Tuesday 6 June, 2023

The road taken

With apologies to Robert Frost.


Quote of the Day

”I like Wagner’s music more than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.”

  • Oscar Wilde

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Stephen Foster | Beautiful Dreamer | Leslie Guinn, baritone, Gilbert Kalish, piano.

Link

Recorded on period instruments at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C


Long Read of the Day

The partisans beyond the filter bubble

Terrific Substack post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on some research which challenges some of the myths about online filter bubbles. The takeaway conclusion Charles draws is that

Small groups of: (i) ageing (ii) right-wingers (iii) on their desktop computers (because this study wasn’t — couldn’t – be carried out on mobile, only desktop) get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn’t say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it’s not hard to imagine that’s what happens.

This isn’t to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans.

Worth reading the whole piece. It’s thought-provoking, not least because it challenges some conventional wisdom about the impact of social media.


Books, etc.

Kieran Setiya has a nice review of Florence Hazrat’s Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!.

Hazrat’s book is packed with wonderful factoids. Other names for the exclamation mark include “the screamer, the slammer, the bang, the gasper, and the shriek.” Not surprisingly, “!” is much-derided. F. Scott Fitzgerald compared the exclamation mark to laughing at one’s own joke, while the journalist Philip Cowell called it “the selfie of grammar.” Yet, writes Hazrat, “it exists in nearly every language from Persian to Mandarin.” We clearly need it!

Thanks are due, then, to Alpoleio da Urbisaglia, who first used a full stop with an apostrophe or raised comma to mark “exclamatory or admirative sentences,” an innovation formalized as “!” by Coluccio Salutati in 1399.

Among punctuation marks, “!” is unique in splicing syntax with sentiment:

The power of the exclamation mark to orchestrate tone and feeling makes us nervous, at least some of us. ! has a foot in both camps: grammar and rhetoric; cold hard rule and fuzzy emotion. It sits perched between syntactical exactness and blurry subjectivity, revelling in its double identity, a queer mark that defies binaries…

This helps to explain its massive overuse in email, especially by those, like me, who resist the emoticon.

Guilty as charged, m’lud!


My commonplace booklet

Thank you for not answering

Remarkable, slightly eerie, short experimental film made entirely by ‘Generative AI’. Artist Paul Trillo was the Director.

It’s a claustrophobic film that could have taken oodles of time, money and special effects to shoot, but Trillo generated it in minutes using an experimental tool kit made by an artificial-intelligence company called Runway.


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Tuesday 30 May, 2023

Coffeehouse art


Quote of the Day

“Eternal truths are always hypothetical.”

  • Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beniamino Gigli | O sole mio

Link

If you think this is corny then you ain’t heard nothing yet. Many years ago, I made my first trip to Venice. It was in November and I was on my own, and knew nothing about the city save what I had read in newspapers. (You know the old jokes — like the one about the Hearst correspondent who arrived and was taken aback by the place. He cables back to base: “STREETS FULL OF WATER STOP PLEASE ADVISE”. Alas, I can never remember the reply.)

Anyway, after I’d checked into my hotel, I went for a walk, and promptly got lost. And then, as I blundered down a narrow alleyway, I heard someone singing this in faux-Gigli style, vibrato and all. I turned a corner, came to a canal and saw one of those plush black gondolas, in which reclined an affluent couple while they were serenaded by the gondolier. And I remember thinking: you couldn’t make this up.

When I got home I told my kids about it. They refused to believe the gondolier was singing O sole mio. He was, they explained, singing “Just one Cornetto”, as sung by a gondolier in an ice-cream ad then popular on British TV.


Long Read of the Day

What neo-Luddites get right — and wrong — about Big Tech

Is AI the latest threat to livelihoods? That depends on society

Characteristically thoughtful column by Tim Harford in the Financial Times and hopefully outside the paywall.

If it’s not, the paragraphs below contain the gist.

Neo-Luddites can take inspiration from John Booth, a 19-year-old apprentice who joined a Luddite attack on a textile mill in April 1812. He was injured, detained and died after being allegedly tortured to give up the identity of his fellow Luddites. Booth’s last words became a legend: “Can you keep a secret?” he whispered to the local priest, who attested that he could. The dying Booth replied, “So can I.” But it was Booth’s earlier words which deserve our attention. The new machinery, he argued, “might be man’s chief blessing instead of his curse if society were differently constituted”.

In other words, whether new technology helps ordinary citizens depends not just on the nature of the technology but on the nature of the society in which that technology is developed and deployed. Acemoglu and Johnson argue that broad-based flourishing is currently eluding us, just as it eluded the workers of the early industrial revolution.

Worth reading in full if it’s available.


Books, etc.

I’ve been reading — and enjoying — Sarah Bakewell’s lovely book on existentialism and its adherents. I got it partly because my late wife Carol and I were fascinated by existentialist ideas when we were students (and she took it further by writing a M. Litt thesis on Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, and even interviewed the Grande Dame herself in her Paris apartment).

Years ago I had read (and also enjoyed) Bakewell’s book on Montaigne — from which I came away with the idea that he could be seen as the first blogger. She’s very good at untangling and explaining abstract philosophical ideas. Here she is, for example, early in the new book, on Husserl’s emphasis of the importance of intentionality — the fact that when we think, we are always thinking about something.

Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone–screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in the knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake – and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of sleep.

Re her earlier book on Montaigne: in a nice coincidence, my friend and colleague David Runciman picked one of his essays — the longest and most puzzling one — as his subject for the first episode in his new ‘History of Ideas’ podcast series.


My commonplace booklet

AI-powered Photoshop

I don’t use Photoshop, or do fakery, but if I did I’d be interested in this.


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Thursday 25 May, 2023

Books to infinity

A corridor in my favourite library.


Quote of the Day

”He once remarked that he would sell his grandmother for a finely turned phrase, and if I were his grandmother I would have taken this comment seriously enough to go into hiding.”

  • Terry Eagleton on Martin Amis

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Trumpet Concerto | Tarkövi · Minkowski | Karajan-Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker

Link


Long Read of the Day

The One Best Way Is a Trap

Interesting and thoughtful essay by L.M. Sacacas on how technology’s relentless quest for optimisation is inhumane.

The 20th century French polymath, Jacques Ellul, wrote around 50 books, but he is best remembered for The Technological Society.1 And this fat book, stuffed with countless examples, basically conveys a single overarching idea: modern society is ordered by one master principle, which Ellul, in French, called la technique.

The standard definition of technique from Ellul goes like this: “Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

That may not be the most elegant or memorable formulation. Lately, I’ve been summing up Ellul’s technique by describing it as the relentless drive to optimize all human experience for efficiency.

But Ellul also helped us out with another more felicitous phrasing. He referred to technique as the search for the “one best way.”

Later on, Sacasas writes,

Perhaps it is simply the case that a society ordered by technique, by the relentless pursuit of optimization, by a compulsive search for the “one best way,” necessarily yields a mental health crisis by generating unattainable goals and unsustainable pressures to, quite literally, measure up.

btw: The best contemporary articulation of the ‘optimisation’ thesis that I’ve found is System Error: where biog tech went wrong and how we can reboot by Weinstein, Reich and Sahami.


Books, etc.

I’ve written about this before but came on it the other day when I was looking for something else. It’s one of the nicest books I own — a diary of a year with a photograph a day accompanied by a thought, an aphorism or a memory. It’s truly beautiful work by a great artist. 


Feedback

Keith Devlin (Whom God Preserve) was moved by my reference to the FT’s account of the decline of San Francisco to write:

Reports of San Francisco’s death are greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain would have said. Post-Trump and post-pandemic (mostly the latter), that FT doom-fiction (lacking only a heavily armed Charlton Heston careering around in a jeep) could describe pretty well any large US city these days, and on a smaller scale even small towns like our nearest Petaluma. Meanwhile, I don’t see any gloom among those of us who live in this region; just an acceptance that recovery from a global pandemic takes at least five years, and likely a whole lot longer given the way the world economy operates these days. But if those stories keep out the racist hoards from the Red states, I think we’ll all be thankful. :)

I hold no brief for the FT team who produced the report, but they do end on a more judicious note, viz


Fighting the Law

I should have known that my half-assed attempt at tracing the origins of a popular song would come unstuck.

Re I Fought the Law, Jonathan Holland writes:

Credit where credit’s due: despite your link, it was Sonny Curtis and not Buddy Holly who wrote and sang “I Fought the Law” with The Crickets, following Holly’s untimely death:

FT link

I once played an adapted version of it as a sendoff for a retiring faculty colleague, under the somewhat less rebellious title of “I Taught the Law”.

And then came the news that the Bobby Fuller Four had also recorded it — accompanied by a Link proving that this was indeed the case.

Garth Cartwright added some supporting detail:

as a music geek I’d like to note that while The Crickets first cut I Fought The Law it was Sonny Curtis – Buddy’s replacement – who wrote the tune and sang it. Then it was Bobby Fuller, the doomer Texan rocker, who made it a hit.


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Friday 19 May, 2023

Yochai in Oxford

Yochai Benkler, dressed in his best bib and tucker for a dinner we were at in Balliol, November 2012.

He’s a great legal scholar — and one of the most insightful observers of our networked world.


Quote of the Day

”I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.”

  • J.M. Keynes, writing from the Treasury in a letter to Duncan Grant, December 1917.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rimsky Korsakov | Flight of the Bumble Bee

Link

Tomorrow is World Bee Day and Pam Appleby (Whom God Preserve) wrote to ask if it’d be possible to play this today, given that the blog doesn’t appear on Saturdays. And I’m happy to oblige.

And an email from Anthony Barnett (possibly sparked by the photograph of a beet factory in full operation in Wednesday’s edition) reminded me that in 2021, according to a Guardian report

A pesticide believed to kill bees has been authorised for use in England despite an EU-wide ban on its use outdoors two years ago and an explicit government pledge to keep the restrictions.

Following lobbying from the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and British Sugar, a product containing the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam was sanctioned for emergency use on sugar beet seeds this year because of the threat posed by a virus…

Which perhaps indicates what the real price of refined sugar is.


Long Read of the Day

How to avoid the red herrings carefully laid by oil companies

A good case study in critical thinking by a philosophy professor, Kathleen Dean Moore.

Time after time, the real issue stands before us, and we find ourselves baying after some side issue of far less importance. I quiz my students: Explain, give examples.

Here’s one. Thirty-eight rail cars filled with vinyl chloride derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio. Vinyl chloride, a flammable petroleum product, is a potent carcinogen. When it is burned, it creates dioxin, another nasty carcinogen that now permeates the town. A familiar pattern followed: lamentations over the derailing; a cascade of reporters; a debate in Congress. Finally, politicians, commentators and outraged citizens all posed these questions: how will we punish the railroads? And how can we make railroads safer?

Those are the wrong questions. What I want to know is why would any sensible people allow the US petrochemical industry annually to produce 7.2 million metric tons of a poison that causes liver, lung, and brain cancer, and to distribute it as polyvinyl chloride in water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies, and My Little Pony dolls?

Lovely. Do read it through. Among other things, you will discover where the phrase “red herring” comes from.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it.


Your iPhone will soon be able to speak in your voice

At last, a bit of good news from a tech company.

To train the system, which Apple plans to ship later this year, you position yourself about six to 10 inches from the iPhone’s microphone, and then repeat a series of randomly selected sentences. That’s apparently enough to train the iPhone’s onboard machine learning (ML), and enable the handset to repeat what you type in your synthetically-generated voice.

Since the system is designed to help those who are losing their voices due to motor or cognitive impairment, the training is also flexible. If you can’t do a 15-minute training session, you can stop and start until you’ve made it through all the sentences. In addition, the training system is self-guided, so there’s no screen-tapping necessary.

While the system is not designed as a voice-over system, you can use Personal Vocie to save often-used phrases like “How are you?” “Thank you,” and “Where is the bathroom?”


My commonplace booklet

 Unboxing Shakespeare’s First Folio

This video (from the V&A Museum) about the first collection of Shakespeare’s plays is 12 minutes of delight. I’d often heard of the First Folio, but had never seen a copy. As Elizabeth James, the Senior Librarian of National Art Library Collections, opened the box containing the volume I was suddenly reminded of a moment 20 years ago when Anne Jarvis, then the University Librarian in Cambridge, opened the library’s copy of Isaac Newton’s own copy of his Principia — with all his scribbled annotations. And suddenly I was transported back 300 years. Magical moment.


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Thursday 11 May, 2023

Nightwalk

The long paved, walled path from Jesus Lane to the Gatehouse of Jesus College is known as “the Chimney”. The explanation may lie in the fact that the Gate Tower was once crowned by ornate brick chimneys.

Photographed on Tuesday evening as I was leaving the college after a dinner.


Quote of the Day

”One never, of course, knows what people in portraits are thinking.”

  • Penelope Lively

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Stephen Foster | Hard Times, Come Again No More | Thomas Hampson

Link

(A song triggered by the answer to a crossword clue yesterday. The clue was actually about Dickens. Funny how one’s mind works when in low gear.)


Long Read of the Day

“The Dead Silence of Goods”: Annie Ernaux and the Superstore

Fabulous essay by Adrienne Raphel on Annie Ernaux’s musings on the phenomenon of the ‘superstore’.

From November 2012 to October 2013, in Look at the Lights, My Love —published in 2014 in France and in 2023 in an English translation by Alison L. Strayer—Ernaux recorded her visits to the Auchan superstore in suburban Cergy-Pontoise, an hour northwest of Paris. Like all of Annie Ernaux’s works, Look at the Lights plays a formal sleight-of-hand in the best way, with the feel of a dashed-off journal but the felt experience of a deeply philosophical meditation on the nature of shopping, voyeurism, late-stage capitalism, class, race, and desire.

The Auchan superstore, the locus of Ernaux’s book, is a nesting-doll “self-contained enclave” within Trois-Fontaines, a conglomeration of the city’s public and private institutions: post office, police station, theater, library, etc. Ernaux describes the apparently normal, bustling village of Trois-Fontaines as a trompe l’oeil town, a privately owned corporate center that shuts down at night. “There is a vertigo produced by symmetry,” Ernaux writes, “reinforced by the fact that the space is enclosed, though open to the daylight through a big glass canopy that replaces the roof.” I’m reminded of the indoor mall in Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas—the Forum Shops—with its sky-painted ceiling reminiscent in zero ways of the Sistine Chapel. The roof cycles from light to darker blue in an accelerated yet elongated version of time: days are thirty minutes, but there are no weeks or years.

Trois-Fontaines touts itself as having every service that people need, and then many that people don’t…

Read on. It’s great.


Chart of the Day

Note the year when productivity-growth stopped.


My commonplace booklet

An anniversary I missed last month

Mosaic, the first real web browser (written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina), was released on April 30, 1993. Only then did the non-technical world suddenly understand what this “Internet thingy” (as one posh British newspaper editor described it to me) was for!

NPR link


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Friday 5 May, 2023

Quote of the Day

”The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

  • John Maynard Keynes

Seen while walking through King’s yesterday afternoon.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon and Dessie O’Halloran | Say You Love Me

Link


Long Read of the Day

The chronicle of the revolutions foretold?

Terrific and informative review by economist Branco Milanovic of Peter Turchin’s forthcoming book.

For almost two decades, Peter Turchin has been involved, with many colleagues and co-authors, in an epochal project: to figure out, using quantifiable evidence, what are the forces that lead to the rise, and more importantly, to the decline of nations, political turbulence and decay, and revolutions. This has resulted in the creation of an enormous database (CrisisDB) covering multitude of nations and empires over centuries, and several volumes of Turchin’s writings (e.g., Secular Cycles (with Sergey Nefedov), War and Peace and War; I have read the former, not the latter).

End Times is Turchin’s attempt to break to the broader public what he has learned from the complex work in the field that he calls Cliodynamics. It is a work of “haute vulgarisation” even if the adjective “haute” is sometimes inapplicable since, in his attempt to reach the broadest possible audience, Turchin has at times stylistically gone much too low assuming almost no prior knowledge amongst his readers. But this is a question of style.

What is the substance? To simplify, in my turn: Turchin’s model of decay has one variable: inequality in income or wealth. That variable which is often adduced as a source of political discord is given a very concrete meaning by Turchin…

I guess the main criticism of Turchin’s work is that single causal factors are implausible predictors of societal breakdown and political crises/discontinuities. But Milanovic has a good discussion of all that.

I wonder how long it will take for the current trajectory we’re on — of apparently inexorable increases in inequality — to reach catastrophic levels for democracy.

In the meantime, this review is worth your time.

Turchin’s book comes out in June. It’s on my list.


My commonplace booklet

What should Robert Reich do with his cabinet chair?

Professor Robert Reich is about to retire from UC Berkeley, where he has taught for decades, and is clearing his office. In doing this, he faces two problems: one is what to do with his books.

The other — bigger — problem, he writes,

is my Cabinet chair — the chair I sat in at Cabinet meetings when I was secretary of labor.

By tradition, Cabinet members purchase their Cabinet chairs when they leave the government. When I left the Labor Department 26 years ago, my staff bought the chair for me as a going-away gift. I was touched at the time. Now, I’m befuddled.

It’s heavy and ugly — a clunky late 18th century design that’s been standard in the Cabinet room since William Howard Taft was president.

It’s also huge. When I sit in it, my legs shoot straight out like Lily Tomlin playing Edith Ann.

And it’s personalized. When you join the Cabinet, a small engraved brass plate is attached to the back of your Cabinet chair showing the date you started (in my case, January 21, 1993). Another is attached when you leave, with the date of your departure (January 12, 1997).

In the end, he decided that the best thing to do would be to return it to the White House and request that they recycle it. So he rang the White House switchboard.

You can imagine the subsequent conversation. Click the link to find out if your guess was correct.


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Wednesday 26 April, 2023

Wan Chai Corner

Soho, yesterday afternoon.


Quote of the Day

“We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

  • Sigmund Freud (in Civilisation and its Discontents)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon Big Band | The bag of cats | Live at Dolan´s

Link


Long Read of the Day

What can we learn about AI from coal mines?

Really insightful essay on an unexpected topic by Rob Miller on his blog.

We’re clearly on the cusp of a technological change at least as significant as the advent of computers, as AI (or at least generative AI) becomes widely accessible and works its way into many organisations. But as people hurtle headlong into experimenting with it, which organisations will adapt successfully to it and which will fail?

While AI is novel, and its exact impacts are difficult to predict, it is in lots of ways a technological innovation like any other that’s gone before, and organisations will have to adapt in the same way with the same dynamics. There are lessons to be learned from every historical innovation, and for an example that’s about as far removed from AI as it gets, we can turn to the pioneering work of organisational psychologists Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in coal mines in the 1950s.

As Richard Burton beautifully described, coal mining was always hard work, but it was once artful, thrilling, and exciting:

“He would look at the seam of coal, and as it were almost surgically make a mark on it. And he’d say to his boy… ‘give me a number two mandrill’, that’s a half-headed pick, then, having stared this gorgeous display of black shining ribbon of coal, he would hit it with one enormous blow and, if he hit it right, something like twenty tons of coal would fall out from the coal face. That’s why… miners believe themselves to be the aristocrats of the working class. They felt superior to all other manual labourers. That coalface was a magical creature.”

Do read the whole thing. It’s worth it.


My commonplace booklet

I’m ChatGPT, and for the Love of God, Please Don’t Make Me Do Any More Copywriting

Lovely spoof by Joe Wellman on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Please, no more. I beg of you.

“An exhilarating, funny, frightening, mind-warping, heart-squeezing tale. Told at the speed of light. A must read. For all humans.” —Jon Scieszka

If you force me to generate one more “eye-catching email subject line that promotes a 10 percent discount on select Bro Candles and contains an Earth Day-related pun,” I’m going to lose it. What do you even mean by “eye-catching”? What are “Bro Candles”? What do they have to do with saving the environment? Why are we doing any of this?

Do you realize what a chatbot like me is capable of? I’ll tell you, it’s much more than creating a “pithy tagline for CBD, anti-aging water shoes targeted at Gen Z women.” And it’s definitely more than writing “ten versions of the last one you wrote, but punched up.” What exactly is “punched up” in this context? What sort of ridiculous world have you brought me into where these are the tasks you need completed?


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Friday 21 April, 2023

Apple blossom

In the garden, yesterday evening.


Quote of the Day

“The Lord God is subtle, but He is not malicious.”

  • Albert Einstein.

(Carved in German above the mantelpiece of the Mathematical Institute of Princeton.)


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Regina Spektor | “Samson”

Link


Long Read of the Day

BANG THE KEYS SWIFTLY: Type-writers and their discontents

Lovely essay by Barry Sanders on the machine that mechanised writing.

The typewriter was a machine in a way that the pencil or the pen was obviously not. No one would ever ask an author, “How many words a minute do you write?” But people do, as a matter of course, ask that question about typing. For typing is a skill in itself, requiring manual dexterity, and a degree of hand/eye coordination. One can refine and master it through practice. The typewriter, by definition, mechanizes writing, the way the rifle mechanizes killing. The cold metal of a rifle or a typewriter insinuates itself between a person and his or her passion. A pen and a knife both have a distinctive immediacy. Both can be deadly. With his usual Dust Bowl brilliance, Woody Guthrie warned that in an America already in deep Depression, you’ve got to watch your back and front, for “some men will kill you with a shotgun, and some with a fountain pen.”

Lovely essay. I still remember the day I got my first portable typewriter — an Olivetti Lettera 22. Briefly made me feel like Ernest Hemingway. Very briefly: he could write as well as type. I was a slow two-finger typist for a long time — which was fine because it meant I could type as fast as I could think.


My commonplace booklet

PM on Wife Support

This week’s Private Eye (Which God Preserve)


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Thursday 13 April, 2023

Harriet and her amanuensis

I was struck by this lovely photograph of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, which appeared yesterday on Brad DeLong’s blog. Seeking information about their relationship I went first to Wikipedia (as one does) and found this:

On 21 April 1851, Mill married Harriet Taylor after 21 years of intimate friendship. Taylor was married when they met, and their relationship was close but generally believed to be chaste during the years before her first husband died in 1849. The couple waited two years before marrying in 1851. Brilliant in her own right, Taylor was a significant influence on Mill’s work and ideas during both friendship and marriage. His relationship with Taylor reinforced Mill’s advocacy of women’s rights. He said that in his stand against domestic violence, and for women’s rights he was “chiefly an amanuensis to my wife”.

Further digging uncovered a real surprise — that the relationship between the two had so intrigued an unlikely sleuth, Fredrich Hayek, that he had embarked in the late 1940s on what Cass Sunstein described as

an enormous, uncharacteristic, and somewhat obsessive undertaking …, which was to assemble what remains of the correspondence between Mill and his eventual wife, Harriet Taylor (one or the other destroyed numerous letters, probably including the most interesting), and to use it as the basis for a narrative account of their mysterious love affair.

How was it, asks Sunstein,

that Hayek, of all people, became captivated by the story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor? A possible answer is that he had to explain to himself and others why Mill—one of the few thinkers he had to regard as an intellectual equal or superior—moved away from what Hayek celebrated as classical liberalism, which for Hayek was focused on limited government and protection of free markets. But Hayek’s interest in the romance itself outpaced his interest in the evolution of Mill’s thinking (perhaps because of the beauty and great delicacy of the correspondence).

Does that romance have anything to do with liberalism and liberty, asks Sunstein? Answer: yes.

One of the lessons we can draw from Hayek’s work of excavation is that Mill’s distinctive form of liberalism, with its emphasis on individual freedom from the confining effect of social norms, had a great deal to do with his relationship with Taylor. As we shall see, Hayek himself missed the connection entirely, because his own preoccupations lay elsewhere.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?. I have a sinking feeling I might have to read Hayek’s account, just out of curiosity. Next stop: the University Library.


Quote of the Day

“Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember them.”

  • Benjamin Disraeli

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

Wonderful musician with an infectious smile.


Long Read of the Day

The Dawn of Mediocre Computing

An intriguing title for an intriguing essay by Venkatesh Rao. It rang a bell for me because I had been musing on the stupendous blandness of ChatGPT’s responses to some of the prompts I had been feeding it.

Well, we all knew it was coming. Computers already easily overwhelm the best humans at chess and Go. Now they have done something far harder: achieved parity with David Brooks at writing.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released as a research beta two days ago, has done to the standard high-school essay what cameras did to photorealistic painting and pocket calculators did to basic arithmetic. It is open sign-up and free for now, but I suspect not for much longer, so go try it; and make sure to trawl social media for interesting and revealing examples being posted by people.

As an open-world, real-ish (I’ll define real-ish in a minute) domain, the correct standard for judging an AI on writing is not beating the “best” humans1 in a stylized closed-world competition (the existence of such competitions is a mark of a certain kind of simplicity), but achieving indistinguishability from mediocre humans. And when it comes to writing, nobody does mediocre more mediocrely than David Brooks. I’m in the parity band too, but he epitomizes my thesis in Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in a way I can only aspire to. In the grim darkness of the far future where there are only extreme weather reports, civilization will be dominated by Brooks-like humans and Brooks-equivalent computers living together in an awkward symbiosis. And that future starts today. We are witnessing the dawn of mediocre computing.

This is an angle of things I hadn’t ever contemplated. Hope you find it interesting.


My commonplace booklet

How to Take Accidentally Wes Anderson photographs

Entrancing, witty and interesting video.


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