Elon Musk needs to learn that more debate does not mean more truth

Today’s Observer column:

Underpinning Musk’s views about free speech and the public sphere (AKA town square) is the fatuous metaphor of “the marketplace of ideas” that emerged from the deliberations of the US supreme court in 1953 (though something like it was mooted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes way back in 1919). It suggests that ideas compete with each other in a conceptual marketplace where they can be critically evaluated by every individual. As law professor David Pozen and others have pointed out, there’s no empirical evidence that a larger volume of speech, or a more open “marketplace” of ideas, tends to lead people away from falsity and towards truth. Subscribing to the metaphor is thus either a matter of faith or of evidence-free credulity. And if Musk believes that it is the secret sauce for managing Twitter then he’s a bigger crackpot than even I thought.

Do read the whole thing.

Tuesday 15 November, 2022

Lee Miller: in her own pictures (and words)

I was in Copenhagen last week at an interesting conference in the remarkable ‘Black Diamond’ extension of the Royal Danish Library. When I went in I saw this poster for an exhibition in the Library’s lower-ground exhibition space. And of course at the first opportunity I bought a ticket and went down.

The curators of the show had the brilliant idea of telling the story of her life in 100 of her photographs. She was one of the most remarkable women of her time. If cats have nine lives, then she had at least twenty: just for starters she was a beautiful model, a muse, a photographer, a surrealist, a businesswoman, an author, a war correspondent, a gourmet chef, and a friend (and sometimes a lover) of a number of great artists.

Her last years were difficult. She drank too much, had a difficult relationship with her son and often felt mentally unstable and depressed. But after her death, her son found a vast collection of her photographs in the attic of the country house that she and Roger Penrose owned. It had 20,000 original prints and 60,000 negatives — an artistic goldmine.

Some finds from this goldmine are in the exhibition. Quite a few are familiar but many I hadn’t seen before. And her war photographs are raw, stark, savage and shocking. She and her colleague David Scherman arrived in Dachau the day after it had been liberated. As the exhibition catalogue puts it:

”Miller was deeply shocked by the vast amount of dead and dying, emaciated people and the evidence of atrocities found in the camp. The crematoria had run out of fuel, so the bodies lay in piles with men in separate stacks, women and children in others. Miller photographed what she saw, just as she would later do in Buchenwald. She found the strength to document the terrors in a fierce anger and a strong sense of moral obligation to show the truth of the war, no matter how horrifying.”

It took its toll on her, as it would on anyone. There’s a photograph of her taken at the time which shows an exhausted woman in a war correspondent’s uniform who is clearly at the end of her tether — but still working. One unforgettable photograph shows two concentration camp guards who had tried to escape by dressing in civilian clothes, but had been captured and clearly been beaten. She shows them kneeling staring at her with dead eyes. Men knowing that the clock had run out for them. Another photograph shows a Nazi bigwig in stained regalia flat on his back after committing suicide in his office. And she photographed the firing squad who executed the former Hungarian Prime Minister and anti-semite, László Bárdossy, as they carried out their orders.

Two things were particularly revelatory about the exhibition. One was that Miller was a very good writer. Her account — in Vogue, of all places — of what post-defeat Germany was like is vividly readable. After the liberation, she and Scherman drove to Munich and strolled straight into Hitler’s flat in 16 Prinzregentenplatz, where one of the most famous photographs of Miller — of her washing herself in the dictator’s bathtub — was taken. She also took one of Scherman doing the same, but of course it is the one of her in the bath that became famous.

The other nice discovery was what a gentle and considerate man her early photographic mentor and lover, Man Ray, was. His letter to her advising her against marrying the wealthy Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey is a beautiful example of someone who really cared for her and didn’t want her to be taken for granted.


Quote of the Day

”Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

  • Mark Twain

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jackson Browne and Billy Strings | Running On Empty (live) | San Francisco, Sept. 29, 2022

Link


Long Read of the Day

The Age of Social Media Is Ending

Interesting retrospective essay by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic on the way an era is ending.

It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.

Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment. The critical moment was when social networking changed into being social media.

Perceptive and worth a read.


The aphrodisiac effect of crypto ‘wealth’

Well, isn’t this nice.

Sam Bankman-Fried and two friends.

Puzzled? I don’t blame you. But this blog post by Michael W. Green might help. The headline kind-of gives it away: “The $32 Billion Crypto Scammer”.

“The Next Warren Buffett.” That’s how Fortune magazine dubbed Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind who wore shorts, schlubby socks, and sneakers on stage with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. But Bankman-Fried, worth an estimated $32 billion at his height, wouldn’t just be a financial oracle like Buffett. He would also be the second-coming of George Soros: By the end of this midterm election cycle, he’d become the second largest donor to the Democratic Party.

Over the past few days, all of that has come spectacularly undone.

Now, Bankman-Fried looks, at best, like the original storyline for Michael Saylor of Microstrategy during the Dotcom bust. Or, more likely, like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy. Or, with increasing plausibility, like a less civic-minded Bernie Madoff.

Tens of thousands of people who invested their savings on various FTX exchanges have likely been wiped out. FTX employees have quit en masse. And SBF? According to reports, he’s been taken into custody by Bahamian authorities after holing up at FTX HQ with his father.

Do read on. And marvel at the gullibility, not just of the crypto crowd, but also of ex-Prime Ministers and former Presidents.


My commonplace booklet

  • From PetaPixel: A Russian Missile Crew Was Geolocated From Just This Photo.

  • From Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve): “I always heard your “McKee’s Law” as stated by Nelson Algren, one of three in A Walk on the Wild Side. “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” Wikipedia attributes it to “Murphy.” At least it is not attributed either to Yogi Berra or Maynard Keynes….


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Elon Musk running Twitter? It’s like giving a delicate clock to a monkey

My OpEd piece from yesterday’s Observer

When the news broke that Elon Musk had finally been obliged to buy Twitter, the company he had tried – for months – to get out of purchasing, it reminded many observers of the 1979 commercial for Remington shavers in which the corporation’s president, Victor Kiam, proclaimed that he liked the electric razor so much “I bought the company.”

This was a mistake: Kiam merely liked the business he bought, whereas Musk is addicted to his company, in the sense that he cannot live without it. In acquiring Twitter, he has therefore forgotten the advice given to Tony Montana in Scarface: “Don’t get high on your own supply.”

In the immediate aftermath of the $44bn acquisition, though, he was as high as a kite. He showed up at the company’s San Francisco office carrying a kitchen sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he tweeted with a video of him in the lobby of the building…

Do read the whole thing.

Thursday 15 September, 2022

Free speech in a time of mourning

Interesting column by Marina Hyde on the difficulties PC Plod has in drawing the distinction between bad manners and illegality.

Yesterday, police arrested a 22-year-old man in Edinburgh after Prince Andrew was heckled as he walked behind the Queen’s coffin. “Andrew,” the shout was heard, “you’re a sick old man.” Hand on heart, I’ve heard worse. And if Prince Andrew hasn’t, he certainly will. Money and position and expensive lawyers can insulate you from a huge number of consequences in our imperfect world, but if some boy in the streets wants to go full Emperor’s New Clothes on you, you might just have to suck it up, even if it is bad manners in the circs.

This isolated incident, in police parlance, is not an isolated incident. In Oxford, a man was arrested then de-arrested for shouting “Who elected him?” at the local proclamation of the new king. In Westminster, a police officer was filmed demanding the details of a man who had held up a blank sheet of paper. The man (a barrister) asked what would have happened if he’d written “Not My King” on it, at which point the officer requested his details, “because you said you were going to write stuff on it that may offend people around the King … it may offend someone.” Hmmm. Thank you, PC Brains. The idea that the UK is a cradle of free speech is one of those comforting stories the country likes to tell itself, when all manner of things from the libel laws to teachers being hounded to the Daily Mail devoting its entire front page to outrage that a comedian mocked Liz Truss says differently.

I really like the bit about the barrister and his blank sheet. Quite a smart experiment, that.

Interesting also that when the Queen’s children walked behind the gun carriage yesterday, they were all in military uniforms except for Andrew. As I recall, after he settled the Epstein case (with the aid of shedloads of family money, no doubt), his late mother insisted that he give up his military roles — actual and honorary. So his appearance in civvies was a nice confirmation of her enduring influence.


Quote of the Day

“The psychological mid-Atlanticism of the UK is so often a drag. The nation wants American taxes and a European state. And so it has neither. It is more influenced by laws made in Brussels but more engrossed with elections in Iowa. And so its politics are dire.”

  • Janan Ganesh, FT, 10/11 October, 2011.

Just about sums it up.


Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Sonata for Horn and Piano in F Major, Op. 17 | MinJee Lee (piano) & Sergey Akimov (horn)

Link

New to me. Just stumbled on and enjoyed it. Hope you do too.


Long Read of the Day

 How Social Media Influences Our Behaviour, and Vice Versa

Useful review by Tamsin Shaw of Max Fisher’s new book,  The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World.

Fisher, a New York Times journalist who has reported on horrific violence in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, offers firsthand accounts from each side of a global conflict, focusing on the role Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube play in fomenting genocidal hate. Alongside descriptions of stomach-churning brutality, he details the viral disinformation that feeds it, the invented accusations, often against minorities, of espionage, murder, rape and pedophilia. But he’s careful not to assume causality where there may be mere correlation. The book explores deeply the question of whether specific features of social media are truly responsible for conjuring mass fear and anger.

I’ve just bought the book.


Apple’s latest contributions to ‘computational photography’

Spoiler alert: probably of interest only to camera nerds

Apple had a somewhat low-key event a few days in which they introduced the latest iPhones and changes to the Apple Watch. Many commentators greeted the event with a yawn, but, being a photographer I wanted to know what exactly they had done with the camera.

Clearly Andrew Williams of TechRadar heard my plea and produced a pretty good account. As you might guess from the intro, it’s really only for those of us who like this kind of thing, but still…

The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max feature a 48-megapixel sensor with an f/1.78 lens. This is the first time an iPhone has used a pixel-binning sensor, meaning as standard it will shoot 12MP images, just like other iPhones.

Combine four pixels and they effectively act as a larger 2.44 micron pixel. It works this way because the color filter above the sensor groups four pixels in red, green and blue clusters.

Pixel binning sensors have been around in Android phones for years. The first we used was not an Android, though. It was the Nokia 808 PureView, from 2012.

The quad pixel arrangement of the iPhone 14 Pro means this is not a “true” 48MP sensor in one sense, but you can use it as such. Apple’s ProRAW mode can capture 48MP images, using machine learning to reconstruct an image and compensate for the fact we’re still dealing with 4×4 blocks of green blue and red pixels.

A similar method is used for the iPhone 14 Pro’s 2x zoom mode, for “lossless” 12MP images. This complements the separate 3x optical zoom sensor, which shares its hardware with last year’s models…

You get the idea. But this is news because the iPhone has probably become the most important camera on the market. At any rate Apple claimed  the other day that 3 trillion photos were taken on iPhones last year. Benedict Evans said that this compared with the 89 billion photographs taken in 1999, which was apparently the year when film use peaked.


My Commonplace Booklet

  • From Jonty Bloom’s blog:

    I was reminded yesterday of a story I had heard about the aerospace industry which is suffering from much higher raw material prices, as is everyone else. Apparently titanium is not available for love nor money at the moment and the industry uses a lot of titanium. So they looked at what other industries were competing in the market for the precious stuff and discovered it was golf club manufacturers. An industry that has to have a raw material out bid by an industry that doesn’t. Oh well that is the free market for you…

  • Geoff Huntley has a fabulously ingenious interactive illustration of what social media use would be like on ‘Web3’ as imagined by the crypto crowd. Basically you get charged for everything you do.


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Why is Google so alarmed by the prospect of a sentient machine?

This morning’s Observer column:

Some people regard GPT-3 as a genuine milestone in the evolution of artificial intelligence; it had passed the eponymous test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 to assess the ability of a machine to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Sceptics pointed out that training the machine had taken unconscionable amounts of computing power (with its attendant environmental footprint) to make a machine that had the communication capabilities of a youngish human. One group of critics memorably described these language machines as “stochastic parrots” (stochastic is a mathematical term for random processes).

All the tech giants have been building these parrots. Google has one called Bert – it stands for bidirectional encoder representations from transformers, since you ask. But it also has a conversational machine called LaMDA (from language model for dialog applications). And one of the company’s engineers, Blake Lemoine, has been having long conversations with it, from which he made some inferences that mightily pissed off his bosses…

Read on


As energy prices soar, the bitcoin miners may find they have struck fool’s gold

This morning’s Observer column:

In the bad old days, prospecting for gold was a grisly business involving hysterical crowds, pickaxes, digging, the wearing of appalling hats, standing in rivers panning for nuggets, “staking” claims and so on. The California gold rush of 1848-55, for example, brought 300,000 hopefuls to the Sierra Nevada and northern California and involved the massacre of thousands of Indigenous people.

In our day, the new gold is bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, and prospecting for it has become a genteel armchair activity, although it is called “mining”, for old times’ sake. What it actually involves is using computers to perform unfathomably complicated calculations to create cryptographic “hashes” – codes that are, in practical terms, uncrackable.

Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? But in reality anyone can play the game. You just have to have the right kit…

Read on

Why your ability to repair a tractor could also be a matter of life and death

This morning’s Observer column:

It was one of the few pieces of cheery news to emerge from the war in Ukraine. Russian looters, no doubt with the assistance of Russian troops, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment, worth about $5m, from a dealership in Melitopol. The kit was shipped to Chechnya, where a nasty surprise awaited the crooks. Their shiny new vehicles had, overnight, become the world’s heaviest paperweights: the dealership from which they had been stolen had “bricked” them remotely, using an inbuilt “kill-switch”.

This news item no doubt warmed the cockles of many a western heart. But it would have raised only hollow laughs from farmers in US states who are customers of John Deere and are mightily pissed off, because although they have paid small fortunes (up to $800,000 apparently) for the firm’s machinery, they are unable to service or repair them when they go wrong…

Read on

Facial recognition firms should take a look in the mirror

This morning’s Observer column:

Last week, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) slapped a £7.5m fine on a smallish tech company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition”. The ICO also issued an enforcement notice, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that is publicly available on the internet and to delete the data of UK residents from its systems.

Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name some background might be helpful. It’s a US outfit that has “scraped” (ie digitally collected) more than 20bn images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms all over the world to create an online database. The company uses this database to provide a service…

Read on

What do Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have in common? An unhealthy Twitter habit

This morning’s Observer column:

Why do billionaires tweet? Is it because they no longer have to earn a living? Or because they’re bored? Or because they spend a lot of time in, er, the smallest room in the mansion? Elon Musk, for example, currently the world’s richest fruitcake, has said that “At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne”, adding that “it gives me solace”. This revelation motivated the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to do some calculations, leading to the conclusion that more than 8,000 tweets over 12.5 years suggests that, on average, Musk “poops” twice a day. (I make it 1.75 a day, but that’s just quibbling.)

So why does Musk tweet so much? One explanation is that he just can’t help himself. He has, after all, revealed that he has Asperger’s. “Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things,” he said on Saturday Night Live, “but that’s just how my brain works”. Understood. It may also be a partial explanation of his business success, because his mastery of SpaceX and Tesla suggests not only high intelligence but also an ability to focus intensely on exceedingly complex problems without being distracted by other considerations.

There are, however, darker interpretations…

Read on

The former Nazi rocket scientist who all too accurately saw the future

This morning’s Observer column:

… In June 1945, the [US] State department approved the transfer of Von Braun and his specialist team to the US. He worked on the US army’s ballistic missile programme and designed the rocket that launched the US’s first space satellite in 1958, four months after the USSR’s Sputnik sent the American political class into a panicky tailspin. In 1960, his group was assimilated into Nasa, where he became director of the new Marshall Space Flight Center and the lead architect of the Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon.

Not bad for a former SS officer, eh? But, as I discovered as I burrowed down the agreeable rabbit hole on which [Robert] Harris had launched me, the story gets better. During his early years in the US, Von Braun became pally with Walt Disney, with whom he collaborated on a series of three educational films and to whom he probably confided his dream of a manned mission to Mars. More intriguingly, in 1949, when he was stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas, he wrote a science fiction novel (in German) entitled Marsprojekt but failed to find a publisher for it. He wrote it, he writes in the preface, “to stimulate interest in space travel”. Eventually, the novel was translated into English, cleared by the Pentagon (on the grounds that its author’s visions of space travel were “too futuristic to infringe on classified matters”) and published in 2006 as Project Mars: A Technical Tale…

Read on

LATER

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  • And George Dyson sent a photograph of his father’s copy of the technical appendix to von Braun’s novel.