Danger: Blogger at Work

On his holidays, too.

Quote of the Day

“Exercise if bunk. If you are healthy you don’t need it: if you are sick, you shouldn’t take it.”

• Henry Ford

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton & Bob Dylan | Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right | LIVE

Link

It’s an unusual take on one of my favourite songs. I prefer the original version with the clawhammer pick.

• • * 

Long Read of the Day

 How Americans Came To Distrust Science, by Andrew Jewett | Boston Review | 8th December 2020

Link

A large part of the American public has distrusted “science” since the early 20th century, seeing it variously as a threat to religious beliefs, a disruptor of moral values, and a slippery slope towards a totalitarian state. “A tendency to trace social ills to the cultural sway of an ideologically infected science continues up to our own day, even as the details of the indictment have changed.”

There was only one Brexit deal — ever

It was always wealth vs sovereignty: how much loss of the former in return for how much gain in the latter. Fabulous Guardian column by Rafael Behr.
Short read, and well worth it.

Now we know what went on in Matt Hancock’s secret meeting with Mark Zuckerberg

Great reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Mark Zuckerberg threatened to pull Facebook’s investment from the UK in a private meeting with Matt Hancock, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

The minutes, from May 2018, show that an obsequious Hancock was eager to please, offering “a new beginning” for the government’s relationship with social media platforms. He offered to change the government’s approach from “threatening regulation to encouraging collaborative working to ensure legislation is proportionate and innovation-friendly”.

Hancock sought “increased dialogue” with Zuckerberg, “so he can bring forward the message that he has support from Facebook at the highest level”.

Zuckerberg attended the meeting only days after Hancock – then the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) – had publicly criticised him for dodging a meeting with MPs. Civil servants had to give Zuckerberg explicit assurance that the meeting would be positive and Hancock would not simply demand he attend the Select Committee, and noted that the meeting began with an ambience of “guarded hostility”.

The government fought tooth and nail to prevent the Minutes of the meeting being released. In the end, the Information Commissioner ordered their release.

“In the Commissioner’s view the requirement for due transparency and openness is particularly acute in the present case given Mr Zuckerberg’s absence in the UK public domain… In view of the high level of personal control which the Facebook founder and CEO enjoys over some of the most influential and powerful social media platforms in the UK, the Commissioner considers that the demand for such transparency is correspondingly high.”

The Christchurch mass killer was radicalised by YouTube

The New Zealand mosque shooter was radicalised on YouTube: Among the findings of a New Zealand government investigation into the 2019 mass killing in Christchurch was that the shooter had been radicalized more on YouTube than he had in the darker corners of the internet. The Times technology columnist Kevin Roose also has a good Twitter thread on the missed opportunities to take YouTube’s dangers seriously.

But the NZ authorities also came in for criticism, as the New York Times reports:

Still, the Royal Commission — the highest-level inquiry that can be conducted in New Zealand — faulted the government on several counts. It found that lax gun regulations had allowed Mr. Tarrant to obtain a firearms license when he should not have qualified. And it said that the country’s “fragile” intelligence agencies had a limited understanding of right-wing threats and had not assigned sufficient resources to examine dangers other than Islamist terrorism.

A system mired in bureaucracy and unclear leadership was ineffective. But the two independent commissioners who conducted the inquiry stopped short of saying that the disproportionate focus on Muslims as a potential source of violence had allowed Mr. Tarrant’s attacks to happen.

A page from my Lockdown audio diary

Sunday 29 March — Day 8

There’s a cynical academic joke that you hear in every university. It goes like this: Q: Why are academic disputes so acrimonious? A: Because the stakes are so low.

The point of the joke, I suppose, is to emphasise that professors argue about issues which are of no interest to any normal person — and so in that sense, they’re just contemporary manifestations of those fabled medieval disputes about the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin. That is to say, arguments about stuff that doesn’t really matter, where the stakes are very low.

As it happens, though, we now find ourselves in the middle of an academic dispute where the stakes could not be higher. The question at issue is how best to combat the Coronavirus — and millions of lives may depend on getting the right answer.

The current contestants in this battle of ideas are teams of researchers from two of Britain’s best universities — Imperial College, London and Oxford. Both have constructed mathematical models of the pandemic which, they hope, enable them to understand the dynamics of its contagion, and also enable them to simulate the likely impact of various policies to manage the outbreak.

A few weeks ago, after the Johnson administration had its “Oh shit this could be really serious moment” you may recall that the Prime Minister started to give daily Press Conferences flanked by two eminent knights who embodied the “scientific advice” that he was determined assiduously to follow. This blogger — and thousands of observers overseas — watched incredulously as these eminences laid out a strategy based on the concept of herd immunity: the idea was that about 60 per cent of the population would need to get the virus first, after which this supposed immunity would kick in.

A quick session with a calculator confirmed the hunch that this idea looked bonkers. Just think about the numbers. The UK currently has nearly 70m inhabitants. 60% of 70m is 42m, most of whom, it was assumed, would only get a mild dose, recover and thereby acquire herd immunity. But if the mortality rate of the virus was one per cent (which was one of the guesses at the time) then that meant that the UK government policy was assuming that 420,000 people might die. At which point even those of us who know nothing about epidemiology but can do simple arithmetic began to wonder what these eminent scientific knights had been smoking.

Clearly, the modellers at Imperial College wondered the same thing, and they spent a frantic weekend running simulations to determine what a less crazy strategy would be — and concluded that ‘containment’ would be not only the best bet, but the only sensible thing to do. Their conclusions seemed to convince Johnson and his advisers, and so over a weekend the government pivoted on a sixpence to a new policy — containment and lockdown in order to prevent our beloved NHS with its 8,000 ventilators from being overcome. Which is how we came to be where we are now and why I am composing this from deepest quarantine.

At this point Oxford University enters the fray. According to a report in last Tuesday’s Financial Times, the Oxford model suggested that the virus may already have infected far more people in the UK than anyone had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population. If the results are confirmed, the FT report continued, they would imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment. The vast majority would develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

The research, observes the FT, presented a very different view of the epidemic to the Imperial College modeling which had such a dramatic influence on government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Professor Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, who led the study. Experts in the semiotics of academic warfare will be able to decode that genteel observation. The professor is, er, surprised. It’s a bit like when lawyers say “with the greatest possible respect…”

I have no idea which group of modellers is right. Perhaps neither is. But the interesting thing about the Oxford hypothesis is that it is testable in a way that would have appealed to Karl Popper.

If people have acquired immunity through having had a mild dose of the disease, then they will have antibodies in their blood. There are, I think, recognised tests for detecting these antibodies. So all that is needed is for a research team (it could be from a polling firm like YouGov) to administer this test to a random sample of the UK population. The results would tell us not only if the Oxford conjecture is accurate but also what proportion of the population has immunity. And when we know that maybe we’ll be getting somewhere.

(Oh, and by the way, if you heard the sound of someone clapping, it’ll be the ghost of Karl Popper.)

From 100 Not out! – a Lockdown Diary. If you liked this you can get the book on the Kindle store

And here’s the audio recording for that day:

Link

Another, hopefully interesting, link

•  Mount Everest is higher than we thought, say Nepal and China. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Driving in France

Hopefully, again in due course.

Quote of the Day

“I would suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

• E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field- Nocturne no. 5 B Flat Major Andantino

Link

Long Read of the Day

DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough 

Terrific account by Cade Metz of how researchers at DeepMind think they have solved “the protein folding problem,” a task that has bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years.

Some scientists spend their lives trying to pinpoint the shape of tiny proteins in the human body.

Proteins are the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all living things. They begin as strings of chemical compounds, before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define what they can do — and what they cannot.

For biologists, identifying the precise shape of a protein often requires months, years or even decades of experimentation. It requires skill, intelligence and more than a little elbow grease. Sometimes they never succeed.

Now, an artificial intelligence lab in London has built a computer system that can do the job in a few hours — perhaps even a few minutes…

Great read. And a nice accompaniment to the astonishing achievement of the Covid vaccine development effort.

Peter Alliss RIP

The Guardian carried the obit that had been written by the late Frank Keating (who died in 2013). It concludes thus:

To the end, he could be outrageously and sharply pointed but also poetically, tellingly simple at the microphone, like this sotto running-commentary advice at Sandwich in 2011 as the young Irishman Rory McIlroy came into view down the fairway: “Just keep playing nicely, gently, m’boy … keep finding the fairways, keep finding the greens … You can’t force this game … some people think you can … some players think they can … but you can’t … Golf is all about patience … Good old-fashioned word ‘patience’ … ask kids today about ‘patience’ and they pull out their iPhones, whatever they are, and say it don’t say anything here about ‘patience’ but I can tell you the population of Madagascar … ”

Alliss was, by all accounts, a born raconteur (in the same genre as his predecessor Henry Longhurst). Mark Townsend in Golf Monthly included Alliss’s anecdote about Bobby Locke, who won the British Open four times:

One of his favourite memories was, again, something quirky rather than the norm. To set the scene the great Bobby Locke had joined him on a patch of rough ground to the right of the 1st fairway at the Old Course to hit a few balls ahead of his opening round in 1957.

“He had about eight balls and he sent his caddy, Bill Golder, who was about 65 then, down on to the beach. We spent the next five minutes chatting about this exhibition match and that exhibition match before I said ‘Well, I must be off’.

“He asked what the time was, I told him it was twenty to and he replied ‘Oh God, I must be off.’ He never hit a ball, he waved to his caddy and he was off. It is bizarre to think these days that there are rows of Titleists and there’s his caddie, who has clambered down across the beach, and he never hit a ball. He went to the 1st tee and went on to win the championship by three shots.”

As someone who was a keen golfer in my undergraduate days, Alliss is a figure from my past. I remember once walking round with him in a tournament — something you could do occasionally in those days, before golf became a TV-dominated sport. He struck me as a handsome, amiable, right-wing buffer who also happened to be a terrific golfer. And he was a terrific commentator on the game.

Uber dumps its ludicrous self-driving operation

Lovely blast by Cory Doctorow:

When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.

From the start, Uber’s “blitzscaling” strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.

But they had billions to burn. Mohammed bin Salman, the murdering Crown Prince of the Saudi royal family, funded Softbank – a Japanese pump-and-dump investment scheme behind Wework and other grifts – with $80B as part of his “Vision 2030” plan.

Vision 2030 is a scheme to diversify Saudi wealth away from hydrocarbons by attempting to establish monopolies that will allow the family to control entire sectors of the global economy.

These schemes are longshots, and the fallback position is to unload failed monopolies – with staggering debt-overhangs – on investors who’ve been suckered with the promise that really big piles of shit surely have a pony buried underneath them somewhere.

I particularly like his payoff lines…

Every long con needs a “store” – a place where the con plays out, like a fake betting shop where the scammers rope in the mark and fleece them of every dime. But once the con is done, the store has to shut down amid a “blow-off” that lets the grifters escape.

Uber’s shutting down the AV part of its store: they “sold” the division to a startup called Aurora, but the “sale” involves Uber “investing” $400,000,000 in Aurora. That is, they’ve paid someone else to take this bit of set-dressing off their hands.

If you want to learn more about how Uber will never, never, ever, ever be a real business, be sure to tap into transport economist Hubert Horan’s series on the company, which he calls a “bezzle.”

Great stuff.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• The best of the ‘Best Books of 2020’ lists. Curated by Jason Kottke. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Magritte-on-Thames

Quote of the Day

“You get all the French-fries the President can’t get to.”

• Al Gore, on being Vice President, 1994.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon and Willie Nelson | Homeward Bound

Link

Wonderful, truly wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

Peak Brain: The Metaphors of Neuroscience

Lovely disquisition on metaphor by Henry M. Cowles in the LA Review of Books. Sample:

The year I abandoned my Nikon, it popped up in a surprising place: cognitive science. That year, Joshua D. Greene published Moral Tribes, a work of philosophy that draws on neuroscience to explore why and how we make moral judgments. According to Greene, we make them using two different modes — not unlike a digital camera. “The human brain,” he writes, “is like a dual-mode camera with both automatic settings and a manual mode.” Sometimes, the analogy goes, you want to optimize your exposure time and shutter speed for specific light conditions — say, when faced with a big life decision. Other times, probably most of the time, tinkering with the settings is just too much of a hassle. You don’t want to build a pro-and-con list every time you order at a restaurant, just like you don’t want to adjust the aperture manually for each selfie you take.

Strange goings-on at Google

From this morning’s FT:

How did Google get itself into this mess? A company that is widely seen as having deeper capabilities in artificial intelligence than its main rivals, and which is under a microscope over how it wields its considerable economic and technological power, just had an acrimonious parting of the ways with its co-head of AI ethics.

Timnit Gebru left claiming she was fired over the suppression of an AI research paper. Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, said the paper wasn’t fit for publication and Dr Gebru resigned.

Except that she didn’t resign, it seems. She was fired — or, as they say in Silicon Valley without a hint or irony, “terminated”.

So let’s backtrack a bit. Dr Gebru was the joint-leader of Google’s ethical AI team, and is a prominent leader in AI ethics research. When she worked for Microsoft Research she was co-author of the groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people of colour — a flaw which implies that its use can end up discriminating against them. She also co-founded the ‘Black in AI’ affinity group, and is a champion of diversity in the tech industry. The team she helped build at Google is believed to be one of the most diverse in AI (not that that’s saying much) and has produced critical work that often challenges mainstream AI practices.

Technology Review reports that

A series of tweets, leaked emails, and media articles showed that Gebru’s exit was the culmination of a conflict over another paper she coauthored. Jeff Dean, the head of Google AI, told colleagues in an internal email (which he has since put online) that the paper “didn’t meet our bar for publication” and that Gebru had said she would resign unless Google met a number of conditions, which it was unwilling to meet. Gebru tweeted that she had asked to negotiate “a last date” for her employment after she got back from vacation. She was cut off from her corporate email account before her return.

More detail is provided by an open letter authored by her supporters within Google and elsewhere. “Instead of being embraced by Google as an exceptionally talented and prolific contributor”, it says,

Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing. In an email to Dr. Gebru’s team on the evening of December 2, 2020, Google executives claimed that she had chosen to resign. This is false. In their direct correspondence with Dr. Gebru, these executives informed her that her termination was immediate, and pointed to an email she sent to a Google Brain diversity and inclusion mailing list as pretext.

In that email, it seems that Gebru pushed back against Google’s censorship of her (and her colleagues’) research, which focused on examining the environmental and ethical implications of large-scale AI language models (LLMs), which are used in many Google products. Gebru and her team worked for months on a paper that was under review at an academic conference. In late November, five weeks after the article had been internally reviewed and approved for publication through standard processes, senior Google executives made the decision to censor it, without warning or cause.

Gebru asked them to explain this decision and to take accountability for it, and to that responsibility for their “lacklustre” stand on discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Her supporters see her ‘termination’ as “an act of retaliation against Dr. Gebru, and it heralds danger for people working for ethical and just AI — especially Black people and People of Color — across Google.”

As an outsider it’s difficult to know what to make of this. MIT’s Technology Review obtained a copy of the article at the root of the matter — it has the glorious title of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” — from one of its co-authors, Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington. However, she asked the magazine not to publish it in full because it was an early draft.

Despite this pre-condition, Tech Review is able to provide a pretty informative overview of the paper. On the basis of this summary, it’s hard to figure out what would lead senior Google executives to pull the plug on its publication.

Its aim, says Bender, was to survey the current landscape of research in natural language processing (NLP).

First of all, it takes a critical look at the environmental and financial costs of this kind of machine-leading research. It finds that the carbon footprint of the research has been ‘exploding’ since 2017 as models are fed more and more data from which to learn. This is interesting and important (I’ve even written about it myself) but there’s nothing special about the paper’s conclusions, except perhaps the implication that the costs of doing this stuff can only be borne by huge corporations while climate change hits poorer communities disproportionately.

Secondly, the massive linguistic data sets required inevitably contain many varieties of bias. (We knew that.) But they also capture only past language usage and are unable to capture ways in which language is changing as society changes. So, “An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms. It will also fail to capture the language and the norms of countries and peoples that have less access to the internet and thus a smaller linguistic footprint online. The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.” Well, yes, but…

And then there are the opportunity costs of prioritising NLP research as against other things with potentially greater societal benefit. “Though most AI researchers acknowledge that large language models don’t actually understand language and are merely excellent at manipulating it, Big Tech can make money from models that manipulate language more accurately, so it keeps investing in them.

This research effort brings with it an opportunity cost, Gebru and her colleagues maintain. Not as much effort goes into working on AI models that might achieve understanding, or that achieve good results with smaller, more carefully-curated data sets (and thus also use less energy).

Finally, there’s the risk that that because these new NLP models are so good at mimicking real human language that it’s easy to use them to fool people. There have been a few high-profile cases of this, such as the college student who churned out AI-generated self-help and productivity advice on a blog — which then went viral.

”The dangers are obvious: AI models could be used to generate misinformation about an election or the covid-19 pandemic, for instance. They can also go wrong inadvertently when used for machine translation. The researchers bring up an example: In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian man’s post, which said “good morning” in Arabic, as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.”

All of this is interesting but — as far as I can see — not exactly new. And yet it seems that, as Professor Bender puts it, “someone at Google decided this was harmful to their interests”.

And my question is: why? Is it just that the paper provides a lot of data which suggests that a core technology now used in many of Google’s products is, well, bad for the world? If that was indeed the motivation for the original dispute and decision, then it suggests that Google’s self-image as a technocratic force for societal good is now too important to be undermined by high-quality research which suggests otherwise. In which case, it suggests that there’s not that much difference between big tech companies and tobacco, oil and mining giants. They’re just corporations, doing what corporations always do.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• One in Six Cadillac Dealers Opt to Close Instead of Selling Electric Cars. When told to get with the times or get out of the way, 150 out of 800 dealers reportedly took a cash buyout and walked away. Link They’ve figured out that there’s much less money in selling EVs which require very little follow-up care and maintenance. Once you’ve sold someone an EV, you won’t see them that often. No more expensive oil-changes and spark-plug changes.

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Squaring the Shakespearean Circle

In the garden of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, Stratford-on-Avon

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out as a Kindle book. Link

Quote of the Day

“The only reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead.”

• Sam Goldwyn, of his rival Louis B. Meyer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Padraig McGovern ; Peter Carberry | Two jigs | Connie the soldier & The frost is all over

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The internet is not ready for the flood of AI-generated text

Christopher Brennan’s essay on the way that many of our systems currently focus on engagement makes them particularly vulnerable to the incoming wave of content from bots like GPT-3.

We don’t need hyper-intelligent machines to dramatically change the way that the internet works. In my recent conversations, we talked about the issue of what happens when AI text-generation capabilities are more widespread and can generate what Winston calls “10,000 Wikipedias” worth of text in a very short time. You might have already gotten weary of our current state of “too much content,” but it is about to get far, far worse.

Some of the closest possibilities are commercial. OthersideAI has just raised millions in seed money for a use of GPT-3 that will write automatic emails for salespeople in the style of their choice. Porr, after revealing his blog as automated, wrote about automated copywriting, which could generate several options and then automatically A/B test them to see which gets the most engagement.

My week by Dominic Cummings

Lovely spoof. Excerpt:

Thursday

Boris says he wants to see me at the end of the day. I go into his office and he is sitting behind his desk with Carrie standing next to him.

“What is this, the Pride of Britain awards?” I ask.
“Very good, Dom, very drole,” says Boris, looking shifty.
“Tell him, Boris,” Carrie says.
“Tell him what, Boris?” I say.
“Look Dom, it’s like this. The thing is, if I can speak freely, reductio ad absurdum, and get to the point, ergo propter hoc, as it were. Just to be perfectly clear…” he says.
“Stultus est sicut stultus facit,” I tell him.
“Eh?” he asks.
“Have you not seen Forest Gump, prime minister?” I ask.
“We haven’t got time for that now, let me get straight to the point…” he trails off.
“Tell him, Boris,” says Carrie.
“I will, stop interfering,” he says.
“Me?” I say, surprised.
“No, it’s your job to interfere,” he says.
“Not anymore,” says Carrie.
“Look, I’m dealing with this,” says Boris.
“What? Brexit? Coronavirus? The economy? Levelling-up? China? Barnier? Biden? You aren’t dealing with any of it,” I tell him.
“That’s your job,” he says.
“So, you want me to stop interfering?” I say confused.
“No, I want you to keep on interfering,” he says, now confused himself.
“Tell him Boris,” says Carrie.
“Tell him what, Boris?” I say.
“Look Dom, it’s like this…” stutters Boris.
“You’re fired,” says Carrie.
“I wanted to say that,” says Boris.
“Fired?” I say, incredulously.
“Not fired exactly, it’s more that we are going to have to let you go, Dom,” says Boris, looking at his shoes.

The Light of the Charge Brigade…

…is the lovely heading of a fascinating post on Quentin’s blog.

The British county of Essex is often the butt of jokes here, since it has a few notably unappealing areas, but this is unfair. In general it’s a lovely county with some particularly pretty spots. Just at the moment, though, it has a different kind of jewel in its crown, at least from my point of view, because it’s also home to what looks like one of the coolest car-charging areas on the planet. If you want to see what the future of car travel might be, the place to go is probably the Gridserve Electric Forecourt near Braintree, which opens formally next week.

This is what it looks like:

The really clever thing about this is how familiar it looks. Just like an ordinary service station. Except it isn’t ordinary: all those pump-like devices are electric charging points. There isn’t a litre of petrol anywhere. Making new things look ordinary is the way to get beyond the early adopters of any new technology to reach the mainstream, small-c conservative masses. That was the brilliance of the Toyota Prius hybrid. It looked normal — even boring and safe. Not in the least daring. But in its time it was revolutionary. Now the time has come for fully-electric EVs. And the same applies.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• An Open Letter to Santa Claus Regarding His Travel Plans. “While I understand that your home is melting and you do not have many Christmases left, it is most imperative that you stay in the North Pole this year. Until the COVID-19 vaccine is released to the public, unnecessary travel for anyone is gravely irresponsible… Link.

• Rusty but intact: Nazi Enigma cipher machine found in Baltic Sea. Link.

• NSF releases footage from the moment Arecibo’s cables failed. Video from two different cameras, with one capturing a close-up of the cables snapping. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

For hire

Quote of the Day

“I do not believe in Belief… Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.”

• E.M. Forster in Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon & George Harrison | Here Comes The Sun

Link

Long Read of the Day

Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Zach Carter

This will not be to everyone’s taste. But if you’re interested in Keynes (as I am) and if you’ve read Zachary Carter’s splendid new biography then you’ll love it. What’s particularly good is the fact that Cowen is pretty critical of Keynes, so it’s very much an anti-hagiographical conversation.

Here’s a little sample:

COWEN: I have at least 20 different friends who studied The General Theory, Keynes’s book from 1936, the big famous one. I ask them, “What’s the central message of The General Theory?” They all give me different answers, so I’d like to know, what’s your answer? There’s so much in the book, right? Incredibly rich and multifaceted, but what’s the bottom-line core of The General Theory?

CARTER: You love the hard questions. I wrote in the book that the bottom-line core message of The General Theory is that prosperity is not hardwired into human beings, that it has to be guided through political leadership. I think that traces back, to some extent, to what you were just talking about about India. He views the state and the government, from a very early age, as this sort of guiding hand. In the case of India, it’s a bit paternalistic, but also, domestically, he believes that government is a necessary force to organizing human affairs.

The General Theory — it’s a complicated book. In certain respects, it’s not always consistent with itself, but I think that there’s a political message, which is that political guidance is needed for prosperity to exist, for markets to function. There’s also a reevaluation of what economics is doing and how economics functions. Keynes is not focused on scarcity at this point, and I think Michał Kalecki has written about this.

I think this idea that Keynes is refocusing the nature of economics and economic humanity, from competition for scarce resources towards the idea that uncertainty about the future is the most important psychological condition for economics. If you believe in scarcity as the overriding issue, you’re going to come to different conclusions about how the world works than if you believe uncertainty is the overriding issue. I’m not sure which one of those is the most important, but those are the two that I think are key.

Great stuff.

Digital health passports should not be rolled out on a mass basis until COVID-19 vaccines are available to all, report warns

Digital health passports, sometimes also referred to as ‘immunity passports’, are digital credentials that, combined with identity verification, allow individuals to prove their health status (such as the results of COVID-19 tests, and eventually, digital vaccination records).

As the move to ‘return to normal’ strengthens immunity passports will become valuable and sought after for obvious reasons — like enabling you to travel, get a job, go to the theatre or a film perhaps. So you can write the script for what will happen next — and who will get the lion’s share of the certificates. (Hint: it won’t be the deserving poor.) Which is why an interesting new report from Exeter University is timely. It warns that digital health passports should not be introduced on a mass basis until coronavirus tests are available and affordable to everyone in the country. The same considerations apply to vaccines once these are approved and ready for widespread use.

The Report’s central findings are:

Digital health passports may contribute to the long-term management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• However, digital health passports pose essential questions for the protection of data privacy and human rights, given that they:

• use sensitive personal health information;

• create a new distinction between individuals based on their health status;

• can be used to determine the degree of freedoms and rights one may enjoy.

• Measures supporting the deployment of such digital health passports may interfere with the respect and protection of data and human rights, in particular the rights to privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and the freedoms of movement, assembly, and to manifest one’s religion or beliefs.

• While public health interests may justify such interferences, policymakers must strike an adequate balance between protecting the rights and freedoms of all individuals and safeguarding public interests when managing the effects of the pandemic.

The research was carried out by Dr Ana Beduschi, from the University of Exeter Law School and is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research & Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19.

Stripe: the most important company you’ve never heard of

From Bloomberg:

Private financial technology business Stripe Inc. is in talks to raise a new funding round valuing it higher than its last private valuation of $36 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The valuation being discussed could be more than $70 billion or significantly higher, at as much as $100 billion, said one of the people, who asked not be identified because the matter is private. That would make it currently the most valuable venture-backed startup in the U.S., according to CB Insights.

Stripe was co-founded in 2010 by two Irish lads — brothers John and Patrick Collison. The pair sold their first company for $5 million when they were teenagers and are now worth about $4.3 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Their company currently has more than 2,500 employees and 14 global offices. An ad on its website suggests that it is poised to become much bigger and more important.

Stripe’s software, which competes with Square Inc. and Paypal Holdings Inc., is used by businesses to accept payments (including payments to Substack authors who charge subscriptions for their blogs). But that turned out to be just the boys’ first act.

Basically, Stripe now aims to become the central platform for financial transactions on the Internet. This is how the shrewd analyst Ben Thompson graphically summarises it on his daily subscription newsletter.

Watch this space. And, no, you can’t buy shares in it. It isn’t a public company.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Think really big bridges don’t vibrate in high winds? Think again. Link
• Boom and Bust wins Enlightened Economist Book of the Year. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Street scene, Arles, 2017

A relic from the days when people could travel freely!

Quote of the Day

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

• TS Eliot

(Except for the poetry of Seamus Heaney, where you get it the instant you read it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Yusuf Cat Stevens | Father and Son | Another Saturday Night | Festival de Viña 2015

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Substackerati

Terrific Columbia Journalism Review essay by Clio Chang about the company that runs the platform on which this (email) edition of my blog, Memex.1.1, is published. It’s a well-informed, nicely critical and beautifully-written piece, well worth your time if you’re interested in media ecology and what is happening to journalism.

Sample:

Substack, established in 2017 by three tech-and-media guys—Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi—is a newsletter platform that allows writers and other creative types to distribute their work at tiered subscription rates. Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative. And, for many, it’s a viable source of income. In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-of amount for freelance journalists. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, on the climate crisis, told me that her gross annual income surpassed $200,000—and among paid-readership Substacks, she’s ranked fifteenth. “I literally opened my first savings account,” she said.

Rising seas predicted to flood thousands of affordable housing units by 2050

Researchers mapped where coastal homes could flood in the US

From the Verge:

Coastal cities in the US could find themselves grappling with a new housing crisis in the coming decades. The number of affordable housing units vulnerable to flooding could triple by 2050 as the planet heats up, according to a new study. That amounts to more than 24,000 homes that could flood at least once a year by 2050, compared to about 8,000 in 2000.

The study, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, ranks the states and cities at greatest risk. Its authors also unveiled a new interactive map that people can use to see how their hometown might be affected.

I tried to use the interactive map to see if Mar-a-Lago might be inundated, but I’d have needed to get my VPN to switch to a server in the US first and it was early in a busy morning and I concluded that life was too short. S

Still, it’s a nice thought…

Deal, no-deal, maybe-deal…

Fascinating thought from Jonty Bloom…

Ever since the referendum I have said the UK will leave without a deal, the fantasies of the ultras trumping any sensible negotiations in the public interest. But for the first time I see the possibility of a deal because of the Daily Mail and Telegraph, no less.

It will be a bad deal and ignores the pleas, lobbying, research and interests of almost every industry in the UK. But for almost the first time the papers have started noticing that no deal also means; holiday homes can only be used for 3 months at a time, car insurance will soar in price and pet passports will be an expensive pain in the derriere. Those are just three consequences of Brexit, there are many others and although these are similar issues to those hitting business, this time they hit people with votes.

The EU negotiating strategy, “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” has led to this, far cleverer than “give us a deal or we break the law.” But all still depends on whether the PM will realise what is happening and stand up to the ultras. Will he notice in time that people don’t seem to care about other people’s jobs but care deeply about fido’s holidays? Ignoring that would as they say in Yes Minister, be a “brave decision”.

I wonder.

Facebook is still stumped by WhatsApp

How can it monetise it without destroying what makes it work?

Nice piece by Shira Ovide in the New York Times…

Perhaps never before has an online property been so popular and made such little money. More than two billion people worldwide use WhatsApp regularly to text or make phone calls, but it scarcely generates any money for Facebook, which has owned WhatsApp since 2014.

That’s because WhatsApp is mostly a personal communications app, and Facebook doesn’t make money from that group chat with your cousins. This looks set to change. Haltingly, including by agreeing to buy a customer service start-up on Monday, Facebook is trying to use its trademark playbook to remake WhatsApp into an inescapable way for businesses to interact with us.

If Facebook figures it out, WhatsApp could change how we shop and use the internet forever — as the company’s main social network and Instagram did. If not, Facebook will own a spectacularly popular failure. The outcome will set trends for our digital lives and determine which businesses thrive or don’t.

To understand WhatsApp, you need to know about Facebook’s three-step playbook and why it’s breaking down…

What I love about WhatsApp is that it costs Facebook a tone of money to keep it going and yet it can’t wring a cent out of it. My hunch is that if they try to ‘monetise’ it, then a sizeable proportion the masses of people who love and use it will become disenchanted and drift to something else.

Nothing lasts forever.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Google Reveals Major Hidden Weakness In Machine Learning. It’s called underspecification, but it’s just the latest of the fundamental problems that the current feeding-frenzy with the technology conveniently ignores. Link.

• Ed Yong’s Must-Read Stories of the Pandemic. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Family Outing

Seen on our morning walk today.

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out on Kindle. Link

Quote of the Day

“The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time looking under the bed for Communists that they haven’t had time to look in the bed.”

• Michael Foot, on the Profumo affair, 1963.

The unsuitable lockdown

Looking in the wardrobe this morning for a shirt I suddenly realised that I haven’t worn a suit — or a jacket — for nine months. And I began to wonder if I will ever wear one again. I guess the answer is yes, but only if and when the University gets back to some kind of normality.

I always disliked wearing a suit until one of my colleagues who had been in the Navy suggested a way of dealing with the phobia. Think of it as your dress uniform, he said. After all, sometimes he’d had to put on his full uniform, medals, gold braid, scrambled egg cap, etc. But most of the time it had rested in his wardrobe in a moth-proof wrapper.

So to try and cheer myself up after my beloved Sue died in 2002 I decided to tackle the suit phobia and had one made by a very fancy London tailor. It cost an arm and a leg, but the uncanny thing was that when it was finished and I put it on it felt like something I had worn for years. And so I actually came to enjoy wearing it. It became my ‘uniform’, as it were. So I guess I will eventually get to wear it again occasionally — after I’ve got my vaccination certificate, perhaps.

Until then, residing in Zoomland, the dress code will continue to be sweaters and jeans.

Interestingly, few weeks ago David (Lord) Sainsbury, who is the Chancellor of the University, spoke at a Bennett Institute Webinar from his home. And he was in an open-necked shirt and a sweater. Bet he won’t be dressed like that in person, though.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Padraig McGovern & Peter Carberry | The road to town and other reels

Link

Long view of the Day

Not a long read today but a long view. “A Yorkshire Lad in LA” — Edward Saywell’s terrific lecture on the life and work of my favourite artist: David Hockney.

It’s an hour and a half but worth every minute.

For the sake of democracy, social media giants must pay newspapers

My Observer column in this morning’s paper:

One of the consequences of the rise of social media is that whatever public sphere we once had is now distorted and polluted by being forced through four narrow apertures called Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, services in which almost everything that people see, read or hear is curated by algorithms designed solely to increase the profitability of their owners.

One sees the effects of this transformation of the public sphere at all levels, but one of the most disturbing is in the decline of local newspapers. In many regions of democratic states what goes on in the courts, council chambers, planning committees, chambers of commerce, trade union branches, community centres, sports clubs, churches and schools now goes unreported because local newspapers have gone bust or shrunk to shadows of their former selves. Citizens of most UK towns and cities now have much less information about what’s happening in their localities than their grandparents did, no matter how assiduously they check their Facebook or Twitter feeds. And the quality of local democratic discourse has been accordingly impaired.

The tech companies are not wholly to blame for these changes of course. But they have played a significant role in undermining the institutions whose business model they vaporised. Looked at from that perspective, it seems wholly reasonable that societies should require social media companies to contribute to the support of news organisations that democracies require for their functioning and survival.

Do read the whole thing.

‘Why did it take nine hours to go 130 miles in our new electric Porsche?’

Cautionary tale of a couple who have a beautiful new Porsche Taycan EV but discovered that they were at the mercy of the UK’s ramshackle public charging network.

A couple from Kent have described how it took them more than nine hours to drive 130 miles home from Bournemouth as they struggled to find a working charger capable of producing enough power to their electric car.

Linda Barnes and her husband had to visit six charging stations as one after another they were either out of order, already had a queue or were the slow, older versions that would never be able to provide a fast enough charge in the time.

While the couple seem to have been “incredibly unlucky”, according to the president of the AA, Edmund King, their case highlights some of the problems that need ironing out before electric car owners can rely on the UK’s charging infrastructure.

When they finally got to a working fast charger at a motorway services station – via two more that were not operating – they were met with eight shiny Tesla chargers but discovered they were out of bounds because they are only available to the brand’s owners. Fortunately there was another non-Tesla fast charger that was available at the station and they were finally able to get enough power to get home with only 11% battery power to spare.

The really surprising thing about this (to me, anyway) is that the Porsche has such a short range.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• It seems that the Fakhrizadeh assassination was carried out by remote control. Link

• KFC Rolls Out Self-Driving 5G ‘Chicken Trucks’ in China. Allegedly the result of a partnership between a Chinese tech startup, Neolix, and Yum Brands, which owns KFC. *Link

• In other news: our galaxy is being slowly ‘Pulled’ Apart by a neighbouring galaxy. The Milky Way is being slowly twisted and deformed by the gravitational force of a neighbouring satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out on Kindle. If you’re interested you can get it here

The Mask

Venice, 2010.

Quote of the Day

“There can be no law if we were to invoke one code of international conduct for those who oppose us and another for our friends.”

• President Eisenhower, speech on the Suez crisis, 31 October 1956

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chris Rea | Ace of Hearts

Link

Long read of the Day

You have to make a proper appointment with this — the piece David Foster Wallace wrote for Rolling Stone after spending a week on the campaign trail with John McCain in 2000. It’s long, long, long, but as beautifully written as anything DFW ever wrote. And it’s the best piece of campaign reporting I’ve ever read — and I’ve read a lot over the years. (The only other campaign reporter who comes close is Hunter Thompson.)

DFW starts with a detailed account of McCain’s horrific experience as a POW in Vietnam, and his refusal to accept a release because that would have given him a privilege over other servicemen who had been captured before him. Acceptance would have broken the Code in which he believed. For that refusal the Commandant, right there in the office, had guards break his ribs, re-break his arm and knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Now read on…

But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68 – right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him – that moment is hard to blow off. All week, all through MI and SC and all the tedium and cynicism and paradox of the campaign, that moment seems to underlie McCain’s “greater than self-interest” line, moor it, give it a weird sort of reverb that’s hard to ignore. The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered – voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: “moral authority,” that old cliche, much like so many other cliche’s – “service,” “honor,” “duty,” “patriotism” – that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we’ve seen, though – arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in ’98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-SPAN, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July ’99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings – something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like “service” and “sacrifice” and “honor” might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe. About whether anything past well-Spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened? These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that the culture we’ve grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is?

Like I say, it’s a mighty long read. But it leaves one musing in the silence afterwards. And thinking again about Trump’s attempt to belittle McCain way back in 2015. (“He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”) This from a guy who dodged the draft using the pretext of a bone spur. (38% of people have the same bone growth that kept Trump out of Vietnam.)

The other thought is the tragedy of DFW’s death at the age of 46.

Et in Arcadia non sum

Pithy comment today on Jonty Bloom’s Blog

The news that Arcadia the British store group seems to be about to go into administration raises many issues about business in the UK. High Streets across the country will take another massive hit, with more empty stores adding to their misery and 13,000 staff could be out of work when unemployment is already soaring.

Sir Phillip Green on the other hand will still be a billionaire, or to be more precise his wife will be; she after all owns the company. Both are based in Monaco, not for the tax benefits you understand, but as Sir Phillip told Parliament because he found the schools there were so good.

We will have to take his word for that but the wider issue is how the owners of businesses can take billions out of a company and then watch it fail. Sir Phillip is not the first and he won’t be the last to do this. Accountants, lawyers and auditors arrange and sign off these deals, they are all perfectly legal.

But stripping cash from a business, loading it with debt, failing to fund the pension pot properly and then wringing your hands as thousands of loyal workers lose everything; is not a business model any country should be proud of. Not least because at the end it is the state and its taxpayers who pick up the bill.

I particularly like the effrontery of living in Monaco because of its excellent schools. Who knew?

But there is a bigger point. The liberal democracy to which so many of us want to return to after Trump and his authoritarian peers fade away is the same system that permitted, enabled — and sometimes even valorised — the kind of looting by private equity of serious enterprises like Arcadia. Is that really what we will return to after the pandemic? And if not, what are democratic institutions going to do about it?

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• A remarkable optical illusion. Link. Eventually, this convinced me that the rotating circles didn’t move. HT to Jason Kottke.

• Roadside America. On a series of road trips across the US, John Margolies recorded the fading remnants of a culture of roadside architecture which was under threat from freeway building, changing taste and corporate fast food. His photos of the bizarre, the surreal and the often downright brilliant examples of twentieth century popular architecture are, well, fantastic. [Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

100 Not Out, my lockdown diary, is now in the Kindle store!

You can get it here.

King’s in silhouette

Quote of the Day

“This could be the first Thanksgiving when you’d be better off being a turkey.”

• Dave Pell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Rolling Stones | Start Me Up

Link

Microsoft bought some of the rights to use this at the launch of Windows 95 (for an undisclosed but massive sum), presumably because it was the only operating system in the world where you had to press the ‘Start’ button to turn it off.

Long read of the Day

Surveillance Capitalism Wasn’t Built by Powerful Companies Alone

How societal norms and prevailing economic models still contribute to the development of harmful technologies.

By Anouska Ruhack

Link

This surveillance economy is made up not only of the powerful tech companies but also of the underlying assumptions, beliefs and economic models that reinforce them. Unless we scrutinize and question these beliefs, we risk merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…

What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers

Charlie Warzel has a terrific piece about what Facebook does to ‘ordinary’ people of a certain generation (mine). He asked two people to let him access their Facebook accounts to see what appears in their feeds, because it would be very different from what appears in the feed of a well-known New York Times journalist. It was.

Such a clever and simple idea. Here’s how it begins…

In mid-October I asked two people I’d never met to give me their Facebook account passwords for three weeks leading up to and after Election Day. I wanted to immerse myself in the feeds of a type of person who has become a trope of sorts in our national discussion about politics and disinformation: baby boomers with an attachment to polarizing social media.

I went looking for older Americans — not full-blown conspiracy theorists, trolls or partisan activists — whose news consumption has increased sharply in the last few years on Facebook. Neither of the two people I settled on described themselves as partisans. Both used to identify as conservatives slowly drifting leftward until Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party offered a final push. Both voted for Joe Biden this year in part because of his promise to reach across the aisle. Both bemoaned the toxicity of our current politics.

Every day, Jim Young, 62, opens up his Facebook app and heads into an information hellscape. His news feed is a dizzying mix of mundane middle-class American life and high-octane propaganda.

Great read throughout. Essentially, like many (perhaps most) people of their generation they signed up for Facebook for innocent reasons — like wanting to connect with people from their past, family, etc. And then, slowly, they started to discover that some of their friends were sharing weird stuff, and sometimes becoming stranger by the day…

That’s what ‘user engagement’ curation does to you.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• What some writers are (or could be) earning on Substack. Not this one, though. Link

• On (not) leaving San Francisco. Lovely photo essay by Om Malik.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!