandeis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Piano Concerto No. 2 in A-Flat Major, H. 31: II. |Poco adagio

Link

Long Read of the Day

Susan Sontag’s Playground of Ideas

Regular readers will know that I am a great fan of notebooks — and will therefore understand why I alighted on this essay by Jillian Hess, who has been reading Susan Sontag’s notebooks in the UCLA’s archives. Sontag was a compulsive note-taker and left 100 notebooks to her son, David Rieff; on her deathbed she told him that they were “the most important thing” she had bequeathed to him. In the piece there are lots of photographs of pages from the notebooks. I particularly liked the list she made of the writers she needed to deal with in her book Against Interpretation.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Books, etc.

This arrived the other day. (Publishers often send me unsolicited proof copies of forthcoming titles.)

As it happens, it looks interesting and timely, because the future and identity of ‘Europe’ have suddenly become more questionable than any of us supposed until Trump and J.D Vance articulated their contemptuous view of the continent.

Glyn Morgan is an historian who points out that the Europe my generation grew up in was essentially a creation of the post-war American state. From 1946 onwards, the U.S. Administration pushed reluctant Europeans to create a federation of democratic states. In doing so, they gave birth to what Morgan called an ‘American Europe’ — a new political order protected by the U.S. military and buoyed by transatlantic trade.

In the introductory chapter, he gives an interesting example of how this worked.

In 1946, the French government were desperate to secure the forgiveness of their war debts and to secure a loan. They were ultimately successful, but the US government drove a hard bargain, including forcing the French to open their movie theatres to foreign films (essentially US films). As part of the deal, French films were only allowed to be shown for four weeks out of thirteen. It’s not clear whether such a deal counts as an act of an imperial power, an act of accepting an invitation, or an ordinary financial transaction between stronger and weaker parties. Nonetheless, this ‘money for movies’ deal provided the French government with ample warning that they would be playing a subordinate role in the new American Europe.

It also, incidentally, led de Gaulle to decide that France needed its own nuclear deterrent.

My commonplace booklet

Bombing as entertainment

Fintan O’Toole has a great column in the Irish Times (behind a paywall) about the war between Trump and Iran. He opens the piece with the previous experiment in bombing countries into oblivion — the allied offensive in Germany during WW2 — and the sobering findings of J.K. Galbraith’s retrospective analysis of that campaign: “as bombing intensified, war production increased.” Galbraith determined that by September 1944, when the US and British bombing campaign reached its peak, German production of military aircraft was “nearly twice what it was before the raids”.

But at least in WW2 the carpet bombing had an ostensible purpose, even if it turned out to be cruel and misguided. The difference between then and now, O’Toole writes,

is that there is no real pretence of purpose and no real effort at justification. This ostentatious insouciance is novel. When Trump announced that he might bomb Iran’s oil facilities on Kharg Island “a few more times just for fun”, a new note was being sounded in human history – the open relishing of annihilation as entertainment.

Entertainment doesn’t have to work. There will be no need to send today’s equivalent of Galbraith to Iran to figure out how effective all this violence has been. Who bothers to ask how effective a giant fireworks display was? It made a big bang, created an exciting spectacle and cost a fortune. It showed off our wealth and power and was fun while it lasted. We bombed our little hearts out.

Feedback

• The photograph of the Gibbs Building in Monday’s edition sparked some memories, and a lovely email from Bill Lubenow, the distinguished historian of British intellectual life.

The Popper/Wittginstein confrontation took place in H1 in rooms occupied by Richard Braithwaite (a member of the Moral Sciences Club and an Apostle where the Apostles met frequently) and Christopher Morris. The poker was Braithwaite’s. It is remarkable to think about how much knowledge (understanding and generalized) is local and intimate. It reminds me of the “Circus” which did so much help form [Keynes’s] ideas for the General Theory.

Bill wrote the definitive book on the Cambridge Apostles.

• Thanks to Aoife Midgley for pointing out that the correct spelling for ‘bright’ in Irish is Geal, rather than Gael. A portion of humble pie has been duly consumed.

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Perfect symmetry

The Gibbs building, King’s College, Cambridge. It was in a room in the building that the famous confrontation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at a meeting of the Moral Science club in October 1946 took place. The story is told in  Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.

Quote of the Day

”If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith (on the dogma of ‘trickle-down economics)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fáinne Gael an Lae

Link

Nice orchestral version of an old Irish tune — Bright Ring of the Day

Long Read of the Day

**Why Are the Wealthy Pouring So Much of Their Wealth into Politics?

Useful explanation by Robert Reich, who was Secretary for Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration and a professor at Berkeley. This is from his Substack.

Last week, I testified at a congressional hearing organized by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich about what Big Oil has gotten from its mammoth contribution to Trump’s 2024 campaign — and how much Americans are paying for this bribe in higher fuel costs and destructive climate change.

The short answer: It’s the most corrupt deal in American history.

But it’s hardly the only corrupt deal in Washington. Political corruption is growing dramatically — partly because Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. But also because America’s wealthy and their corporations have been pouring more and more money into politics because the return on this “investment” has become so large.

I have some good news to share with you about all this. But first I want to sketch the core problem, 1-2-3. Then I’ll suggest a solution…

It’s become an endemic problem in British politics over the past two decades. But at least it’s finally been acknowledged as a serious issue. The first point in the overview of the Rycroft report into it reads:

This country faces a persistent problem of foreign interests seeking to exert influence on, and to interfere in, our politics. Too much of this is malign and seeks to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy.

And guess who the main beneficiaries of this dodgy largesse have been in the past. And who’s the newest beneficiary on the block?

My commonplace booklet

How the Spreadsheet changed the world

I’ve just come on this blog post by David Oks when I was in my office in College, and as I looked up from it my eye fell on my personal copy of VisiCalc, which I bought for my Apple II in 1979 when it first came out. Sadly, I no longer have that machine, but I remember how radical the program seemed at the time. It was also the reason why many MBA graduates who knew nothing about computing bought the Apple II. I’ll be returning to this subject because, for some of us, there are resonances between the spreadsheet and LLMs. But that’s for another day.

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Big Mac

In — of all places — Venice! A pre-Trump example of American ’soft power’?

Quote of the Day

”Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.”

• Zygmunt Bauman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dolores Keane | My Own Dear Galway Bay (Live)

Link

RIP for a wonderful and much-loved singer, who passed away peacefully on 16 March — in Galway.

Long Read of the Day

What AI Hypists Miss

Perceptive column by Francis Fukuyama

Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even superintelligence. He said that this will quickly solve many of the world’s problems: GDP growth rates could rise to 10, 15, even 20 percent per year, diseases will be cured, education revolutionized, and cities in the developing world will be transformed with clean drinking water for everyone.

I happen to know something about the latter issue. I’ve been teaching cases over the past decade on why South Asian cities like Hyderabad and Dhaka have struggled with providing municipal water. The reason isn’t that we don’t know what an efficient water system looks like, or lack the technology to build it. Nor is it a simple lack of resources: multilateral development institutions have been willing to fund water projects for years…

You can guess what the reason is. I liked this because I’m continually irritated by the extravagant claims that AI boosters make about AI will do. It suggests that they know little to nothing about history, politics or indeed reality.

Books, etc.

Having listened to the author on a Santa Fe Institute podcast, I’m contemplating tackling his book. Before diving in, I asked Claude for a summary of any serious reviews that have been published. Here’s its conclusion:

The honest summary for you: the book is probably readable if you’re comfortable with the ideas of complexity and emergence without needing to follow the mathematics (which stays largely in the background). It’s less a popular science book in the Gleick Chaos tradition and more an extended, technically-inflected argument — rewarding if you’re prepared to work at it, but not one that holds your hand throughout.

My conclusion: worth a try. See you in a couple of weeks!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Why are people taking phone calls on speakers when walking around in public?

Turns out I’m not the only one asking the question.

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Blossoming

Seen on a walk on Saturday.

Quote of the Day

”I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sonny Boy Williamson and the Yardbirds | Pontiac Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

My Prodigal Brainchild

Lovely essay by Neal Stephenson on how Marc Zuckerberg screwed up an idea that he had conceived.

I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.

In retrospect, John’s message was prescient, since it marked the moment when the Metaverse really did break free and become my alienated, prodigal brainchild.

In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.

So there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause…

It does. He’s such a good writer. Enjoy.

Feedback

• My item about a search for literary sources on the Magnolia tree brought a lovely email from Diane Coyle with a link to Ted Hughes’s poem, Snowdrop.

Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.

The link came with a commentary.

This poem, published in 1959, has as its subject the earliest flower of the year, the snowdrop. The thick, tough leaves push up in late December, and flowering is most abundant in January and February. Snowdrops are resistant to frost and the coldest winter weather. Hughes expresses admiration for the flower and its resilience.

• The item about the book on ‘learning from Leonardo’ brought an email from Ronald Young pointing out that there are two books about learning to think like Leonardo da Vinci! Unfortunately, the Link to the other one doesn’t seem to be working just now.

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!

Megalithic Sunrise

Sunrise at Stonehenge on Friday, 20th.

I wasn’t there but my friend, Keryn Jalli, was, and took the photograph.

Quote of the Day

”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field | Nocturne No. 5 in B-flat major | Rafael Gómez-Ruiz

Link

Field was an Irish composer, pianist and teacher, born in 1782 to a musical family in Dublin and widely credited with inventing the Nocturne as a musical genre.

Long Read of the Day

Love Actually? Washington’s current relationship with Britain is more like Contempt Actually

As an Irishman I’ve always been puzzled by the so-called “special relationship” of the UK with the US. It seemed to me more like the relationship between a billionaire and his butler. The amazing thing, in a way, was that the delusion persisted even after the brusque lesson delivered by Eisenhower to Anthony Eden at Suez, and it persisted right through the Blair era and into Starmer’s. All of which explains why I liked this latest post by Timothy Garton Ash.

Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”

An American critic of Trump recently asked me the obvious follow-up question: “Why does your government keep grovelling?” More fundamentally, we must ask why so much of official Britain, and especially its security establishment, keeps clinging for dear life to the United States, behaving for all the world like someone stuck in an abusive personal relationship…

Good question. And how might the UK cast off this servile cringe?

Make AI more like a human? It’s far too clever for that

My Observer column of 6 March…* 

The difference between genius and stupidity, observed Albert Einstein, “is that genius has its limits”. Cue the vapourings about AI from some of Silicon Valley’s prodigies. Think of Sam Altman of OpenAI, for example, burbling that the technology will bring “unimaginable prosperity”, help to fix the climate crisis and even “figure out how to cure cancer”. And, of course, it will make work optional, as Elon Musk explained to then UK prime minister Rishi Sunak in a toe-curling interview at the AI safety summit held at Bletchley Park in 2023.

How do smart people come to talk such nonsense? It’s mostly because spectacular success in their chosen, limited, domains makes them overconfident. After all, they’ve built huge companies and solved hard problems and assume that all problems are presumably similar to ones they’ve solved before. They live in a world where intelligence and information processing are what make things happen and assume that those are the key variables everywhere.

Alas, they’re not. The problem we have in addressing the climate crisis is not shortage of ideas – or a lack of real (or artificial) intelligence – but that we live in a political system driven by five-year electoral cycles that make it impossible to take the necessary remedial measures in time…

Read on

Books, etc.

In an email exchange about C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, John Seeley mentioned a book I hadn’t heard of — Michael Gelb’s How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci. So like the conscientious autodidact I am, I dug it out.

Here are the seven ‘Da Vinci principles’ 

1. Curiosità – an insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

2. Dimonstrazione – A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

3. Sensatzione – The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

4. Sfumato (literally, “Going up in Smoke”) – A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty.

5. Arte/Scienza — The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. “Whole-brain” thinking.

6. Corporalita — The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness and poise.

7. Connessione — A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking, in other words.

At a rough count I think I could tick only 1, 5 and 7. I make a lot of mistakes, and sometimes learn from them, so maybe I get a quarter-tick for #2!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Autonomy needs humans

From Azeem Azahr:

Waymo’s entire remote guidance operation runs on just 70 human operators — a 43:1 car-to-human ratio. GM’s robotaxi service Cruise had 1.5 staff per car.

And btw, AIs need humans too, to create the ‘guidelines’ that sanitise LLMs before they are unleashed on the unsuspecting public. It’s called ‘Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback’ (RLHF).

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O Magnolia!

This tree takes me by surprise every spring. I went searching to see who else has felt ambushed by it. Claude came up with Robert Lowell, who wrote of “blossoms on our magnolia that ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white.” Odd, that: beauty as a kind of violence. Hmmm…

Quote of the Day

” The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.”

• Thorstein Veblen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

De Danann | The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (in Galway)!

Link

I wonder what Handel would have made of it. Note the virtuoso performance on the Bodhrán by Johnny McDonagh.* 

Long read of the Day

Stay Classy: Mummy’s Favourite

Riveting review by Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books of Andrew Lownie’s book about the creep formerly known as Prince/Duke and the memoir of the girl to whom Jeffrey Epstein introduced him, and who took her own life last year.

Here is O’Hagan on Randy Andy.

In the days​ of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker, high on royal privilege but in touch with the inner life of the standard British male. ‘If he wasn’t a member of the royal family,’ the astrologer Russell Grant said, ‘his ideal role would be running a beach bar in the sun – with the odd blue movie being shown at the back.’ Among the prince’s early girlfriends were Koo ‘Starkers’ Stark and Vicki Hodge, an actress whose better-known works include The Stud and Confessions of a Sex Maniac. Hodge had a colourful line in ex-boyfriends, including John Bindon, an actor-gangster who had holidayed with Princess Margaret and was tried for murder. The days of wine and roses for the pre-hyphenated Windsors left a few stains on the carpet, but the royals still acted as if they were beyond reproach.

Mummy loved Andrew, and what Mummy loved, Mummy protected. By 1984, it seemed he’d got the basic point about dropping the floozies and finding the sort of woman who would ‘understand him’. Enter ‘Chatterbox One’, the codename given to Sarah Ferguson by air traffic controllers when she was learning to fly, a woman in happy possession of two O-levels who exuded jolliness and scads of suitability. (Her father was Prince Charles’s polo manager and it was Diana who set her up with the fourth-in-line.) After a few country weekends and acres of japes, Ferguson was installed as the Duchess of York.

Along with that ‘love of fun’ admired by the tabloids, Fergie brought a few money problems and a talent for reaching beyond her grasp, though not beyond Andrew’s grasping. As a couple, they have always been too stupid to understand the vulnerability of the institution that supports them, and they began wrecking it from the inside as soon as they met. Years ago, before it was fashionable, some of the youngsters in the family were calling Andrew ‘the Nonce’, and there was general dismay at the Yorks’ reckless avarice. The British royal fantasy has a few sustaining mythologies, and one of them is dignity, a quality defined, after Andy and Fergie, more by its absence. The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their actions. The writing was on the wall, or on the T-shirt, when Sarah Ferguson appeared in the mid-1980s wearing one that said ‘Piste Again’. The duchess loved skiing and being on holiday and Andrew was addicted to having everything for free. What to do? Eventually, Andrew Lownie records, they were lent King Hussein of Jordan’s seven-bedroomed Castlewood House on the edge of Windsor Great Park. ‘Bored, Sarah started 1987 with three weeks at Sandringham, followed by a fortnight skiing in Klosters, and a ten-day break with Andrew in Barbados paid for by the multi-millionaire Robert Sangster.’ At this point, Sangster had been a tax exile for twelve years. Stay classy…

And here is O’Hagan on Virginia Giuffre’s memoir…

There are sadnesses in her book, he writes, “that are too deep to rehearse, but all she really wanted was to be among people who had the kinds of freedom she wanted for herself”.

In her memoir she writes that Andrew raped her three times in three different locations. He denies attacking her, but he paid her a reported £12 million to go away. Throughout the process, Giuffre was hounded by the press and eviscerated by those who live with the terrifying delusion that royalty has something to do with virtue. ‘A complete whore’ is the way the victim was described by Lady Victoria Hervey, a socialite who once dated Andrew and later appeared on Love Island.

‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Giuffre writes, ‘but I felt I had to.’ All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and ‘loyalty’ in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Maxwell took this young girl to Epstein, who abused her a number of times, then they flew her around the world to be abused by their powerful friends, who lived in a universe of deniability. People who know the former prince say that his main concern, after the Newsnight fiasco, was to ensure that his daughters would not be deposed and have to give evidence in support of his lies. (The Pizza Express in Woking will be for ever tattooed on their silent hearts.) A second reason for his ‘falling on his sword’, as they like spuriously to say, was that he wanted to make sure Giuffre didn’t spoil his mother’s platinum jubilee. After the best efforts of lawyers Harbottle & Lewis had failed, and as the plug was being pulled on her favourite son’s charities and his military affiliations and royal patronages, the queen still hoped that he might keep one or two titles, just to cheer him up. Time and Scotland Yard will tell if he can stay out of jail.

Books, etc.

This is delightful little book — a collection of 47 newspaper columns by a great Italian theoretical physicist. I like him especially because, like me, he’s never really accepted C.P. Snow’s ’two cultures’ distinction. Topics range from Aristotle and Copernicus to Mein Kampf , Black Holes and why he’s an atheist. And there’s a particularly fascinating essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s scientific work as a lepidopterist. The essays remind me of the newspaper columns of Umberto Eco, which are likewise a delight. And I’m personally grateful to Rovelli for suggesting a special fountain pen that I’d been looking for — the TWSBI Eco

It’s special because it fits neatly in a trouser pocket, never leaks and writes beautifully. So it goes everywhere with me.

Feedback

From Greg Jeffreys

It’s not that I disagree with your Gatsby observation, more that it’s a form of Venn diagram missing important elements. So we do have these people for whom the impacts upon the ‘little people’ of their actions neither register nor matter. But we’re missing the longeurs of their old money through this lens – for Trump could have been Gatsby in the novel, and the ‘nouveau’ of his ‘riches’ are disdained. And ‘the force that through the green fuse the drives the flower’ for Trump, Musk et al is a frantically energised thing: the need to be noticed at any cost – and the fact that they would be happy if the world ended when they did. Hence Iran is paying the price of the dark jewels lurking in the Epstein files…

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Crooked Timber

The trunk of an old tree in the Library court of my college. It looks as if it had been wrung out by a Goliath doing to it what we do to wet towels. But it always reminds me of something else — Kant’s sardonic observation that “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.”

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Isaiah Berlin made this the organising metaphor (and title) of his collection of essays arguing against political perfectionism. His argument being that any political programme based on eliminating that crooked grain will inevitably lead to tyranny.

And Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and a bunch of his mates also made it the title for one of the most interesting blogs on the web.

Quote of the Day

“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

• Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Concerto No. 21 | Andante

Link

Pure schmaltz, but what the hell.

Long Read of the Day

Claude, you are a cutie-pie!

Margaret Attwood had a long conversation with Claude.

You can guess what happened? Or can you?

Me: Who is the murderer in Crackpot of the Empire?

Claude: In the Father Brown episode “The Crackpot of the Empire” (Series 4, Episode 4), the killer is Uncle Mirth, whose real name is Julius Kirkov (played by Toby Longworth). He is a former music hall comedian who traps a group of people — including Father Brown — in an abandoned mill to exact revenge on them. Sir Mortimer is killed when he forces his way into a sabotaged freight elevator, which the killer had rigged knowing that Mortimer’s selfish nature would make him shove past everyone else to be the first one in.

Me: That is not correct. Uncle Mirth is set up to look like the murderer. Who is the real murderer?

Claude: I apologize — my search results aren’t revealing the specific twist about who the real murderer is. The TV Tropes page and Fandom wiki both returned errors when I tried to access them for more detail.

What I can confirm is that the episode has a notable “bait-and-switch” involving Uncle Mirth being set up to look guilty. However, I don’t want to guess incorrectly again. Could you tell me who the real killer is? I’d love to know the answer!

Me: Henry Kirov, Uncle Mirth’s nephew.

Claude: Thank you for the correction! So the real murderer is Henry Kirov, Uncle Mirth’s nephew — who presumably set up his own uncle to take the blame. That’s a classic misdirection device, using a suspicious and eccentric figure like Uncle Mirth to draw attention away from the true culprit. It’s a very Agatha Christie-style twist that the Father Brown series often does well!

Me: Do you actually watch TV shows?

Claude: No, I don’t watch TV shows! I’m an AI, so I don’t have eyes or the ability to experience media. My knowledge comes from text data I was trained on — things like reviews, episode summaries, fan wikis, and discussions about shows that existed up to my knowledge cutoff…

Read on. It’s a hoot. Or perhaps, an hoot. She describes the encounter thus: “How I ended up showing off to a seductive and possibly psychopathic AI”.

(Note to AIs: you underestimate Attwood at your peril.)

My commonplace booklet

“They were careless people. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing Daisy and Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.

Good description of Donald Trump and his retinue.

Jürgen Habermas RIP

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The most significant German philosopher and social theorist of the post-war era has passed away at the age of 96. I first encountered his work when I was writing A Brief History of the Future in the mid-1990s and was looking for a way of describing the emerging blogosphere. It seemed to me that it was an instantiation of Habermas’s concept of the “bourgeois public sphere” that emerged in 18th-century Europe in coffee houses, salons, and literary societies, where private individuals gathered to debate matters of public concern, subjecting state authority to rational criticism. As Habermas envisaged it, this ‘sphere’ was not a place but a practice involving reasoned debate among participants regarded as equals (i.e. ignoring social status) and oriented toward consensus rather than strategic advantage. I thought that this concept mapped fairly neatly onto the blogosphere of the time. And in a way it still does. After all, this blog is part of it.

There are lots of obits of him — for example on NPR; the New York Times; the BBC; Jacobin; Le Monde; Guardian; and a particularly informative one on Explaining History.

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