Tilly RIP

We had to bid farewell to our beloved cat Tilly last night. She was 19.5 years old, so you could say she had a good innings. But she had been a lifelong companion for two of my children and a constant background to our lives. She often gave me disapproving looks, so I was pleased to dig up this picture, in which she is merely saying “You cannot be serious!”

She also had the ability to curl herself up into an almost-perfect circle.

Quote of the Day

”More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

• St Theresa of Ávila

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Geshwin | Rhapsody in Blue | Khatia Buniatishvili

Link

It’s 17 minutes long, but worth every minute.

Long Read of the Day

The Political Economy of Technology

Terrific review essay on Project Syndicate by Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) on Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s book, Power and Progress. It’s a terrific book, but it’s also a long read. Bill has done a consummate job of summarising many of its key arguments and adding value as he goes.

Highly recommended. But set aside some time for it.

My commonplace booklet

50 years ago: Henry Kissinger and the death of democracy in Chile

Robert Reich remembers the other 9/11 anniversary that occurred on Monday.

As Chile marks the 50th anniversary tomorrow of the coup that brought strongman Augusto Pinochet to power for almost 17 years — toppling Chile’s democratically elected socialist government and resulting in the murders and “disappearances” of thousands of Pinochet’s political opponents — it’s important to recall the central role played by Richard Nixon and Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in this atrocity.

Kissinger — now 100 years old, and who in my humble opinion should be considered a war criminal — urged Nixon to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government of Salvador Allende because Allende’s “‘model’ effect can be insidious,” according to declassified documents posted by the U.S. National Security Archive.

On September 12, 1970, eight days after Allende’s election, Kissinger initiated discussion on the telephone with CIA Director Richard Helms about a preemptive coup in Chile. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger declared. “I am with you,” Helms responded. Three days later, Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to “make the Chilean economy scream,” and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to keep Allende from being inaugurated…

An awful lot more people died in Chile that year (and in succeeding years) than in the attack in New York.

I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s observation that “Satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Errata

On Monday I claimed that Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk ran to 360 pages. That was a typo — it’s 670 pages long. I know, because I’ve read the whole damn thing.

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Silent ecstasy?

Striking sculpture spotted in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Quote of the Day

“Education isn’t something you can finish”.

• Isaac Asimov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Elite Syncopations | Phillip Dyson

Link

At last, an unobjectionable use of ‘elite’ as an adjective!

Long Read of the Day

Fully automated data driven authoritarianism ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

Marvellous essay by Henry Farrell which, among other things, has an elegant takedown of the sainted Yuval Noah Harari.

Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy about it for nearly as long. But also in fairness to Harari, he was usefully wrong – I’ve assigned this piece regularly to students, because it wraps up a bunch of common misperceptions in a neatly bundled package, ready to be untied and dissected.

Specifically, Harari argued that AI (by which he meant machine learning) and authoritarian rule are two flavors that will go wonderfully together. Authoritarian governments will use surveillance to scoop up vast amounts of data on what their subjects are saying and doing, and use machine learning feedback systems to figure out what they want and manipulate it, so that “the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.” Harari informed us in grave terms that liberal democracy and free-market economics were doomed to be outcompeted unless we took Urgent But Curiously Non-Specific Steps Right Now.

In our Foreign Affairs piece, Abe, Jeremy and I argued that this was horseshit…

Read on to see why.

Footnote. Growing up in the 1950s I was, like most of my peers, an avid reader of ‘The Lone Ranger’ comic strip which starred a brave (and, of course, white) cowboy and his faithful Indian companion/servant, Tonto. In general, Tonto had only one response to his master’s utterances — “Kemo Sabay”, which in our innocence we assumed to be Native-American-speak for “Yes boss”, or words to that effect. Imagine my delight when, a few years ago, someone told me that in fact it means ‘horseshit’ in some indigenous language or other.

As they say in Italy: if it isn’t true it ought to be.

My commonplace booklet

From Jeff Jarvis…

Perhaps LLMs should have been introduced as fiction machines. 

ChatGPT is a nice parlor trick, no doubt. It can make shit up. It can sound like us. Cool. If that entertaining power were used to write short stories or songs or poems and if it were clearly understood that the machine could do little else, I’m not sure we’d be in our current dither about AI. Problem is, as any novelist or songwriter or poet can tell you, there’s little money in creativity anymore. That wouldn’t attract billions in venture capital and the stratospheric valuations that go with it whenever AI is associated with internet search, media, and McKinsey finding a new way to kill jobs. As with so much else today, the problem isn’t with the tool or the user but with capitalism. (To those who would correct me and say it’s late-stage capitalism, I respond: How can you be so sure it is in its last stages?)

And this…

The most dangerous prospect arising from the current generation of AI is not the technology, but the philosophy espoused by some of its technologists. 

I won’t venture deep down this rat hole now, but the faux philosophies espoused by many of the AI boys — in the acronym of Émile Torres and Timnit Gebru, TESCREAL, or longtermism for short — is noxious and frightening, serving as self-justification for their wealth and power. Their philosophizing might add up to a glib freshman’s essay on utilitarianism if it did not also border on eugenics and if these boys did not have the wealth and power they wield. See Torres’ excellent reporting on TESCREAL here. Media should be paying attention to this angle instead of acting as the boys’ fawning stenographers. They must bring the voices of responsible scholars — from many fields, including the humanities — into the discussion. And government should encourage truly open-source development and investment to bring on competitors that can keep these boys, more than their machines, in check.

Yep.

Linkblog

Noticed while drinking from the Internet firehose.

China’s answer to ChatGPT Some bright spark on the Economist has been trying it out.

Ernie bot has some controversial views on science. China’s premier artificial intelligence (ai) chatbot, which was released to the public on August 31st, reckons that covid-19 originated among American vape-users in July 2019; later that year the virus was spread to the Chinese city of Wuhan, via American lobsters. On matters of politics, by contrast, the chatbot is rather quiet. Ernie is confused by questions such as “Who is China’s president?” and will tell you the name of Xi Jinping’s mother, but not those of his siblings. It draws a blank if asked about the drawbacks of socialism. It often attempts to redirect sensitive conversations by saying: “Let’s talk about something else.”

It’ll get better — if it’s allowed to.

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Island View

If you’re ever in West Kerry make sure to visit the Blasket Centre, a striking institution housing exhibitions that deliver an imaginative re-telling of the story of the Blasket islands, their rich heritage and literature which is of national and international significance. It’s an elegant piece of modern architecture with, as a central feature, a long corridor oriented towards the Great Blasket (the main island in the group), and a seat on which to sit and contemplate it in peace and tranquillity.

And if you’re really interested, there’s always Robert Kanigel’s magnificent book about the island.

Quote of the Day

”Liberals’ predictions about China have often betrayed wishful thinking. In the 2000s Western leaders mistakenly believed that trade, markets and growth would boost democracy and individual liberty. But China is now testing the reverse relationship: whether more autocracy damages the economy. The evidence is mounting that it does—and that after four decades of fast growth China is entering a period of disappointment.”

• Economist Leader, 25.10.2023

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | “Galway Girl” | Live at the Cambridge Folk Festival

Link

I’ve seen many memorable acts at the Festival, but this is something else.

Long Read of the Day

Evelyn Waugh is laughing at you

Nice essay by Will Lloyd on Evelyn Waugh, “one of those widely read novelists who only appears laden with disclaimers. Pinch your nose before you enter his sty. We must dissociate ourselves from his bigotry and snobbery, his cruelty and his love for the aristocracy; we must approach him, Nicholas Lezard wrote in the Guardian, as ‘we might an ogre’.”

Yet, says Lloyd,

there he is, the misogynist, whose closest friends and confidants were all women. There he is, the xenophobe, whose novel Black Mischief (1932) adds up to a rattling takedown of white supremacy in Africa. True, he was cruel, but Waugh was mean for amusement’s sake. The aim was to generate mirth, not maim people. His son Auberon said he “lived for jokes”. And what appears to be a bewildering admiration for the aristocracy is its opposite. Read in sequence the major novels are an excruciating portrayal of the English upper-classes between the wars. Their insularity breeds false confidence, their decadence numbs them to reality, and their amorality makes them callous. Waugh may have loved their world – country houses, fat cigars, St James’s clubs – but he was not deceived about how feckless the upper-classes really were. He spent decades aping their mannerisms while digging their graves.

And the interesting thing, Lloyd observes, is that

The society Waugh satirised has the same contours as our own. Our ruling classes are silly and venal. Our world feels like it is racing towards the same smash-up Waugh’s generation faced. In New York, avant-garde personalities convert to Catholicism for the same slightly perverse reasons Waugh did. History wretches itself up again. Waugh understood that as long as human beings were involved, history would always be a farce first, a farce second and a tragedy third.

It’s an essay that raises a tricky question for all of us. Given that many great artists have been — how shall I put it? — horrible human beings, is it ok to admire or love their work knowing how terrible they were in life. Waugh was an appalling person, but I love his writing. Always have.

Can AI-generated art be copyrighted?

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

Evelyn Waugh famously held that taking a keen interest in ecclesiastical matters was often “a prelude to insanity”. Much the same might be said about newspaper columnists taking an interest in intellectual property law. But let us take the risk. After all, you only live once – at least until Elon Musk creates an electronic clone of himself.

On Friday 18 August, a federal judge in the US rejected an attempt to copyright an artwork that had been created by an AI. The work in question is, to the untrained eye at least, no great shakes. It is called “A Recent Entrance into Paradise” and depicts a three-track railway heading into what appears to be a leafy, partly pixellated tunnel and had been “autonomously created” by a computer algorithm called the Creativity Machine.

In 2018, Stephen Thaler, CEO of a neural network firm called Imagination Engines, had listed Creativity Machine as the sole creator of the artwork. The US Register of Copyright denied the application on the grounds that “the nexus between the human mind and creative expression” is a crucial element of protection.

Mr Thaler was not amused and issued a lawsuit contesting the decision…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

Photographers Slam the Quality of Trump and Co-Defendants’ Mug Shots. Link

My problem is not with the quality of the pics, but with the people portrayed by them.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

Bertrand Russell’s essay, “In Praise of Idleness”.

I hadn’t read it for years, but it’s still enjoyable. It contains his wonderful definition of ‘work’:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

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The way out..

… of one of the hotels we stay in on our drive through France.

Quote of the Day

”Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

• Carl Sagan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Johann Strauss Jr | Morgenblätter waltz | Op. 279

Link

At first I fell to wondering who the Morgenblätters were, assuming they must have been some rich patrons of the Strauss clan. And then sheepishly realised that the word means ‘the morning papers’. Embarrassing ignorance on my part! On the plus side, though, it makes the choice perfectly appropriate for this slot!

Long Read of the Day

Britain is a developing country

Savagely realistic diagnosis by Sam Bowman.

A slowdown in “frontier growth” and technological progress matters a lot for the United States. But it matters less to Poland or Bangladesh – countries that are still trying to get to the frontier. While technological advances do still benefit them, most of their growth comes from using their existing inputs, like land and labour, in more efficient ways that are not technologically novel, or adding more capital that, again, is not technologically novel – some agrarian developing economies can grow simply by adding more tractors; no developed economy can.

For these developing countries, the challenge is to catch up with the world’s advanced economies, and they can still have rapid improvements in their living standards without the need for global technological progress at all.

My claim is that the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about technological progress doesn’t make much sense, and at worst is a serious distraction…

It is. But try telling that to the Bexiteers. Or even to the Prime Minister du jour.

Books, etc.

Heather Cox Richardson has a new book coming

It’s due out in September and she’s now in the throes of recording the audio version, thinking about publicity, etc. On Monday, her Substack blog ( to which I subscribe) had an interesting insight into the importance of pre-orders In the post-Covid publishing business.

One thing new in this go-round is that the pandemic made it hard to get paper (manufacturers switched to cardboard packaging) and to print new runs (large printing facilities in the U.S. have closed as people turned to electronic formats), so if you think you’re going to want an actual book you might want to consider preordering one in the next week or so, from a local bookseller if you can. The publisher uses an algorithm based on preorders to determine the size of the first run, and while a second print run used to take about a week, now it can take as long as 8 weeks, so strong preorder numbers help to avoid running out of copies.

I hadn’t thought of that. And it explains why so many publishers now send me so many pre-publication ‘reading copies’ of books. They’re hoping that it might lead to an Observer review. And occasionally it does, though the person who decides is the paper’s Books Editor, not me.

My commonplace booklet

Tesla Model Y was the world’s best-selling car in Q1 2023

Spoiler alert: this may be of interest only to recovering petrolheads.. Normal, well-adjusted adults should feel free to pass by on the other side.

The news that Tesla’s hatchback outsold the Toyota Corolla last quarter is interesting.

When Tesla embarked on making cars way back in 2004-5 its first product was the roadster — an expensive premium sports car (based on a Lotus Elite chassis) aimed at wealthy early adopters (aka Silicon Valley geeks). From the beginning, though, Elon Musk insisted that the company’s long-term strategic goal was to create affordable mass-market electric vehicles — mainstream cars, including saloons and affordable compacts.

At the time many of us (including yours truly) found that a trifle hubristic. After all, the global automobile industry was huge, dominated by Ford, General Motors, Toyota, VW, Mercedes, BMW, etc. — corporations that had mastered the difficult art of making these complex products on a huge scale. Sure, Tesla had a future making clever, expensive specialised cars — like Jaguar in the old days, maybe. But a mass-manufacturer? — give us a break.

Well, that was then and here we are.

As I was writing that what came to mind were similar thoughts that many people had in the summer of 2007 when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Sure it was smart and innovative — a handheld computer with an Internet connection that could also make calls. But coming from a computer company that aspired to break into a huge industry dominated by companies like Nokia who knew what they were doing, who did Jobs think he was?

History repeats itself, and doesn’t even rhyme.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

”In its first few days of life, Threads cashed in on Instagram’s scale — but its troves of initial users aren’t sticking around. Daily users, once at 49 million, dropped in a week to 24 million, according to estimates from the research firm Similarweb.

Meta has said it’s taking steps to improve Threads and give people incentives to come back. But the situation has echoes of another time a tech giant tried to build a social network off of a huge but mismatched set of users — remember Google+

• Ellen Huet on Bloomberg’s Tech Daily.

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Stairway to where, exactly?

West Cambridge Hub

Quote of the Day

“Almost every desire that a poor person has is a punishable offence”

• Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | SugarMan

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Twilight of Neoliberalism

My friend Sean French and I have one thing upon we both agree. Whenever there’s an article in the New Yorker by Louis Menand we down tools and read it.

He rarely fails to deliver and this essay is no exception. It’s particularly fascinating if (like me) you’re seeking explanations of how democracies wound up in the mess they are currently in.

It’s really a review-essay triggered by the publication of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

In the book, Orestes and Conway tell

the intellectual story and the political story of neoliberalism, so their book is, in effect, three histories piled on top of one another. This makes for a very thick volume.

The lobbying story is good to know. Most voters are highly sensitive to the suggestion that someone might take away their personal freedom, and this is what pro-business propaganda has been warning them about for the past hundred years. The propaganda took many forms, from college textbooks funded by business groups to popular entertainments like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books, which preach the lesson of self-sufficiency. (The books were promoted as autobiographical, but Oreskes and Conway say that Wilder, with the help of her daughter, completely misrepresented the facts of her family story.)

The endlessly iterated message of this lobbying, Oreskes and Conway say, is that economic and political freedoms are indivisible. Any restriction on the first is a threat to the second. This is the “big myth” of their title, and they show us, in somewhat fire-hose detail, how a lot of people spent a lot of time and money putting that idea into the mind of the American public.

Menand is very good on Hayek, and particularly good on Milton Friedman’s persuasiveness as a hawker of memorable untruths and simple slogans. And his essay left me with the sinking feeling that I’ve now got to read The Big Myth — and re-read Gary Gerstle’s book on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, one of the best books I read last year.

Such a shame there are only 24 hours in a day.

My commonplace booklet

• 15.6 – concentration of nitrogen dioxide in micrograms per cubic metre of air in urban areas of the UK in 2022, above the World Health Organisation recommendation of 10 micrograms per cubic metre.

• From “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing”, an interesting (long) essay in Noema by Laura Hartenberger.

”ChatGPT, in a sense, plagiarizes our voices as it parrots the writing it was trained on. It tends not to cite the specific sources it synthesizes to craft its phrases, and when it does, they are unreliable — the MLA Style Center website cautions writers to “vet” any secondary sources that appear in AI-generated text, as the programs have the occasional tendency to “hallucinate” false sources and provide information of questionable accuracy. Given the opacity of the AI’s sources, a student who tries to pass off AI-generated text as their own may be inadvertently performing a multi-dimensional transgression, plagiarizing an AI that itself is plagiarizing others.”

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

• Hanif Kureishi on life, death and dreaming of returning home. Truly extraordinary interview. Ten minutes on confronting the consequences of a catastrophe.

Weekend Viewing

John Oliver on AI Link. 27 minutes. Make some coffee.

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Books, etc.

A bookshop in rural France.

And the etc.?

Just this:

Interesting conjunction: tampons and faxes, eh?

Quote of the Day

”Even if you’re not interested in climate change, climate change is interested in you.”

• Andrew Curry, in his consistently perceptive Substack blog.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cormac Begley | ‘To War’ | Traditional Irish Jig on a Bass Concertina

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Autism Surge: Lies, Conspiracies, and My Own Kids

Astonishing — and deeply troubling — essay by Jill Escher.

In the summer of 2001 we took our younger son, two-year-old Jonathan, to the neurologist. He hadn’t developed speech, never played with toys, and had a compulsion to stare at cracks in the pavement while flapping his hands. The diagnosis was almost instant: autism. “He has it in spades,” the doctor said.

Autism? We had hardly heard the term growing up, and we had nothing remotely like it up our family trees. My pregnancy was healthy and free from risk factors. Yet here we were, handed a devastating diagnosis, with our son sentenced, for no reason we could discern, to a lifetime of severe mental impairment. And it wasn’t just Jonny. All around us grew a rapidly rising tide of autism. The numbers were surging in the local school districts. The regional developmental disability agency had become overwhelmed with new autism intakes. Serious autism, hard autism—not a sort anyone would have missed before.

When I was pregnant five years later, doctors assured me it was unlikely lightning would strike twice, especially because Jonny’s autism was not caused by some familial genetic defect, but by the time adorable Sophie was 16 months old, the signs were clear. No pointing, no peekaboo, no playing with toys. Like her brother, she met none of her cognitive or language milestones, not even close. Autism, again. In spades.

Today, despite extensive therapies and specialized schooling, both Jonny, 24, and Sophie, 17, remain nonverbal and profoundly disabled by autism…

One of the most sobering pieces I’ve read all year.

How Hollywood’s strikes show that we can’t trust corporations with AI

This is an excerpt from the Observer’s Second Leader on Sunday.

The continuing dispute between the Hollywood studios and screenwriters’ and actors’ unions perfectly exemplifies the extent of the challenges posed by AI. Both groups are up in arms about the way online streaming has reduced their earnings. But the writers also fear their role will be reduced simply to rewriting AI-generated scripts; and actors are concerned that detailed digital scanning enabled by new movie contracts will allow studios to create persuasive deepfakes of them that studios will be able to own and use “for the rest of eternity, in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation”.

So this technology isn’t just a better mousetrap: it’s more like steam or electricity. Given that, the key question for democracies is: how can we ensure AI is used for human flourishing rather than corporate gain? On this question, the news from history is not good. A recent seminal study by two eminent economists, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, of 1,000 years of technological progress shows that although some benefits have usually trickled down to the masses, the rewards have – with one exception – invariably gone to those who own and control the technology…

By tradition, Leaders are always anonymous. But if you find the style oddly familiar, I couldn’t possibly comment.

Dr Oppenheimer, I presume?

Yesterday we went to see Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the life and times of the great physicist who led the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb. It’s a striking, troubling and sometimes puzzling film. Here are some thoughts I came away with.

• Memorable performances by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss and Benny Safdie as Edward Teller.
• A renewed appreciation of the complexity of Oppenheimer as an individual — his cleverness, sensitivity, intellectual sophistication, internal confidence and integrity.
• A realisation that the Project would not have succeeded without the combination of Oppenheimer’s intellectual leadership and Groves’s determined cussedness and organisational muscle. The film captures the complexities of their relationship very well.
• I always thought that Lewis Strauss was a snake. The film confirms that.
• One comes away reflecting on the emotional and cognitive dissonances that plagued many of the scientists who worked on the project. They had a pretty good idea of what the bomb would mean for humanity. On the other hand, the prospect that the Nazis might get to it first was the thought that forced/allowed them to suppress their misgivings. Oppenheimer’s clear thinking about this was probably critical in persuading some of them. But whereas they could keep quiet about it in the aftermath, he was too public a figure, and too frank in expressing his concerns, not to become a target for Strauss and the political establishment in the post-war era. This is ultimately a film about power — a thought captured in a snatch of conversation between Oppenheimer and one of the scientists. Oppenheimer is saying that whatever the political establishment thinks of the scientific team “they need us”. “Yeah”, says the boffin, “until they don’t”. Spot on.

Coincidentally, the film comes out at a time when some of the geniuses behind ‘AI’ are loudly proclaiming that they are having their own ‘Oppenheimer moment’ — about the existential risks supposedly posed by the stuff on which they are energetically working. The hypocrisy and doublethink underpinning this faux angst is breathtaking.

Afterwards, physicist (and TV star) Brian Cox had an interesting conversation with the film’s Director. Worth watching. The official Trailer is here.

It’s long (180 minutes) but well worth seeing, IMO. If you do go, bring some earplugs. Nolan likes noise — lots of it.

Chart of the Day

AI corporate concentration in California

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak burbles about making the UK an “AI Powerhouse”.

Building self esteem

Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s speech on being awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Sheffield.

“When I was asked if I could accept this honorary doctorate my first thought was, ‘no I don’t deserve it. Everyone will think who is she anyway? She never went to uni.’” Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self-Esteem, Britain’s funniest, frankest and – when receiving her doctorate at Sheffield University – most moving and vulnerable pop star, told an assembled hall of the recently graduated. “I’m not Beyoncé or Stanley Tucci or Michelle Obama. This morning when I looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t know if I looked good enough, I realised the journey is never over. Everything I said about believing in myself doesn’t come easy. It’s a life-long practice. You all committed to something, whether it came easy or naturally, whether it was a struggle when it was boring or maybe really really hard. Now you’re at the bottom of the next mountain. And you and me are just going to be constantly going up.” Words to live by if only we could read them through tears.

Source: Tortoise Media daily newsletter, Saturday 27 July.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

• Attn. recovering petrolheads… Caterham are building an EV! Yeah, really. Here’s the video.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox ay 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Le Penseur

Well, not quite what Rodin had in mind, but what the hell.

Quote of the Day

“What makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one. In this war, victory doesn’t come when you destroy your adversary’s army or seize its capital. It occurs when something does not happen. How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative? “

• Eliot Ackerman, write in Foreign Affairs in his reflections on being a CIA agent.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

MonaLisa Twins | Mercedes Benz | (Janis Joplin Cover)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Demographics drive history

That, at any rate, is my reading of this absorbing essay by Yi Fuxian of Project Syndicate.

The deterioration in US-China relations is ultimately due to the bilateral trade imbalance and to US frustration with Chinese politics. Both can be traced back to China’s one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to 2016.

When Western leaders welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, most assumed that they were creating the conditions for eventual democratization. A growing Chinese middle class, they assumed, would demand greater accountability from the government, ultimately creating so much pressure that the autocrats would step aside and allow for a democratic transition. This political fantasy underpinned the Sino-American relationship for decades.

But it wasn’t to be. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been regressing on all fronts, reasserting more top-down control over the economy and tightening censorship and other forms of social and political control. It has been led down this path by the legacy of the one-child policy, which fundamentally reshaped the country’s demographics and economy…

I learned a lot from this, which is why I think it’s worth your attention. It also helps to explain why we in the West have so often been wrong about China.

The best and worst case scenarios for sea level rise

Bad news for future generations (and indeed some current ones too) in this Guardian ‘explainer’.

Part of the problem is the that even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases immediately – which it will not – sea levels would continue to rise. Even in the best-case scenario, it’s too late to hold back the ocean.

The reason for this is not widely known, outside the science community, but is crucial. The systems causing sea level rise – specifically, the thermal expansion of the ocean and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets due to global heating – have a centuries-long time lag.

My commonplace booklet

Musée des Beaux Arts

WH Auden, 1938.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I’ve always loved this poem. What brought it to mind today was the contrast between Western media’s obsession with the Titan submersible at the same time that they were paying little attention to the sinking of the migrant boat off the coast of Greece.

Errata

Contrary to my claim in Monday’s edition that Ed Fredkin, the great computer scientist, had died at the age of ’1988’, he was in fact a mere 88 years of age. Apologies to all, and thanks to the readers who tactfully pointed this out.

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On reflection…

…it’s rather nice being in Burgundy on a Summer evening

Quote of the Day

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

• Ben Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young | Our House

Link

Long Read of the Day

’AI’ creates lots of jobs. But they’re not the kind of jobs you know about, or would want to do.

Terrific report by Josh Dzieza on the dark underbelly of the technology. . This a long, long essay, but worth your time, especially if you think that the tech industry is a uniquely ‘clean’ one.

Dzieza’s report starts with a Kenyan college graduate named Joe.

It was a job in a place where jobs were scarce (Nairobi), and Joe turned out hundreds of graduates. After boot camp, they went home to work alone in their bedrooms and kitchens, forbidden from telling anyone what they were working on, which wasn’t really a problem because they rarely knew themselves. Labeling objects for self-driving cars was obvious, but what about categorizing whether snippets of distorted dialogue were spoken by a robot or a human? Uploading photos of yourself staring into a webcam with a blank expression, then with a grin, then wearing a motorcycle helmet? Each project was such a small component of some larger process that it was difficult to say what they were actually training AI to do. Nor did the names of the projects offer any clues: Crab Generation, Whale Segment, Woodland Gyro, and Pillbox Bratwurst. They were non sequitur code names for non sequitur work.

As for the company employing them, most knew it only as Remotasks, a website offering work to anyone fluent in English. Like most of the annotators I spoke with, Joe was unaware until I told him that Remotasks is the worker-facing subsidiary of a company called Scale AI, a multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley data vendor that counts OpenAI and the U.S. military among its customers. Neither Remotasks’ or Scale’s website mentions the other.

Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping…

It’s much the same story as it was/is with social media: the way the technology’s output is kept clean for tender Western eyes, it provides thousands and thousands of variants of what the late David Graeber used to call “bullshit jobs” — often done by people of colour in the global South.

You think the internet is a clown show now? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

Yesterday’s Observer column.

Like most conspiracists, Junior was big on social media, but then in 2021 his Instagram account was removed for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and in August last year his anti-vaccination Children’s Health Defense group was removed by Facebook and Instagram on the grounds that it had repeatedly violated Meta’s medical-misinformation policies.

But guess what? On 4 June, Instagram rescinded Junior’s suspension, enabling him to continue beaming his baloney, without let or hindrance, to his 867,000 followers. How come? Because he announced that he’s running against Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and Meta, Instagram’s parent, has a policy that users should be able to engage with posts from “political leaders”. “As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States,” it said, “we have restored access to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Instagram account.”

Which naturally is also why the company allowed Donald Trump back on to its platform.

Do read the whole thing.

Henry Petroski RIP

One of my favourite authors has passed away. The NYT has a nice obit:

Henry Petroski, who demystified engineering with literary examinations of the designs and failures of large structures like buildings and bridges, as well as everyday items like the pencil and the toothpick, died on June 14 in hospice care in Durham, N.C. He was 81.

He wrote a series of 20 lovely books about the art and craft (and science) of engineering. My favourites are:

• To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985)
• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990)
• Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design. (2006)

My favourite is his book on the pencil, which — according to the NYT obit — was

Spurred on partly by the inferior quality of the pencils he was given at Duke, he used engineering equations in a 1987 paper in the Journal of Applied Mechanics to describe why pencil points break.

“By asking why and how a pencil point breaks in the way it does,” he concluded, “we are not only led to a better understanding of the tools of stress analysis and their limitations, but we are also led to a fuller appreciation of the wonders of technology when we analyze the aptness of such a manufactured product as the common pencil.”

May he rest in peace.

My commonplace booklet

Content alert: for serious petrolheads only

A Jaguar Mk IX spotted in the car park of an hotel in Thiers the other day. When I was a kid a wealthy landowner who lived nearby (in some style) had one, and I remember thinking that if I ever got rich I would have one too. In the end, I only managed to get a 3.8-litre Mark II which I ran until the quadrupling of the oil price after the Yom Kippur war made it a grotesquely unaffordable luxury.

According to Wikipedia, the Mark IX was popular with governments and Heads of State.

The Mark IX was popular as a state car. When Charles de Gaulle paid a state visit to Canada in 1960, the official cars for the motorcade were Mark IX Jaguars. The British Queen Mother had a Jaguar Mark VII, which was progressively upgraded to be externally identical to the later Mark IX. The Nigerian government bought forty Mark IXs, painted in state colours of green and white. The large Jaguars of the 1950s were sufficiently popular in western Africa that “Jagwah” survives as a colloquialism for “smart man-about-town”.

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Street Art UK-style

The UK has, for some reason (possibly connected with Brexit) become the world capital of potholes. Some streets in Cambridge look as though they had been intensively bombed by small mortar rounds. Periodically, chaps from the local council come round with spray cans to mark the most dangerous holes and then a few days later a team arrives and fills it hastily. Often, though, it turns out to be only a temporary repair. Some in our village have been ‘repaired’ three times.

So you can perhaps understand why one is not entirely convinced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he talks about making Britain “a world-leading tech power”. Fixing the country’s roads would be a good start on that ambitious journey.

Quote of the Day

“Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

• Gustave Flaubert

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Holst | The Planets – II. Venus, The Bringer of Peace

Link

Eerie and beautiful.

Long Read of the Day

 The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore

Wonderful memoir by John Banville.

Sample:

One day in 1990, I was flown first class from Dublin to Phoenix, Arizona, to read at the Irish Cultural Centre there. Five people turned up to listen to me. None of them had read my books, and it was clear that none of them had the slightest intention of doing so. They were the sons and daughter of Irish immigrants, and were there simply to see a real, live son the Oul Sod.

That was the beginning of a tour that would take me to ten cities in nine days. Here are some of the highlights, or lowlights, of that jaunt and others like it.

Chicago, the Windy City, was extremely windy that raw autumn evening as I walked from my hotel to the nearby branch of the now defunct Borders bookshops. I was greeted by the store’s beaming and breathtakingly beautiful Chinese-American manager. She led me to a far corner, past the Self-Help section and next to the Occult shelves, where there waited for me a brave little band of readers in overcoats and mufflers, shuffling their frozen feet and blowing into their fists. Twenty-odd, say, a few of whom were distinctly odd, as usual —every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs.

Lovely stuff. Do read it all.

What is it with Trump and ‘his’ boxes?

Maureen Dowd’s column on Trump’s box-obsession:

During his presidency, The Times reported, “his aides began to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and ends he carted around with him almost everywhere as the ‘beautiful mind’ material. It was a reference to the title of a book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.”

The aides used the phrase — which turned up in the indictment — as shorthand for Trump’s organized chaos, how he somehow kept track of what was in the boxes, which he held close as a security blanket. During the 2016 campaign, some reporters said, he traveled with cardboard boxes full of real estate contracts, newspaper clippings and schedules, as though he were carrying his world around with him.

The guy likes paper. And, like Louis XIV, he believes “L’État, c’est moi.” His favorite words are personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. Kevin McCarthy is “my Kevin.” Army officers were “my generals.” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was “my favorite dictator.” In the indictment, a Trump lawyer quotes Trump as warning, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes.”

Is he so addled by narcissism that he sees no distinction between highly sensitive documents belonging to the government and papers he wants to keep? He treats classified maps and nuclear secrets and a Pentagon war plan for Iran like pelts, hunting trophies, or family scrapbook items.

Answer: Yes, he is addled by narcissism. Boris Johnson is the same.

En passant: one of the thoughts triggered by the photographs of the shower-room in which he stashed some of those state papers is how naff the decor of Mar-a-Lago is.

My commonplace booklet

 Bellingcat’s Online Investigation Toolkit

Wow! What a spreadsheet. Simple, yet powerful, tools.

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Le Miserablé

Cluny, France.

Quote of the Day

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”

• Dorothea Lange

(See also today’s Long Read)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Going Back Home

Link

Life-enhancing stuff for breakfast.

Long Read of the Day

You’re Pointing Your Camera the Wrong Way

Lovely essay by Margaret Renkl on the destructive impact of our self-facing cameraphones.

The greatest danger in flipping the camera toward ourselves isn’t miscalculated risk or the loss of self-esteem. The greatest danger is what happens when we make ourselves the center of the photograph, the center of the world itself. No wonder Portia believes that everything is boring. Solipsism is a closed system.

The first time a young couple posing for a selfie declined my offer to take their picture in a scenic spot, it dawned on me that something had changed about the world. People prefer to smile up at their own faces reflected in a lifted phone because taking a photograph is not primarily a way to commemorate an experience anymore. Nowadays many people are seeking experiences that will provide an enviable backdrop for a selfie. There are murals all over my town that exist for no reason but to attract the selfie takers. Maybe they’re in your town, too…

Very perceptive essay. It reminded me of a moment years ago when my wife and I were sitting on the bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, munching a baguette and watching the passing scene. It was a busy morning and the canal was full of those (very expensive) water-taxis. Most of the customers were Chinese, I’d guess, and they were all standing up and using selfie-sticks to capture, not the waterway immortalised by Canaletto, but themselves standing on a speeding boat with that as a background.

Later And while we’re on that subject, this video about the work of Vivian Maier is spot on.

My commonplace booklet

Errata

Re my question yesterday about the identity of the tree in the photograph…

Simon Boyle wrote:

I fear that I know even less about plants, but recently a local group was almost torn asunder over an argument as to whether a similar furry plant was a) hawthorn being consumed by the caterpillars of Spindle Ermine Moths, or b) the natural seeding of the Grey Willow

He also raised legitimate questions about the feasibility of fitting 95-pt Helvetica Bold onto a 71-pt tall stamp.

And Max Whitby wrote:

Yes this is the female Willows’ airborne seeds dispersal mechanism: Link

Same mechanism as the dandelion, then.

Thanks to both.

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