Wednesday 7 August, 2024

Air Bee’n Bee

One of my boys and his partner gave me a ‘bug hotel’ for my birthday and we decided to pin it to the garden fence and await developments. So far, five Mason Bees have booked accommodation.


Quote of the Day

“Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

  • E.B. White

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eva Cassidy | Autumn Leaves

Link

I know I know, it’s not Autumn yet. But this was new to me and I liked it. Hope you do too!


Long Read of the Day

Gordon Brown on his experience of the Murdoch press

Compelling piece in the Guardian by the UK’s former Prime Minister, in which he details what these rags had been up to — including deleting millions of potentially embarrassing (and perhaps legally problematic) emails.

The kicker is that the guy who presided over much of this chicanery has been appointed Editor of the sainted Washington Post. Truly, you couldn’t make it up.


Books, etc.

Human Voices

I’m currently reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of her uncles, The Knox brothers, and am deeply impressed by it, particularly by her ability to provide contextual detail about four men who had complicated and interesting lives (one was an early cryptographer and code-breaker; two were priests; and one was Editor of Punch).

I hadn’t read anything by her before, and indeed only got the ‘brothers’ book because of reading Henry Oliver’s Second Act and discovering that she was fifty-eight before she published a book and yet is now recognised as one of the best English writers of her generation. So I started wondering which of her novels I should start with. Sarah Harkness’s recent essay solved the problem: Human Voices it shall be.

Which is why her essay is worth reading.


My commonplace booklet

I’m a sceptic about AGI and deeply suspicious of the giant tech corporations which aspire to control the technology. But from the outset I’ve been a pragmatist about Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama, Claude, Gemini et al. I see these as (a) what Alison Gopnik calls (cultural technologies — like libraries, language, books, etc.) and (b) as potentially useful tools — like spreadsheets, and in that context use them a bit as unpaid but assiduous interns. And I find them useful.

Which explains why I liked this post by Nicholas Carlini. He’s a security researcher and a sceptic about most things, but in the essay he outlines how he’s been using LLMs in his work. His view is that,

current large language models have provided the single largest improvement to my productivity since the internet was created. Honestly, today, if you gave me the choice of solving a randomly selected programming task from my work either with access to the internet or access to a state of the art language model, I’d probably pick the language model more than half the time.

Which is interesting, is it not?


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Monday 5 August, 2024

Director’s cut

I don’t suffer from house envy, but if I did — and had won the lottery — this is the kind of house I’d go for. It’s Cory Lodge, which used to be the residence of the Director of Cambridge University’s Botanic garden (maybe it still is, but given the utilitarianism of university administrations, it could well have been turned into offices). It’s a perfect example of a certain kind of Victorian villa.

In the late 1980s, when I desperately needed a place of my own, I rented a wing of a house of this type and vintage for a year and a half, and it was a lovely, restorative experience. There’s something about this kind of architecture that’s good for the soul.

From 1951 to 1973 John Gilmour was the Director of the Garden and his three daughters gave a nice interview looking back on what it was like growing up in such a lovely home.


Quote of the Day

”The cognitive dissonance the Olympics produces for me: You’re watching these amazing athletes push their bodies to the limits of their abilities, you tear up at the drama and the joy and the excitement and the pain and disappointment of it all, you’re maybe even thinking about what it means to be human and how much intelligence is the result of being an embodied creature… and then every tech company ad wants you to buy into artificial intelligence.”

  • Austin Kleon

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vance VP – a parodic adaptation of ABBA’s Dancing Queen about Trump’s running mate .

Link

Some very sharp lyrics reminding listeners that if Trump were to win in November, this Hillbilly elegist will be just “One Big Mac away” from the nuclear button.

Thanks to Timothy Garton Ash, who spotted it first.


Long Read of the Day

The Friedrich Hayek I knew, and what he got right – and wrong

There’s an interesting essay in the New Statesman by John Gray about one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th century. What I hadn’t realised was that Gray actually knew Hayek. The essay is interesting throughout, but particularly good on the relationship between Hayek and Keynes.

The two men had quite different kinds of minds – Keynes’s swift and mobile, with an almost clairvoyant power of entering into the thinking of others; Hayek’s slowly probing, inwardly turned and self-enclosed. They were nonetheless on cordial terms.

Keynes found Hayek rooms in King’s College when the London School of Economics (where Hayek became a professor of economics in 1931) moved to Cambridge for the duration of the Second World War, and for a time the pair shared fire-watching duties on the roof of the college when it was feared that Cambridge might be bombed…

Like many of these Long Reads, it made me want to read something else related to its topic.

(Memo to self: check out Nicholas Wapshott’s book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics in the University Library this morning.)


Back to the 1930s: Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In How Democracy Ends, his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the liberal democracy that we take for granted won’t last for ever, it will not fail in ways familiar from the past: no revolutions, no military coups, no breakdowns of social order. It will fail forwards in an unexpected manner. The implication was that people making comparisons to what happened in 1930s Germany were misguided.

But then something changed. Significant sectors of Silicon Valley – which for decades had been a Democrat stronghold – started coming out for Trump. In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed the fact that he was the region’s statutory maverick. But in the past few weeks, quite a few of the Valley’s big hitters (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, to name just three) have revealed themselves to be supporters of – and donors to – Trump. Musk has set up and donated to a Republican-aligned political action committee (or Super Pac). On 6 June, the venture capitalist Sacks hosted a $300,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion. And so on.

Why all this sudden interest in politics?

Read on


Books, etc.

John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran Foreign Editor, reviews of Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Until around 2015, I tended to be moderately positive about the world. There were far more democracies than when I started at the BBC in 1966, I would tell myself, and markedly fewer dictatorships. Africa and Latin America, once host to so many military dictatorships, were now mostly run by elected leaders. The terrible threat of nuclear war had receded. A billion people were being lifted out of poverty. Yes, what Vladimir Putin had done in Crimea in 2014 was worrying, and Xi Jinping was starting to make disturbing speeches about Muslims and Uyghurs; but given that I’d seen Soviet communism melt away across eastern Europe and in Russia itself, I still felt there was reason for optimism.

That pretty much ended in 2016. Brexit damaged the European project, and Donald Trump shook the columns of American leadership. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, based on the completely false assumption that most Ukrainians would welcome the return of Russian domination, and China’s ruthless suppression of political freedom in Hong Kong have darkened the 2020s much as German, Italian and Japanese intervention darkened the 1930s. And the tide of democracy has turned. Elections have so often become shams. Corruption in government has turned into a major global industry. Well-intentioned but indigent governments welcome Chinese cash because no one else will supply it, and pretend not to notice the strings attached – or even welcome them. Populist movements well up in countries that have traditionally been moderate and calm.

And so the kind of neo-Whig version of history, which taught that trade would bring us all closer together and economics would make war impossible, has collapsed…

Good piece. So much for that Neo-Whig interpretation of post-war history.


My commonplace booklet

What’s going on…

”The far right here and in other countries trawl violent and sexual crimes in the hope that they have been committed by migrants or non-whites. Instances are posted on social media and widely shared, often with a sneering reference to the “joys of multiculturalism”. I hardly need to add that when these crimes are the work of white people, the perpetrator’s origins or ethnicity won’t rate a mention. The absolute jackpot crime would be a child sex murder committed by a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a boat. This wouldn’t just rate a mention by your unfriendly local social media nazi and a bevy of YouTube influencers but by half a dozen Telegraph columnists and a score of GBNEWS and Talk TV hosts and their guests.

Within hours of the murders for which Axel Rudakabana has been charged – and in the absence of his identification, far right social media decided that they had completed its blame-bingo card. (Note, however, that despite a judge taking the unusual step of having an under-18 suspect named, it has made no difference whatsoever to those rioting in several towns in England.)…

From David Aaronovitch’s Substack.


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Friday 2 August, 2024

Morning conference

8:30am, Provence, June


Quote of the Day

“If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving definitely isn’t for you”

  • Steven Wright

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Soave sia il vento | Così fan tutte

Link

Beautiful and so, so cynical. From the 2006 Glyndebourne performance. I’ve often thought that this would make great going-out music for one’s funeral.


Long Read of the Day

Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast

Background: This is a beautiful essay by the great social scientist James Scott, looking back on his intellectual development in which, instead of him leaving his original discipline of political science, political science left him. After I learned of his death, I wrote a little piece about him in last Wednesday’s edition in which I mentioned how generative his book Seeing Like a State had been — in the sense that it triggered a lot of productive thinking in its readers.

As if on cue, a really thoughtful post about Scott popped into my inbox the other day. It’s by Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) and his essay is an insightful meditation on the significance of Scott’s work, and worth reading just for that. But for me it had an added delight — of alerting me to Scott’s own reflection on his intellectual development.

A pivotal movement in his life was a decision to spend a year and a half living in a remote Malay village with 75 inhabitants in order to understand how real people lived rather than doing statistical surveys of the kind beloved by political scientists. One of the ideas that emerged from that experience was an understanding of what he called ‘below-the-radar-resistance’ by powerless peasants or political dissidents in authoritarian regimes.

One example of this kind of resistance that he cites comes from Poland during the period of martial law.

When the Solidarity Movement was strong at the end of martial law in Poland, there were forms of symbolic protest that drove the government crazy. The government news broadcast took place at 6:00 PM and people decided by the hundreds of thousands to leave their houses. The moment the news broadcast began, they took a walk in the street for a half hour, until the news broadcast was over, with their hats on backwards. There was no law against taking a walk, and there was, of course, no law about wearing your hat backwards. You could understand, however, that this was a huge morale booster for much of the Polish opposition to martial law.

The government responded by forcing a curfew at exactly 6:00 that would require people to be in their houses during the news broadcast. Within a few days, the Polish opposition had discovered a workaround. Since they could no longer be in the street during the news broadcast, what they did was to take their television set, put it on the windowsill, and blare out the news broadcast—which they considered to be largely lies—to the security forces, who were the only people in the street. This, as you can imagine, was also a huge morale booster and a symbolic victory for the opposition to martial law, even though it did not change the power dynamic in the short run.

Well worth a read. Even though it’s an academic article, it’s open-access. Go to the link and click on the “PDF” button.


Books, etc.

Feeling pessimistic: why not try reading a book?

Lovely essay by Henry Oliver.

According to the Pew Centre, back in the 1970s, when news coverage wasn’t so pessimistic, only 8% of Americans reported not having read a book in the last year. That figure now stands at 23%. A new survey from the Reading Agency shows that only 50% of UK adults are regular readers. 35% are “lapsed”. And 15% have never been regular readers. In 2015, 58% of adults were regular readers. And only 8% of adults were non-readers back then. The figures for the 16-24 bracket suggest these figures will continue to decline.

Many reasons are given for this decline: distraction of social media, lack of ability to focus, and feeling bored or uninterested by the reading material. Those who did read reported better mental health, improved sleep and concentration, and better understanding of other people’s feelings. Readers have better life satisfaction.

The reason, I think, is that reading is a solitary activity. Reading requires us to leave the world of arguments, ideologies, news coverage, and TikTok feeds and to exist inside our imaginations for a while. Many solutions are sought to the wide-spread mood of dissatisfaction, not least the prevalence of therapy. But this keeps us focussed on what is making us miserable: our own lives, our own problems, the people around us.

It does, because misery is contagious. And listening to music and reading books are two antidotes to it. Which partly explains the structure of this little newsletter. 


Errata

Apologies to the inimitable Heather Cox Richardson for renaming her ‘Helen’ in Wednesday’s edition. Usual culprits: Apple autocorrect and slack proofreading by a sleepy blogger. And thanks to Andrew Brown for pointing it out so tactfully.


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Wednesday 31 July, 2024

The First Webcam

This was the world’s very first webcam. In 1991 my friend Quentin Stafford-Fraser and his colleague Paul Jardetzky set it up to watch a coffee-pot in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s Trojan Room (a large space previously occupied by an early mainframe computer) which housed a number of graduate students. Quentin and Paul connected it to the lab’s internal network so that graduate students everywhere in the building (rather than just the privileged denizens of the Trojan Room) — could see when the coffee had been brewed. Quentin wrote the X-Coffee program that displayed the live image in a small box on the top right-hand corner of every student’s desktop computer, and Paul wrote the server software to underpin it.

In 1993, when Mosaic — the first web browser that could handle images — appeared, the coffee-pot was hooked up to the Internet and broadcast on the web, and for a brief period was the most watched pot in the world! (Fittingly, it never boiled.) Many years later, when the Computer Lab moved from central Cambridge to its new, vast, building on the West Cambridge site, the venerable pot was auctioned for charity, and Quentin became the first person I’ve ever known who appeared on the front pages of the London and New York Times on the same day!

All of this was brought back by having lunch with him last week, when he suddenly produced the ancient relic from his bag. (It had been briefly liberated from its usual display case in the Lab for a TV interview he had done the day before.)

Quentin wrote a nice memoir of the webcam which was published in the Proceedings of the ACM in 2001.


Quote of the Day

”Me no Leica”.

  • Headline on Dorothy Parker’s review of Christopher Isherwood’s I Am A Camera.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Wailin’ Jennys | Light of a Clear Blue Morning

Link

A distinctive take of a Dolly Parton song.


Long Read of the Day

Democratic fragility and resilience.

I know, I know, I/we pay too much attention to what’s going on in the US at the moment. That’s one of the curses of living in the ‘Anglosphere’, as my European friends often point out. But on the other hand, what happens in the US in the next 90-odd days will affect us all. If you doubt that, ask President Zelensky.

In brooding on it I’ve been oscillating between two frames of mind, both triggered by what James Joyce would have called epiphanies.

  • The first, triggered by Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the televised ‘debate’ between him and Trump, was a memory of an afternoon many years ago when my youngest son was revising for his GCSE exams. He was sitting at the dining-room table while I was in the kitchen cooking supper and he suddenly exclaimed, “Dad, I’ve got it! Tragedy is when you can see the disaster coming but you know there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

  • The second was a moment in 2013 when I was reading The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present by my friend and colleague David Runciman. In it he argued that democracies are good at recovering from crises but bad at avoiding them. The lesson they draw from their mistakes is that they can survive them — and that no crisis is as bad as it initially appears. This breeds complacency rather than wisdom, leading to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything. (The ‘confidence trap’ of the book’s title.)

The dangerous thing, of course, is that muddling through takes time, and if democracies are slow to appreciate the next crisis then there may not be enough time to adjust before it’s too late. Watching how agonisingly slow Biden and the Democrats seemed to be in realising the danger led me to conclude that muddling through was no longer an option and that the US would wind up in the grip of a fascist administration with all that implied.

But then Biden conceded to reality and suddenly light appeared at the end of the tunnel. It was an astonishing moment, and of course it may not in the end derail the Trump bandwagon, but there’s now a tangible sense that the US may not fall into Runciman’s confidence trap.

This sense of democratic resilience is admirably captured in a post by Helen Cox Richardson on her admirable Substack blog, which I recommend reading in its entirety.

Here’s how it opens:

Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.

I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.

That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.

But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.

At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime…

Do read the whole thing.


My commonplace booklet


Linkblog

  • Two plus two = 22?. Clever and instructive film about the MAGA mindset.

Thanks to Chris Hall for suggesting it. He uses it in his teaching.


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Monday 29 July, 2024

Safely grazing

A photograph taken on a rural cycle ride yesterday morning. Made me think of Bach — see today’s Musical Alternative.


Quote of the Day

“Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians…. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

  • Donald Trump, speaking to Christians at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 26.

I have to say that when I first read that I wondered if it might have been Trump’s favourite form of media — fake news. So I dug out the CSPAN video of the speech and watched it. And it’s there, towards the end — spool forward to 1.03:12 and you can see for yourself.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Schafe können sicher weiden — Sheep May Safely Graze — from the Hunt Cantata, BWV 208

Link


Long Read of the Day

How to fix the UK? Let me count the ways

Really interesting essay by Tim Harford of the Financial Times

Here’s the bad news: it is going to take more than a change of government to cure what ails Britain. The symptoms are wearyingly familiar, but worth summarising. Waiting lists for NHS treatment have soared above 7.5mn, from 4.2mn in 2019 and 2.5mn in 2010. Prisons are at capacity, and the court system long since exceeded it. Local government funding has been squeezed for years, with obvious effects on local services such as social care, libraries and leisure centres.

The simple explanation for all this is that 14 years of Conservative-led governments have cut taxes, preferring to trust citizens with their own money even if it leaves the public realm looking threadbare. But that’s not what has happened. While headline taxes on average earners are indeed low, as a proportion of national income the total tax burden is — infamously — near the highest level since the 1940s, while the UK continues to borrow and add to the largest pile of debt in living memory. In short, we are spending more than ever and somehow getting less than ever for it.

Those are the symptoms. The cause is familiar, too: productivity has stagnated since 2008…

It’s good, but a newspaper column can only scratch the surface of the UK’s problems. For a really thorough analysis the best place to look (as Tim suggests) is the Resolution Foundation’s report.

You can download it for free. It’s quite a read, believe me.


AI and the Sigmoid Curve

Yesterday’s Observer column

I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I’ve always had a policy of writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new “AI” stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly better camera than my old handset had – which matters (to me) because my Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.

But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold, detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the 2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental improvements…

Read on


Books, etc.

If, like me, you’re struggling to work out the impact(s) of digital technology on democracies, then the re-issue of Karl Polyani’s great 1944 book is quite an event. It was a prescient and powerful argument for keeping capitalism under democratic control — and in that sense was read as a rebuttal of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which, ironically, was also published in 1944.

The economist Branko Milanovic has written a really informative review of the new edition which I think will be helpful to those who didn’t know about Polyani.

For those who may be new to the area, let me just summarize the main insights of Polanyi’s. Market economy, defined as an economy that entirely depends on prices of commodities including market-determined prices of factors of production (what Polanyi called “fictitious commodities”) of labor, land and money is an impossibility. It is impossible in practice because such an economy would annihilate society. This, Polanyi writes, was only imperfectly understood when the first time in history such an attempt was made during the British Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution so extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given unlimited amount of material commodities. (p. 40). Self-regulating market society would result (and in Britain it did initially result) in pauperism, vagrancy, alcoholism, insalubrious living conditions, “satanic mills”, much longer hours of work, shorter lives, lack of education, all the elements well known from economic history and from the works of literature.

Thus, the “society” (a rather capacious term that Polanyi overuses) had to defend itself against a self-regulated market economy…


My commonplace booklet

One of the great things about having a blog is that one has readers that know more than the blogger! I’m continually learning this. On Friday, I posted a picture of a lovely little vintage car that we saw on our drive northwards from Provence, and asked if anyone knew what it was.

You can guess what happened. Some readers knew immediately what it was — and told me. Others deployed search techniques to come up with the answer — a Renault 4CV!

Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve) had the idea of showing the image to Anthropic’s LLM (Claude 3.5), which replied as follows:

This appears to be a Renault 4CV, a small economy car produced by the French automaker Renault from 1946 to 1961.

The 4CV was one of France’s first post-World War II car designs and played a significant role in motorizing the French population after the war. Its nickname in France was “quatre pattes” (four paws), referring to its four doors.

The LLM also added some interesting points about the vehicle: it was designed in secret during the German occupation of France in World War II; it had a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout; it was very popular, with over a million units produced during its 14-year production run; and its design influenced later Renault models, particularly the Renault Dauphine.

This was slightly annoying because I also use Claude but it never occurred to me to ask it about the car. And although my question about the car’s identity was a trivial one, Max’s use of the LLM was a reminder of how useful these tools can sometimes be.

Many thanks also to the readers who pointed me at the Wikipedia entry for the 4CV. They included James Miller (Whom God Preserve) who pointed out that this page explained how the little car came to have the mysterious letters RNUR engraved on the front badge:

On 1 January 1945, by de Gaulle’s decree, the company was posthumously expropriated from Louis Renault. On 16 January 1945, it was formally nationalised as Régie Nationale des Usines Renault.”

Thanks to all. I may not be wiser, but I am much better informed.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • Plastic bottles and regulatory ‘freedom’. Jonty Bloom makes a nice point on his blog about the fact that when you now buy a bottle of water in the UK, you find that after you unscrew the cap and have a drink, the cap continues to be attached to the bottle by a thin piece of plastic. Turns out that this is the produce of a newish EU regulation.

But , writes Jonty,

Because we have left the EU the directive does not effect us, (a classic case of regulatory divergence by inertia, which I have mentioned before) but any British manufacturer of plastic bottle who wants to sell in the EU has to follow the EU rules.

As British industry, Remain and anyone with an ounce of common sense has been pointing out for years now, no company is going to run two production lines, one that meets EU standards and a British one that meets lower UK standards. They will run the one with higher standards and sell them in the UK and the rest of Europe.

Hey Presto! The Brexit fools have discovered that these new bottle tops have been “imposed” on the UK by the EU, we are not free or sovereign, EU regulations still apply, we are still in the dead clutch of Brussels, chained to a corpse and so on…


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Friday 26 July, 2024

l’Auto

Following the Route Napoleon on our drive northwards through the Rhone Alps a couple of weeks ago, we stopped for coffee in the village of Corps and came on this quaint vehicle. It was small but perfectly formed, as they say. Intrigued, we wondered about its ancestry. The only clue was an enigmatic badge:

An early Renault, perhaps? More knowledgeable petrolheads will doubtless know.


Quote of the Day

”I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.

  • Norman Mailer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Buffalo Springfield | For What It’s Worth

Link


Long Read of the Day

Both Sides

Thoughtful essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a pernicious delusion of mainstream media.

Why does American television and press “both-sides” our politics? Why are such different presidential candidates presented as equally flawed? Why do the outrages of Trump, for example at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, lead to the humiliation of Biden?

Both-Sidesism is the habit of reducing the world into two perspectives, treating the two as fundamentally alike, and then ignoring or adjusting the data. One cause of this odd behavior is the ownership of media companies. Another is fear.

But Both-Sidesism is not just a practice. It passes in the United States for a principle of journalism. Indeed, the dualism is almost unquestionable. Americans tends to take it for granted.

But it makes no sense. No data from the world around us indicates that two is the correct number of perspectives, nor that any two perspectives, once chosen, would be equal…

Great essay. I’m reminded of a conversation the economist Paul Krugman had with a group of Harvard undergraduates during the presidency of George W. Bush when Dick Cheney was his adult supervisor (and also Vice-President). At one stage Krugman used the phrase “balance as bias” and some of the students looked puzzled.

So he gave them an illustration of how it works:

Dick Cheney says the Earth is flat. Here’s how the New York Times reports it:
“VP says Earth flat; Others Disagree.”


My commonplace booklet

Shortly after the Trump shooting, Charlie Warzel, a well-known American journalist, went onto Twitter/X and was appalled by what he found there. So he wrote a column about it in The Atlantic which includes this passage:

Some may wish to see the conspiracy peddling, cynical politicking, and information warfare as a kind of gross aberration or the unintended consequences and outputs of a system that’s gone awry. This is wrong. What we are witnessing is an information system working as designed. It is a machine that rewards speed, bravado, and provocation. It is a machine that goads people into participating as the worst version of themselves. It is a machine that is hyperefficient, ravenous, even insatiable—a machine that can devour any news cycle, no matter how large, and pick it apart until it is an old, tired carcass.

If you’re interested in cybernetics, this is an interesting epiphany. Why? Because, for a cybernetician, the purpose of a system is not what people who own or run it say it is. The purpose is what the system actually does.

By the same token, the fact that neoliberalism produces inequality is a feature, not a bug, as programmers say. It’s what the system is designed to do.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • tinyPod — if this makes sense to anyone, they will most likely be denizens of the Apple ecosystem. Basically, you put your Apple Watch into a neat little plastic case that evokes memories of the original iPod and away you go. Effectively turns your wristwatch into a pocket watch! And really only makes sense if your iWatch has a mobile connection. Charming, in a way, but maybe just another example of leading-edge uselessness.

Thanks to Charles Arthur, who first spotted it.


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Wednesday 24 July, 2024

Peak Viewing

The Peak District viewed from Stanage Edge. Note the strategically-positioned crow.

Photo by my son Pete.


Quote of the Day

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …”

  • Max Planck

A striking quote often summarised as “Science advances one funeral at a time”.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | French Suite No 4 | Murray Perahia

Link

This was on the car radio the other day.

When I reached my destination, I sat, entranced, until it ended.


Long Read of the Day

On The Moral Economy of Tech

A transcript of a remarkable talk by Maciej Ceglowski, one of the sharpest observers of digital technology around (and also the creator of Pinboard.in, which he describes as “bookmarking for introverts” and which has played a central role in my workflow for many years).

I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence…

It does. This is really worth your time.


Books, etc.

James Scott, RIP

One of the most distinctive social scientists of his time died last Friday. I came to his work late, when I stumbled on his book Seeing Like a State when I was trying to understand how modern states came into being. It was basically a critique of what Scott called “high modernism”, a mindset of rulers to force “legibility” on their subjects by (as Wikipedia puts it) “homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements. Examples include the introduction of family names, censuses, uniform languages, and standard units of measurement. While such innovations aim to facilitate state control and economies of scale, Scott argues that the eradication of local differences and silencing of local expertise can have adverse effects.”

Reading the book, I was sometimes reminded of The Open Society and its Enemies, but the most amusing impact it had on me was a kind of admiration for the Norman Conquest, the relentless thoroughness of which evoked Scott’s portrayal of the search for ‘legibility’. What else, after all, was the Domesday book [italics] for [unitalics] than to give William an informed idea of who his new realm’s 268,984 landowners were, how wealthy they were, etc.?

Brad DeLong wrote an interesting review of Seeing Like a State in which he gently chided Scott for not acknowledging his debt to Hayek and the Austrian economists. “One one level”, he wrote, the book

is an extraordinary well-written and well-argued tour through the various forms of damage that have been done in the twentieth century by centrally-planned social-engineering projects— by what James Scott calls “high modernism” and the attempt to use high modernist principles and practices to build utopia. As such, every economist who reads it will see it as marking the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning. Heaven knows that I am no Austrian—I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat—but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago…

Scott’s work seems to have been highly generative (a bit like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty in that respect), stimulating a lot of reflective writing on his themes and preoccupations. I’m thinking, for example, of Henry Farrell’s thoughtful meditation on “Seeing like a Finite State Machine”.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, showing what has become of the US Supreme Court.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.


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Monday 22 July, 2024

Evolution

Of one thing at least we can be sure: ‘soapy Sam’ would not have approved of the graphic.


Quote of the Day

With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic.”

  • Mel Brooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gustav Mahler | Fifth Symphony, Adagietto | Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Phil

Link

The symphony was performed at the BBC Proms last night, with Mark Elder conducting the Hallé orchestra.

Footnote Bernstein once gave an intriguing talk at Harvard on the subject of ambiguity in the piece, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a musician.


Long Read of the Day

Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century 

Lovely piece by Ellen Wexler in The Smithsonian about an extraordinary photographer.

It’s a great story.

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof, who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives…

My hunch is that if she knew how famous and celebrated she has become, she’d be appalled!


Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AI

Yesterday’s Observer column:

As enshittification unfolds, the experience of a platform’s hapless users steadily and inexorably deteriorates. But most of them put up with it because of inertia and the perceived absence of anything better. The result is that, even as Google steadily deteriorated, it remained the world’s dominant search engine, with a monopolistic hold in many markets across the world; “Google” became a verb as well as a noun and “Googling” is now a synonym for online searching in all contexts.

The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk threatens to upend this profitable applecart. For one thing, it definitely disrupts search behaviour. Ask a chatbot such as Perplexity.ai a question and it gives you an answer. Search for the topic on Google and it gives you a list of websites (including ones from which it derives revenue) on which you then have to click in order to make progress. For another, if users shift to chatbots for information, they won’t be exposed (at least for now) to lucrative search ads, which account for a significant chunk of Google’s revenue. And over time, experience with chatbots will change people’s expectations about searching for information online.

Overhanging all this, though, is the fact that generative AI is already flooding the web with AI-generated content…

Read on


My commonplace booklet

As regular readers know, I have been a keen photographer for ever, and so am partial to accounts of other photo-sufferers’ successes and tribulations. So you perhaps understand why I was a sucker for Jason Koebler’s essay, “Developing and Scanning My Own Color Film: A Rewarding, Infuriating Hobby”, not least because while I used to develop and print my own black & white films, I always shirked doing the same with colour rolls.

If you read the piece, you will perhaps understand why I shirked it!


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.


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Friday 19 July, 2024

Gehry’s tower

For the new Luna Centre in Arles. Quite a building.


Quote of the Day

“I regard not finding Lord Lucan as my most spectacular success in journalism. Of course, many of my colleagues have also been fairly successful in not finding Lord Lucan. But I have successfully not found him in more exotic spots than anybody else.”

  • Garth Gibbs, a famous Daily Mirror journalist who would not have been out of place in Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful satire on journalism, Scoop. (A copy of which, incidentally, David Cameron kept on his desk before he was Prime Minister, presumably as a handbook for dealing with the British tabloids.)

For readers who do not follow the excesses of these vile rags, I should explain that Lord Lucan was an elegant and dissolute peer who disappeared after murdering his children’s nanny with a lead pipe and was never seen again, despite the efforts of many tabloid journalists — all coincidentally on lavish expenses — to locate him in foreign parts.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ruhe Sanft, Mein Holdes Leben (Zaide) | Lucia Popp

Link

Sublime, utterly sublime.


Long Read of the Day

The AI summer

Nice essay by Benedict Evans, one of the shrewdest observers of the tech industry writing today.

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.

Worth reading from start to finish. The reason we’re in an AI bubble is that while everyone and his dog is talking about how revolutionary the tech is, it’s not at all clear whether — and how — this apparent potential will actually be realised. Evans thinks that history suggests that the big payoffs might be a long time coming.


Books, etc.

Top ten of the NYT’s top 100 books of the 21st century.

  1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
  2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
  3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  4. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
  5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
  7. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  8. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
  9. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The only ones I’ve read are nos. 5,8 and 9. My kids are appalled that I still haven’t read Wolf Hall, and don’t regard my protestations that I’ve seen the dramatisation as satisfactory justification. I’m pretty sure they’re right.

Errata

Apologies to Belinda Kitchin for getting her surname wrong — as ‘kitchen’. Of course I’d like to blame it on Apple autocorrect, but careless proofreading is a more plausible explanation.


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Wednesday 17 July, 2024

A rose by any other name…


Quote of the Day

“I don’t think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn’t be”

  • John Betjeman

Lovely man, though logic wasn’t his strong point. I never pass St Pancras station, though, without thinking fondly of him. Without him it’d be some ghastly modernist pile.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Claude-Michel Schonberg | Bring Him Home | The Piano Guys

Link


Long Read of the Day

Putting the Boot in

Lovely essay by Robert Hutton on British journalism, as satirised by Evelyn Waugh, and embodied by Boris Johnson.

Scoop, whatever Waugh’s intention, offered generations of unserious young journalists the hope that they might pitch up somewhere, get drunk on expenses, fail to understand what was going on, and be declared a hero.

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.

The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the novel’s hero, the hapless William Boot, though…

Read on to find out who’s the model.

Footnote The piece was published in The Critic in 2021 when the foolishness of the British electorate to give Johnson a mandate to screw the country was becoming obvious to even the dogs in the street.


Books, etc.

One of the nicest surprises of last week was to discover that Rick Gekoski and his wife, Belinda Kitchen, were in town. We had dinner with them on Saturday evening. Rick is a writer, a successful rare-book dealer, a publisher and a former academic. So, like me, he has a foot in several graves.

He is also a consummate storyteller, which is why his essays on the book trade (and academia) are memorable. His book, Tolkien’s Gown, a set of essays about the publishing history of 20 great works, is full of stories that most of us would kill for.

I’ve known him for years and so it was great to catch up with him and Belinda. And then, towards the end of the meal, she pulled this rabbit out of her bag — a set of yarns about his dealings — both in rare books and with their authors. I was mortified that I had missed it (it came out in 2021, in the height of the pandemic). The only consolation for the embarrassment is that I now have literary entertainment for the post-EUFA week!


My commonplace booklet

My observation on Monday about the echoes of the famous Imo Jima photograph from WW2 in Evan Vucci’s remarkable photograph of a defiant Trump in the aftermath of the shooting led Joe Dunne to see another echo — Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People.


Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

  • DJI Drone ascends Everest Link. The kind of mountaineering any couch-potato can enjoy.

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