During the War, Hugh Trevor-Roper worked in British Intelligence, mostly on code-breaking and interpretation of intercepted messages. He also recorded in his diary what books he read. According to his biographer, the tallies for the four years 1940-1943 are:
1940: 65
1941: 72
1942: 84
1943: 119
Now I know that there weren’t all that many distractions available to an Intelligence Officer in wartime London, and that there were periods when he was hospitalised with chronic sinusitis, but still…
From the wonderful Brain Pickings newsletter.
On September 7th, 1982, [David] Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”:
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints: 1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book
on writing. Read it three times. 2. Write the way you talk. Naturally. 3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs. 4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. 5. Never write more than two pages on any subject. 6. Check your quotations. 7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it. 8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it. 9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do. 10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want. David
‘S obvious, really. So why don’t more people do it?
Trying to escape from media consensus and groupthink about the economy, I came on this thoughtful piece by Gabriel Sherman arguing that the legislative changes in the US are beginning to bite on Wall Street.
Banks have always had occasional bad years, but the sense on Wall Street is that this bad year is different. Over the past several weeks, I have had wide-ranging conversations with more than two dozen senior Wall Street executives, traders, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity investors. And what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.
The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are structural. The Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.
To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.
With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”
If true, this is good news. Worth reading in full.
I’m stuck in bed with a stinking cold but am greatly cheered by (a) news of the latest arrests at The Sun (a newspaper) and (b) Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper
Canon Claude Jenkins, then in his sixtieth year, had been Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History since 1934. He was an Oxford eccentric, who dressed in a low-crowned hat and antiquated clerical garb, collected cigar butts to smoke later, and surreptitiously pocketed fingers of toast from the breakfast table. Piles of books on both sides of the steps up to his rooms left only a narrow corridor for visitors to ascend, before they squeezed into a study so stuffed with books as to be almost impenetrable. Even the bath was filled with them. Jenkins’s mind was as chaotic as his rooms. He lectured all morning on the hour, each lecture commencing directly after the other. An alarm-clock hanging from a string round his neck served as a prompt to change subject, though his few listeners (sometimes as few as one) found it hard to distinguish one lecture from another.
Sigh. They don’t make ’em like that any more. And if they did the Teaching Quality Assessment, or some other wheeze dreamed up by McKinsey, would do for him.
I love this. The announcement that Margaret Thatcher will have a State funeral when she dies has prompted this e-petition.
In keeping with the great lady’s legacy, Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral should be funded and managed by the private sector to offer the best value and choice for end users and other stakeholders. The undersigned believe that the legacy of the former PM deserves nothing less and that offering this unique opportunity is an ideal way to cut government expense and further prove the merits of liberalised economics Baroness Thatcher spearheaded.
It needs 100,000 signatures and currently has only 27,000. I found out about it in Julian Barnes’s lovely review of The Iron Lady in the New York Review of Books.
Spotted this afternoon in the college gardens.
From today’s NYTimes.
FOR barristers in 18th-century London, it was shoulder-grazing wigs. For the Mad men of 1950s New York, it was briefcases and fedoras. For the glass-ceiling-shattering women of the 1980s, it was shoulder pads.
And for today’s tech entrepreneurs in high-flying Silicon Valley, it is flamboyantly colored, audaciously patterned socks.
In a land where the uniform — jeans, hoodies and flip-flops — is purposefully nonchalant, and where no one would be caught dead in a tie, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd. It’s like a secret handshake for those who have arrived, and for those who want to.
“I have been in meetings where people look down and notice my socks, and there is this universal sign, almost like a gang sign, where they nod and pull up their pant leg a little to show off their socks,” said Hunter Walk, 38, a director of product management at YouTube, whose favorite pair is yellow, aqua and orange striped.
Note: the New York Times is serious newspaper.
To Corpus Christi for a CSaP lecture by Jaan Tallinn, Chief Engineer of Skype. Since he’s the Estonian programmer behind Kazaa (formerly the scourge of the music industry) and then a lead architect of Skype, I expect him to be talking about VoIP or some such geeky topic. He’s a big name in these circles and he plays to a packed house.
But it turns out that he doesn’t want to talk about geeky stuff and instead launches into a fascinating but wayward excursion into Kurzweil territory. He gets there via an unusual route, though: by arguing that, essentially, the human brain was evolution’s biggest mistake, because it has enabled us to divert the natural course of things with our infernal ingenuity — with potentially disastrous consequences. This is routine stuff for some audiences — for example those who share James Lovelock’s views about global warming. But it’s not CO2 emissions that bother Tallinn: it’s the ‘singularity’ that also obsesses Kurzweil. In other words, he extrapolates the increasing ‘intelligence’ and processing power of computers to the point where we will have created artificial intelligences that are smarter than us and which will have no further use for humans, save perhaps as pets. At which point I hear echoes of Bill Joy’s famous essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, and begin to wonder if this software wizard hasn’t, well, ventured into philosophical territory without even a rudimentary map.
But Tallinn is an entertaining speaker (and the only presenter I’ve ever seen who can actually use Prezi to good effect) so most of us temporarily suspend disbelief and stay connected. His central idea is of an “intelligence stairway” — a series of steps starting with self-replication leading to evolution leading to humans leading to tech progress leading to “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) and thence to an “intelligence explosion” which leads to the Kurzweil Singularity. Tallinn thinks (via reasoning that I can’t follow) that what follows next is “environmental catastrophe”. Is this because machines will be unconcerned about global warming, because they are capable of surviving it whereas organic life is not? Who knows? **See footnote**
The audience is intrigued but unconvinced. One attendee is sceptical to the point almost of derision: he doesn’t buy into Tallinn’s account of computational progress (which lays great stress on computers’ ability to play world-class chess, and he thinks that Tallinn’s citation of Apple’s SIRI as an illustration of how far computers have come in understanding people is way overblown. Another sceptic (I think an economist) takes the line that it’s difficult to see computers being able to understand context, and so the only we need to take in AI research is to make sure that they never do!
I am likewise entertained but unconvinced. But I am struck by one thought, namely that there are areas of scientific research where we do worry about a ‘stairway’ of the kind sketched by Tallinn — biotechnology and genetic engineering in particular, and also perhaps nanotechnology. Maybe we should do some thinking about the work that the 300 or so researchers working on AGI are doing? And is the reason why we don’t take the threat of AGI seriously the fact that, deep down, we simply can’t conceive of machines that are smarter than us? We have no problem envisaging scenarios in which, say, nanotechnology or genetically-modified organisms might run out of control and give rise to horrible unintended consequences. But computing machines…???
But it was an entertaining and thought-provoking lecture. On my way out through the throng of Cambridge academics and geeks engaging in the social activity quaintly known as “networking” I am suddenly struck by a vague memory from my past. I too once gave a lecture to a packed house. The audience appeared to love it and applauded loudly at the end. As I was leaving the theatre I noticed that one of my academic colleagues had been lounging at the back. “Very good lecture”, he said. “Just the right number half-truths”.
**Footnote
My colleague Anil Madhavapeddy was also there and writes:
“He [Tallinn] is falling into his own trap: any sufficiently advanced AI would
maintain itself until it can find a more algorithmically efficient source
of resources than earth (i.e., gas giants! space!) and would not work on
human timescales (whats the rush?).On the other hand, one can imagine very easily a computing virus such as
Stuxnet II wiping out life on earth, due to it causing some cyberphysical
system to go ballistic and trigger something off by mistake. Not advanced
AI, just plain old insecure computer systems, and this does need fixing
urgently, and the GAI topic is an unfortunate distraction.”
Wow! A helicopter tour of St Petersburg. Amazing — except for the music. Wonder if they’ve done it for other cities? Amsterdam, for example.
After Adrian Monck had decamped from poorly-paid academic life to well-heeled employment in charge of Public Affairs for the World Economic Forum he once gently chided me for an intemperate, exasperated comment I had made about the Forum’s annual talkfest. In retrospect, I think I was reacting to the infuriating smugness of journalists (and bloggers) who were really just flaunting their entree into such an exclusive club — much as sports reporters might flaunt a ticket to the dining room at Augusta National during the Masters. But because I take Adrian seriously, I started paying more attention to what goes on in Davos. So I was intrigued to find that he has started blogging again with this thoughtful post. “Davos”, he writes.
“is an independently-minded mountain community, steeped in Switzerland’s direct democratic tradition. Its altitude and an enterprising doctor, Alexander Spengler, made it a destination for well-heeled tuberculosis sufferers. Thomas Mann set his comedy of ennervation, The Magic Mountain, in one of its sanatoria. Albert Einstein helped kick-start its reputation as an intellectual retreat (video).
Davos today is a working alpine town. The town’s tourism is a functional contrast to the chocolate box world of Villars, Zermatt and St Moritz. The Forum’s Annual Meeting boosts the local economy, but not its winter sports. Barely one-fifth of those participating can be accommodated in a five-star hotel. The local ski-lift company has contemplated shutting the lifts during the Meeting. When I’m there, as a member of the Forum, I sleep on a single bed and share a bathroom. Hardship? Not really, but it is work.
And that suits the Forum, because it deals with the world as it is, not as it would prefer it to be. It is not a decision-making body. Nor is it a conspiracy in which the horological components of global governance and industry are wound together to frustrate the rest of the world…”.
Of course one has to remember that he works for the forum, so the Mandy Rice-Davies caveat applies. Still, the next post on the blog gives a set of interesting, contradictory and sometimes critical perspectives on this year’s event.
I’ve been to Davos once — many years ago, long before the Forum was thought of. I thought it a rather dull, workaday place, quite different from St Moritz which is just around the corner. I remember it chiefly because I bought a Swiss Army knife there which I still have.
