Snowy and me
He’s been monitoring my workload atop the screens of a succession of MacBooks for many years.
Quote of the Day
”People never die wishing they’d bought more stuff.”
- House-clearance manager
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Beethoven | The Prisoners’ Chorus | Fidelio
Obvious music given what’s in my Commonplace booklet below.
Long Read of the Day
Economics, pluralism and democracy: An interview with Ha-Joon Chang
Ha-Joon taught in the Economics Faculty in Cambridge for years and was the most accessible writer on the subject I knew. I often wondered why the Faculty of Economics hadn’t given him a professorial Chair. Was it because his books sold so well? (One of the reasons, incidentally, why the English Faculty never gave George Steiner a Chair.) My guess was that it might have been because of fundamental intellectual disagreements between Chang and the cabal of neoclassical economists who then ruled the Faculty.
This hunch is confirmed by this revealing interview. As I read it I was continually reminded of Bertrand Russell’s famous observation that “Economics is the study of how people make choices, and sociology is the study of how they don’t have any choices to make”.
It’s a very long read, but I found it unfailingly interesting and thought-provoking and I hope you do too. Maybe worth brewing some coffee and taking some time out, though…
On reflection…At the root of Chang’s difficulties in Cambridge was what Thomas Kuhn wrote about aeons ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The book describes the way in which any scientific discipline operates by coalescing around a paradigm — the overarching theoretical framework that determines what gets taught, who gets appointed and who gets promoted, what topics are deemed interesting for research, who gets published, what kind of theorising is esteemed, and so on.
Kuhn was writing about scientific disciplines, but I think that his general framework applies to many academic disciplines. The central problem is that while disciplines cannot operate without a paradigm (because it’s what defines them), sometimes a paradigm may become pathological, effectively condemning the discipline to stew in its own intellectual juices for a long time. Which IMO is what happened to economics as it descended into ‘physics envy’ and the delusion that it could become a ‘hard’ science. Chang’s ‘problem’ in Cambridge was that he never suffered from that delusion. And it perhaps explains why he now has a Chair in SOAS.
(The transcript comes from the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, Volume 17, Issue 2, Winter 2024.)
My commonplace booklet
‘Are you serious?’: He spent months in a Syrian prison. CNN’s camera caught the moment he’s freed
A remarkable — and moving — CNN video report of the moment when one of one of Assad’s prisoners was rescued.
Coincidentally, Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) sent me a link to an account on Freedom from Torture written in 2008 by a prisoner of Assad, who tells his story in the third person.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Gemini Flash mixes cocktails. Simon Willison, a talented geek whom I follow, is a great guide to the newest AI models. He’s very impressed by Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, a multi-modal LLM. That means it can handle inputs in the form of images, video, audio and documents. He’s made a short video showing one of his interactions with it, which is fascinating — even if slightly incomprehensible to someone (i.e. me) who has never had a cocktail in his life.
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