Spoiler alert

This edition is largely about Twitter, a platform which has recently been bought by Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who is two parts genius and one part fruitcake (and in some ways also a slightly pathetic figure because of his childish craving for attention). Since my guess is that many readers probably don’t use Twitter and therefore regard its future as nothing to do with them, this may seem an outrageous indulgence on my part. But bear with me: what happens to Twitter matters to all of us — those of us who live in democracies anyway — because it has become, de facto part of the critical infrastructure of our public sphere. A search for “twitter” and “public sphere” on Google Scholar, effectively the world’s biggest scholarly citation-index, turns up 130,000 academic articles. And democracies need a functioning public sphere if they are to endure.

Let me explain…

In a recent Observer OpEd piece I said that having Musk responsible for an important part of the world’s public sphere could turn out to be “like entrusting a delicate clock to a monkey”. I meant it, because Musk has over time talked a lot of nonsense about “free speech”. And now he’s the richest media baron in the world.

On the other hand, though, his stewardship of two high-tech corporations (Tesla and SpaceX) confirms that he’s also very smart — which suggests that the predictions that he will destroy Twitter are overblown. He paid a fortune for the company and is in hock to banks for a lot of money, so he will try to transform it from a chronically unprofitable company into a money-spinning giant. The real question, then, is: how will that new media giant impact on the public sphere?

An obvious question — given that Twitter is a niche platform — why does its future matter? After all, a PEW survey recently found that only 23% of US adults use it — compared with the 81% who use YouTube , the 69% who use Facebook and the 40% who are on Instagram.

To understand why Twitter matters you have to think of our information environment as a media ecosystem, not a marketplace. I’ve been banging on about this for many years — there’s even a whole chapter on it in one of my books. An ecosystem is a system in which many species exist, interacting and competing with one another for food and energy. One of the important types of interaction is symbiosis — “any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between two different biological organisms, be it mutualistic, commensalistic, or parasitic.”

In our media ecosystem, one critical symbiotic relationship is that between Twitter and mainstream media. You or I may not be interested in, or on, Twitter, but every journalist on the planet is obsessed with it — which is why what happens on Twitter finds it way into the output of every major news organisation in the world. It’s what enabled Donald Trump, for example, to dominate the news agenda in the US for five whole years. This symbiosis is what justifies my contention that Twitter is part of the critical infrastructure of our public sphere. And it explains why it’s worth paying attention to what Musk does with it.

Quote of the Day

”I withdraw in disappointment, as just one moment in a slow, gentle “weening from the things of this earth”, to adapt a phrase from Mary Shelley. The things of this earth, really, are a bunch of shit, which Twitter just concentrates into a dense fecal supplement. My system finally revolted against these years of heavy intake at the moment when my friend Agnes Callard got mobbed for something so stupid I can’t even bring myself to describe it.

• Philosopher Justin E.H. Smith on deleting his Twitter account.

(Agnes Callard’s ordeal by Twitter-mob is chronicled in this Buzzfeed story.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Petzold: Minuet No. 1 in G Major | Lang Lang

Link

Short and unutterably sweet.

(It was originally and incorrectly attributed to Bach as BWV Anh. 114)

Long Read of the Day

Twitter Is Our Future

Long and perceptive blog post by James Fallows who, over several decades, has been one of the most perceptive observers of our media ecosystem. (I’ve been citing his book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy for more years than I care to remember.) So his views on the future of Twitter are worth reading.

He views Twitter as a bellwether for two reasons:

One is that Elon Musk’s attempted destruction of Twitter, be it reckless or intentional, is worth seeing as a speeded-up version of what is happening in other parts of the media. Twitter is an outlier, and so is Musk. But because of the incredible haste of this process, the dismantling of Twitter is usefully clarifying about changes for the media as a whole.

The other is that there are “many” possible replacements for parts of the positive functions Twitter has offered. But there is no one clear, obvious, easily available, broadly comparable other place to go. It’s not like saying, “Oh, just get an Android” if you’re unhappy with Apple or iPhones. It’s more like saying: “We’re building a dam, so everyone has to move out of this town before the water gets too deep. Good luck staying in touch after each of you settles someplace else.”

Twitter is only 16 years old, so its own story demonstrates how rapidly new communities can emerge. My point is that Musk is forcing people to go through that process of search, reconnection, and reinvention. He says he is reconceiving online discussion with whatever he has in mind for Twitter. The real entrepreneurial effect may come from the wave of Musk-era Twitter exiles and refugees, among employees and users alike.

Do read the whole thing.

Options for refugees fleeing a Muskovitic Twitter

Dave Winer (whom God Preserve) has — as usual — been thinking creatively about options.

I’ve been asked by a number of people what to do, based on the assumption Twitter is imploding.#

• It’s not yet imploding. Everything seems to work, as before. #
• I’d back up the list of people you follow, and people who follow you. How to do this? Someone should figure it out and write a simple howto.#
• I wouldn’t expect mastodon to be able to handle anything remotely like the load Twitter is handling for years. In the meantime, someone should write a Busy Developers Guide to peering with Mastodon, so we can get started on making the vision really work at scale.#
• If we wanted a smooth transition we should have planned for a great diaspora. Years ago. But nothing like that happened.#
• I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Blue Sky.#
• What is possible, in a few months, if we start working on it now, are mini-twitters, like lifeboats, where a small circle of friends gets together to share stuff within the group. But this won’t be free. But it won’t be that expensive either. Far less than say $8 per month. #

Twitter isn’t a ‘product’ but something much more complex

In his weekly newsletter, Azeem Azhar makes some interesting observations about Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. On the idea of Twitter as infrastructure, for example, he writes,

there are certain services that go beyond simply dollar-and-cents, and end up having more systemic importance. Societies have recognised this. Look at the rules around the banking system. We recognise it within telecoms. It may be that Twitter has aspects of its operation that are more systemic (more like core telecoms or banking) than they are like Candy Crush or the Superbowl. The European Union through the Digital Services Act recognises this. America’s ACCESS Bill will attempt the same. Twitter is not a product like a dust bin, vacuum cleaner or high-end car.

He also highlights an aspect of this controversy that few people seem to be addressing (though I’m sure the geek in Musk is thinking about it) — that Twitter as it exists is a complex system (which is not the same as a complicated one) and that intervening in such systems can produce counter-intuitive and sometimes catastrophic outcomes. Azhar cites Joe Bak-Colman’s reflections on Musk’s vision of Twitter as a ‘Hive Mind’ — i.e. “a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence” because it consists of “billions of bi-directional interactions per day.” In other words, a complex system. Bak-Colman followed this up with an interesting Twitter thread on the difficulties of intervening in such systems.

The most delightful reference I know of in this area is “Ecology for Bankers” by Robert May, Simon Levin and George Sukihara — published in Nature in 2008, just when another complex system was going belly-up.

Machine-learning systems are problematic. That’s why tech bosses call them ‘AI’

Yesterday’s Observer column:

One of the most useful texts for anyone covering the tech industry is George Orwell’s celebrated essay, “Politics and the English Language”. Orwell’s focus in the essay was on political use of the language to, as he put it, “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. But the analysis can also be applied to the ways in which contemporary corporations bend the language to distract attention from the sordid realities of what they are up to.

The tech industry has been particularly adept at this kind of linguistic engineering. “Sharing”, for example, is clicking on a link to leave a data trail that can be used to refine the profile the company maintains about you. You give your “consent” to a one-sided proposition: agree to these terms or get lost. Content is “moderated”, not censored. Advertisers “reach out” to you with unsolicited messages. Employees who are fired are “let go”. Defective products are “recalled”. And so on.

At the moment, the most pernicious euphemism in the dictionary of double-speak is AI, which over the last two or three years has become ubiquitous…

Do read the whole thing.

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Autumnal fruits

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

“Microsoft says it has an AI that can replicate thousands of different types of jobs. It also has some kinks: For example, when asked to name the most corrupt company, it answered ‘Microsoft’.”

• Bloomberg, Tech Daily

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dubliners | Christchurch

Link

Simple tune, but lovely.

Long Read of the Day

Ways to think about a metaverse

Nice essay by Ben Evans, one of the most perceptive observers of the tech industry. He has a lean, clean style and a good BS-detector.

Here’s how it opens…

Sometimes it seems like every big company CEO has read the same article about the same tech trend, and sent the same email to their team, asking “What’s our strategy for this?!” A couple of years ago there were a lot of emails asking for a 5G strategy, and now there are a lot of emails asking about metaverse.

Answering the 5G email was actually pretty easy, partly because almost no-one needs a 5G strategy at all (I wrote about this here), but also because we knew what 5G meant. We probably don’t know what ‘metaverse’ means. More precisely, we don’t know what someone else means. This word has become so vague and broad that you cannot really know for sure what the speaker has in mind when they say it, since they might be thinking of a lot of different things. Neal Stephenson coined the word but he no longer owns it, and there’s no Académie Française that can act as the tech buzzword police and give an official definition. Instead ‘metaverse’ has taken on a life of its own, absorbing so many different concepts that I think the word is now pretty much meaningless – it conveys no meaning, and you have to ask, ‘well, what specifically are you asking about?”

And between those two paragraphs he throws in a wonderful Dilbert cartoon.

Worth reading in full.

Elon Musk knows exactly what he’s doing at Twitter.

Usefully detached piece by Timothy B. Lee in Slate. It’s the most sensible take on what’s going on at Twitter that I’ve seen.

Since Musk formally gained control of Twitter last Thursday, the media has portrayed it as a company in chaos. We can expect a lot more stories like this in the coming months. But as you read these stories, you should resist the urge to conclude—as I did four years ago—that Musk is an ineffective manager. Musk’s management style frequently generates chaos for his subordinates. But there is usually a method to his madness.

There is. It ain’t pretty and its characteristically irresponsible, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks that (a) Twitter is massively over-staffed, and (b) that charging people for ‘certified’ identities will raise some revenue and reduce spam. As far as (a) is concerned, there are two ways of doing it: firing people directly, but that can raise legal issues, even in Silicon Valley; or making life so intolerable that they quit of their own accord. This would be known as ‘constructive dismissal’ in the UK, but maybe there’s no equivalent in the US.

My commonplace booklet

From The Onion…

 Republican Voters Given Toll-Free Number To Call If They Witness Legitimate Vote

AUSTIN, TX—In an effort to tamp down on the “outrageous” practice, Texas GOP officials reportedly shared a toll-free number Wednesday that Republican voters could call if they witnessed someone casting a legitimate vote. “If you see anyone who looks like they’re getting in line or speaking to poll workers, we urge you to call or text 1-88-REAL-VOTE immediately,” said Republican Party of Texas chair Matt Rinaldi, who warned that legal voting was running rampant throughout the state, and that it was up to everyday conservative men and women to stop these registered voters before they could submit their ballots. “Our hotline is staffed 24/7 by Republican officials who will dispatch trained professionals to the scene where any alleged voting is taking place. We cannot let these legitimate votes happen. Please report any suspicious behavior you witness, especially if you see someone who does not appear to be Caucasian.” At press time, GOP officials were urging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to protect polling places from voters by deploying the National Guard.

A joke? Wait till next week.

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Lou Gourmandises

A nice reminder of a hot Summer.

Quote of the Day

”It’s a little ironic that there is a certain kind of tech founder/investor/exec who happily talks about San Francisco as a dysfunctional mess because it lacks assertive and rigorous governance, but also claims Twitter would work better without any rules.”

• Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chopin | Waltz in C Sharp Minor (Op. 64 No. 2)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Legacy Cities

Great essay by Ethan Zuckerman, one of the most thoughtful scholars of the networked world. Other people (like this blogger) go on holidays and come back with photographs. Ethan comes back with photographs too, but also with an insightful meditation on what he’s found.

An unmissable Long Read, IMHO.

More on pillars of creation

The Universe is a start-up

Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) saw the post yesterday about the James Webb telescope photograph and pointed me to a blog post of his from 2020 about the pillars as seen by the Hubble telescope. In typical Doc style, he tells the wider story. For example:

Life appeared on earth at least 4.1 billion years ago. Oxygenation sufficient to support life as we know it happened at the start of proterozoic era, about 2.5 billion years ago. The phanerozoic eon, characterized by an abundance of plants and animals, began 0.541 billion years ago and will continue until the Sun gets so large and hot that photosynthesis as we know it becomes impossible. A rough consensus within science is that this will likely happen in just 600 million years, meaning we’re about 80% of our way through the time window for life on Earth.

[…]

In another 4.5 billion years, our galaxy, the Milky Way, will become one with Andromeda, which is currently 2.5 million light-years distant but headed our way on a collision course, looking for now like a thrown frisbee, four moons wide. (It’s actually much larger.) The two will begin merging (not colliding, because nearly all stars are too far apart for that) around 4 billion years from now, and in about 7 billion years will complete a new galaxy resembling an elliptical haze. Here is a video simulation of that future. And here are still panels for the same:

Our Sun will likely be around for all of that future, though by the end it will have become a red giant with a diameter wider than Earth’s orbit, or perhaps will have gone nova, surviving as a white dwarf. (Also—I’m adding this later—Andromeda is weird and scary.)

He goes on to reprise Freeman Dyson’s estimates of the possible age of the universe, and concludes that:

The best guess here is that Universe is about 1% into its lifespan, which has a great many zeros in its number of birthdays. In biological terms, that means it’s not even a baby, or a fetus. It’s more like a zygote, or a blastula.

In other words… it’s a start-up.

Some start-up.

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Pillars of Creation

This photograph in mid-infrared light from the James Webb telescope shows a lot of the dust that’s apparently a major factor in star formation, together with stars that are still in the process of developing — which can be spotted by their red hue in the MIRI photograph.

For those puzzled about the size of those red-hued baby stars in the picture, The Register relays NASA’s advice:

“Trace the topmost pillar, landing on the bright red star jutting out of its lower edge like a broomstick. This star and its dusty shroud are larger than the size of our entire solar system.”

Rather puts us in our place, doesn’t it? And we thought our solar system was a big deal. All that stuff is 6,500 light-years away. Let me see… light travels at 186,000 miles a second, which is 11,160,000 miles a minute, which is 669,600,000 mph. Now, how many hours are there in a year…?

You get the point.

Quote of the Day

”Making a picture with Marilyn Monroe was like going to the dentist. It was hell at the time, but after it was all over it was wonderful.”

• Billy Wilder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Lee Lewis | Wembley | April 1982

Link

Making Jerry Lee the focus of yesterday ‘musical alternative’ touched, er, chords for many readers. James Miller (Whom God Preserve) recommended this clip which really showcases his incredible musical energy and vitality. Imagine being in the crowd that night.

Long Read of the Day

From Boy to Bono

The U2 lead singer has written an autobiography. The New Yorker published this excerpt from it. I hadn’t expected to find it interesting, but I did — partly, I suppose because I remember the Ireland in which he grew up.

Here’s how it opens:

I have very few memories of my mother, Iris. Neither does my older brother, Norman. The simple explanation is that, in our house, after she died she was never spoken of again.

I fear it was worse than that. That we rarely thought of her again.

We were three Irish men, and we avoided the pain that we knew would come from thinking and speaking about her.

Iris laughing. Her humor black as her dark curls. Inappropriate laughing was her weakness. My father, Bob, a postal worker, had taken her and her sister Ruth to the ballet, only to have her embarrass him with her muted howls of laughter at the protruding genitalia boxes worn by the male dancers under their leotards.

I remember, at around seven or eight, I was a boy behaving badly. Iris chasing me, waving a long cane that her friend had promised would discipline me. Me, frightened for my life as Iris ran me down the garden. But when I dared to look back she was laughing her head off, no part of her believing in this medieval punishment…

After I’d read it I wondered if I should buy the book and read the whole thing. But then I came on the New York Times’s intriguing, footnoted and slightly weird interview of Bono and decided that maybe life’s too short…

My commonplace booklet

 I’m Not Sure Which, But One of These Fifteen PDF Files Is the Final Draft

Emily Kling on the problem everyone has when writing a long, long essay without out being careful about how you name the successive drafts.

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Into the light

Leaving St Pancras station.

Quote of the Day

”Now that you’ve got me right down to it, the only thing I didn’t like about The Barretts of Wimple Street was the play.”

• Dorothy Parker, reviewing the play in the New Yorker in 1931.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Lee Lewis | Slippin’ and Slidin’

Link

Jerry Lee’s death poses a problem for those of us who loved his music (and who remember what a sensation he was when he first burst through). In a way, it’s the same problem that faces anyone who admired Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Larkin, Evelyn Waugh, Hunter S. Thompson,…: great artists, terrible people.

Many of the obituaries have tried to strike a balance in summing up Lewis. The Guardian’s obituarist had a pretty good shot at it:

Lewis embodied pinched obduracy, brooding, malevolent ignorance, violent unreliability and borderline madness. He abused women, played with guns and shot at men; he drove the highways of the south blind drunk with his loaded pistol on the dashboard. Yet in the vivid contrast between the meanness of the man and the grandeur of the artist, the common denominators were his phenomenal energy and admirable, all-conquering self-belief.

He will be remembered for his lifetime of hillbilly delirium, but he will be renowned for his seizure of the musical moment at the dawn of rock’n’roll, when an incomparable talent was his intoxicant and ours: when he shot up the old order and played out his defiant dramas on the keyboard, in the studio and on the stage.

In an email, Ian Cole did a good job at rescuing the musician from the slow-motion-car-crash of his life.

The reports and obituaries are full of what made him notorious with hardly a word about the particular characteristics that made his piano playing and singing so sublime. In the case of his singing, I was always struck by how, particularly in his early days at Sun, he sailed up through a chord on a word which gave it three, four or more notes. His piano playing ranged from the ‘pumping’ major to sixth boogie to delicate flourishes and right hand thumb to little finger trills and controlled glissandi where you have to start and finish on the correct note.

Ian added a link to a recording that he thinks exemplifies those qualities. It does, but it’s not the one that I remember best — which is why I chose mine.

Long Read of the Day

 Welcome to hell, Elon You break it, you buy it.

Nice brisk tutorial for the world’s latest media mogul.

You are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.

And…

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now.

You get the message. I guess Musk will eventually get it too. Worth reading the whole thing. And see below.

Elon Musk running Twitter? It’s like giving a delicate clock to a monkey

My OpEd piece from Sunday’s Observer.

When the news broke that Elon Musk had finally been obliged to buy Twitter, the company he had tried – for months – to get out of purchasing, it reminded many observers of the 1979 commercial for Remington shavers in which the corporation’s president, Victor Kiam, proclaimed that he liked the electric razor so much “I bought the company.”

This was a mistake: Kiam merely liked the business he bought, whereas Musk is addicted to his company, in the sense that he cannot live without it. In acquiring Twitter, he has therefore forgotten the advice given to Tony Montana in Scarface: “Don’t get high on your own supply.”

In the immediate aftermath of the $44bn acquisition, though, he was as high as a kite. He showed up at the company’s San Francisco office carrying a kitchen sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he tweeted with a video of him in the lobby of the building…

Do read the whole thing.

My commonplace booklet

What birds can do that we cannot

This wonderful story rather puts us humans in our place.

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit – known only by its satellite tag number 234684 – has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights.

The five-month-old bird set off from Alaska on 13 October and satellite data appeared to show it did not stop during its marathon flight which took 11 days and one hour.

Tagged in Alaska, the bar-tailed godwit, Limosa lapponica, flew at least 13,560km (8,435 miles) before touching down at Ansons Bay in north-east Tasmania.

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The disappearance of childhood

Coming on this picture by Breugel, The Peasant’s Wedding, when rummaging through a collection of postcards yesterday made me dig out and re-read Neil Postman’s wonderful book, The Disappearance of Childhood, in which he argued that our conceptions of childhood are shaped by the dominant communications technology of our age.

In the oral culture of the pre-Gutenberg age, he says, childhood ended when a young person could competently communicate — which in the Middle Ages was judged to be seven years of age. This is why the Catholic Church declared seven to be the “age of reason” (and the age at which children like me growing up in 1950s Ireland made their First Communion). It’s also why, Postman argued, you never see children in Breugel paintings — you just see small people dressed in adult garb.

As J.H. Plumb put it,

“There was no separate world of childhood. Children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, the same fairy stories. They lived their lives together, never apart. The coarse village festival depicted by Breughel, showing men and women besotted with drink, groping for each other with unbridled lust, have children eating and drinking with the adults”.

Postman’s argument was that the rise of a print (i.e.literate) culture lengthened the conception of childhood (to the age of 12, perhaps), because it took longer to achieve communicative competency in such a culture. He went on, famously, to argue that the dominance of broadcast television from the mid-1950s had reduced the period of childhood to about three years, because above that age children could follow most of what what was being shown on US television!

Quote of the Day

”Never did I read such tosh.”

• Virginia Woolf on Joyce’s Ulysses, in a letter to Lytton Strachey, 24 April, 1922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The SteelDrivers | Blue Side Of The Mountain

Link

Long Read of the Day

Into the muck

An interesting review essay by Noam Maggor on the French economist Thomas Piketty’s three books, triggered (I’d guess) by the recent publication of a collection of the his newspaper columns (which I never see because they’re in French). The piece provides a useful Cook’s tour of Piketty’s intellectual journey — starting with his pioneering, data-intensive study of the way in which the imbalance between wages and return on capital in the US and Europe over the last 200 years varied, and the presentation of his ‘iron law’ expressed as r > g, where r is the return on capital and g is the rate of economic growth. Missing from his chronicle, though, was any explanation for how this relationship came to be so solid.

In the end, Piketty came to the conclusion that the explanation lay not in economics but in with ideology, which is why the title of his sprawling second book, Capital and Ideology, gives the game away: inequality is a product of politics.

Or, as Maggor puts it:

Inequality did not simply emerge from economic reality, from technological change or the organization of production, nor from inherent disparities in individual talent, ability, or effort. Rather, inequality is determined through struggles that take place in the political sphere. These struggles dictate the terms of engagement in the market and, by extension, the market’s distributional outcomes. Why do some groups in society accumulate wealth over time? Not because they are more deserving in any objective-economic or natural-Darwinian sense – but because they were able to write the political rules in ways that have benefited them at the expense of others.

I haven’t read Capital and Ideology so found this essay useful. Hope you do too.

And while you’re at it, it’d be worth looking at 15 proposals on what to do about inequality by the late, lamented Tony Atkinson who was the great scholar of inequality.

LinkedIn has a fake profile problem – can it fix this blot on its CV?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, when LinkedIn was the newest new thing, the standard response to anyone who proudly announced that they were “now on LinkedIn” was: “Oh! I didn’t know you were looking for a job.” But then, as always happens with digital stuff, what was once new became routine and, eventually, de rigueur.

I first realised this when my Cambridge college put on an event for students who aspired to become entrepreneurs and we organised a day during which each student could have a conversation with a local venture capitalist or tech investor. I sat in on some of the conversations and was astonished to find that one of the first questions the mentors asked was: “Are you on LinkedIn?” Students who were not were firmly advised to fix that, pronto.

Intrigued, I signed up and was invited to “make the most of your professional life”. I noted that by clicking on “Agree & Join” I was accepting not only the LinkedIn user agreement but also the company’s privacy policy and cookie policy, which indicated that this was just another surveillance capitalist masquerading as a service. But since I have always tried not to write about stuff that I don’t use, I clicked. I then found that I could do interesting things such as uploading my (non-existent) CV, providing details of my “career”, interests, etc, after which I sat back to see what happened.

What happened was, essentially, spam – in the form of unsolicited messages and invitations from LinkedIn…

Read on

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The Rat-Race as was

Paul Day’s stunning frieze of strap-hanging Tube travellers in the concourse of St Pancras station .

Quote of the Day

”There’ll always be an England, but who wants an England full of morons reading the Express?”

• P.G. Wodehouse, in a letter to Denis Mackail, 1959

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Garcia and his acoustic band | Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Link

Long Read of the Day

Learning Language is Harder Than You Think

Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) was worried that yesterday’s Long Read implied that I am unduly impressed by large machine-learning language models (GPT-3 and the like) and so recommends this splendid blog post by Gary Marcus as an antidote. Methinks he overestimates my infatuation with the models but his advice is good. Hence this Long Read which, like most things Gary Marcus writes, is worth one’s time.

Marcus’s argument is that the inference some of the AI crowd are drawing from the ability of machines like GPT-3 to compose perfectly grammatical sentences — that language acquisition is basically a process of memorising usages of language — is naive in the extreme.

Do read it.

A singular scientist

A lovely profile by Roger Highfield of the late, great James Lovelock, “a visionary whose greatest ideas were made possible by his unshakeable independence.”

As the planet lurches towards a climate emergency and its life support systems falter, the need for visionary thinkers with fresh insights and big ideas has never been more pressing. No wonder, then, that the world mourned the death earlier this year of James (‘Jim’) Lovelock, whose Gaia theory provided a new framework to think about nature, one that changed the way we regard our relationship with Earth.

Lovelock contributed to many fields, such as environmental science, cryobiology and exobiology, from thawing hamsters to building exquisitely sensitive detectors to find life on Mars or to sniff out ozone-destroying chemicals. But when he died on 26 July, the day of his 103rd birthday, the world lost what the Earth scientist Timothy Lenton in Science magazine called ‘a genius and iconoclast of immense intellectual courage’. Lovelock was a true original who was detached from the pressure to conform, one who had found a way to do research outside an institution, and who showed a disregard for disciplinary boundaries.

Driven by his scepticism about conventional wisdom, enabled by his skill as an inventor, and guided by visceral scientific insights, Lovelock made much of his independence. When asked about ‘thinking outside the box’ at a meeting in the University of Exeter to celebrate his centenary, he replied: ‘What box?’

My commonplace booklet

Building engines with Lego and compressed air

Wonderful video. 14 minutes of ingenious micro-engineering. Includes the occasional curious cat

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Lunch break

This wonderful Van Gogh — Noon, rest from work — is in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. I thought I knew most of his paintings, but this one is new to me — and a revelation.

Thanks to Andrew Curry, who used it to illustrate a post on his splendid blog.

Quote of the Day

“We inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas. That needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”

• Rishi Sunak to Tory activists, Tunbridge Wells, 5 August 2022.

Selected just in case anyone had the idea that the UK’s latest PM might be some kind of liberal. He is, after all, an alumnus of Goldman Sachs. In fact, the person he most reminds me of is George Osborne, another fanatical believer in ‘fiscal rectitude’ who made ordinary people pay for the bailing out of the banks in 2008.

En passant… I wonder if the conspiracists of the DUP have tumbled to the fact that ‘Rishi’ is an anagram of ‘Irish’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Lewis “Burgundy Street Blues” with Mr. Acker Bilk & his Band (1965)

Link

Should be played at everybody’s funeral.

Long Read of the Day

AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning – and raising questions about an innate grammar

Very interesting essay on what the large language models might be suggesting about how humans learn language.

New insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.

Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be…

Read on.

This is a challenge to conventional theories about language learning which postulate that language learners have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience. But large language models like GPT-3 can generate grammatical sentences — without knowing anything about the world — simply by being good at predicting what word comes next.

This essay brings to mind many earlier debates about the complex relationship between technology and scientific theory. Think about the telescope and astronomy, or the microscope and biology. Which is why it’s interesting.

Exit, Beijing style

Fascinating video of strange goings-on among the top brass of the Chinese Communist Party at the Congress in which the former Chinese President Hu Jintao was led out of the hall in a moment of unexpected drama during an otherwise fastidiously choreographed event.

The 79-year-old Hu was sitting beside Xi Jinping in when he was approached by a man in a suit and Covid mask who spoke to him and appeared to pull his right arm. With Xi looking on, the man then places both hands under Hu’s armpits and attempts to lift him out of his seat. Xi appears to talk to Hu before the man gets between them and tries to lift Hu again. Then another guy in a mask arrives and Hu eventually stands up, exchanges a few words with Xi and places a hand on the shoulder of Premier Li Keqiang, the China’s number two official, before he was led away. Weird.

My commonplace booklet

From Joe Dunne:

I think your quote this morning should read ‘Too many notes, dear Mozart, too many notes’ and it should be attributed to Emperor Joseph II. It was supposedly said after the first performance of Entfuhrung aus dem Serail on 16th July 1782 in Vienna. But never let the truth get in the way of a good story!

I won’t, Joe, I won’t.

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