Inhumanity in numbers

This striking table greets one at the entrance to the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Rise Up exhibition which explores the battle to abolish the British slave trade and end enslavement between 1750 and 1850, as well as the aftermath, its legacies and the ongoing struggle for equality and social justice today. It’s a brilliantly curated and sobering exhibition which we went to on Saturday. I need to go back for a second look, because it needs time for thought and reflection. And it powerfully reinforces my scepticism about the idea of ‘European Civilisation’.

Fittingly, before you enter the show, the museum has a prominent notice which admits that the wealth of the man whose bequest of his library, art collection and £100,000 enabled its founding in 1816 — Richard FitzWilliam, the seventh Viscount FitzWilliam — probably derived from one of his ancestors, who had been a slave-owner. This interesting fact, however, doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the institution’s Wikipedia page.

Quote of the Day

“Problems are like toilet paper. You pull on one and ten more come.”

• Woody Allen* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mendelssohn | Songs Without Words | No. 1 In E Major, Op. 19: Andante Con Moto | Daniel Gortler

Link

Leaves one speechless.

Long Read of the Day

 A curious tendency among Western philosophers?

Intriguing essay on the wonderful Crooked Timber blog by Doug Muir.

Here are two groups of Western philosophers. We’ll call them Group A and Group B. Here’s Group A:

Plato, Epicurus, Plotinus, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, David Hume, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Schopenhauer, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kurt Gödel, Karl Popper, Jeremy Bentham, Alan Turing, Saul Kripke.

And here’s Group B:

Aristotle, Socrates, Descartes, Bishop George Berkeley, Rousseau, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, John Rawls, Willard Quine.

Okay, so: what distinguishes these two groups?

Read on to find out. I failed the test.

Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri?

Yesterday’s Observer column was about Apple’s announcement that the promised ‘AI’-enhanced to its Siri personal assistant tool would be significantly delayed. I was alerted to this by John Gruber’s wonderful Daring Fireball blog, and my column ended thus:

For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that “what Apple showed regarding the upcoming ‘personalized Siri’ at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis”. And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video – the so-called “Knowledge Navigator” video – it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history.

Until – says Gruber – now.

Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn’t in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook’s stewardship of the company. If there’s one thing Jobs’ Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It’s clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Do read the whole thing.

Later. A reader emailed me suggesting that there was one significant moment when Steve Jobs presented a device that worked in demo mode but wasn’t actually anywhere near ready for sale — the first iPhone. The story is told in a 2013 New York Times article

My commonplace booklet

I came on this old postcard in a book the other day and it triggered a whole stream of memories.

We have been going to Provence every Summer (except for a two-year Covid break) since 2003. When the kids were young we used to fly to Toulon and rent a car, but as they grew up my wife and I realised that we were now free to drive down, and thereby discovered one of the nicest road movies there is — a leisurely (three-day) drive through rural France, avoiding motorways and staying in small hotels and chambres d’hote. The first day of the journey takes us from Calais to northern Burgundy. The second to central France, near Thiers. And the final day takes us to Arles, which is still one of the wonders of the world (and a delight if you happen to be a photographer).

The first year we did this trip, we stumbled on a lovely hilltop Bastide near Thiers as a Day Two stopover. It had the improbable name of Le Sapin Bleu and had been beautifully restored by pair of ex-pat Brits. It was one of the loveliest houses I’ve every been in, and over the years our hosts became friends, to the point that sometimes they would ask us to bring stuff that ex-pats love but are unobtainable in rural France.

And then Covid struck and they decided that the game was up, even for a lovely rural B&B, so they sold up and left to seek their fortunes (and maybe also their widely dispersed families) elsewhere. Even though we eventually found a nice alternative on the outskirts of Thiers, we still feel a pang when driving past the sign to the road that leads uphill to it.

Feedback

My pic of the learned sign forbidding that attachment of bikes to railings sparked some lovely emails, for which many thanks. But Euan Williamson’s response, summarising the Scottish approach to such prohibitions, rally takes the biscuit!

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Caveat bicyclist

Translation (from Latin): TWO WHEELS LEFT HERE WILL PERISH

Not sure about the Greek. Only in Cambridge could you see a notice like this to deter cyclists from locking their bikes to a railing. (I wonder if there are similar notices in The Other Place?)

Quote of the Day

”It is harder to summon, even among friends and allies, the vital unity of purpose amidst the perplexities of a world situation which is neither peace nor war.”

• Winston Churchill in 1958

A pretty good summary of the problem facing EU countries at the moment.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

In a Mellow Tone | Ben Webster

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The News: Believe That The Worst Is Possible — But Not Inevitable

Look, I know that “hindsight is the only exact science”, etc. etc., but I’m fed up with the extent to which people are still shocked by what’s happening. Some aspects of what’s now going on in Washington (for example, Musk’s end-run into the heart of government) might have been unforeseeable, but the Project 2025 blueprint was out in the open and I was astonished that liberals didn’t seem to be taking it seriously all through last year.

Timothy Burke seems to have felt much the same. As he writes in this sobering essay,

The lack of anticipation by interests and organizations who are already suffering enormous damage is precisely a sign of how beholden they were to an unwarranted belief in their own inevitability. The Democratic Party ran on being a bulwark against a fascism, but we have now discovered that most of them never believed that fascism could really happen. It was just a campaign message that tested well with their voters. They assumed that most of those voters were just overwrought.

Institutions that ought to have been urgently laying the groundwork for a hard fight as early as 2015 instead just pretended that it wasn’t going to happen, that it was all just bluster, that they’d be able to use the same tried and true forms of lobbying and lawyering and risk aversity to divert and deflect some modest pressures on their ordinary operations…

Yep. And even now many Europeans (and maybe also Canadians) are in denial about the new reality. Trump, as Burke, points out,

thinks less like Bismarck and more like Leopold II: other countries are for looting, and not by the relatively sophisticated methods of multinational corporations. It’s only beginning to dawn on Americans, Canadians, Europeans and the rest of the world that Trump is perfectly serious about annexing Canada, Greenland and perhaps other territories by forceful means.

This is a sobering piece, worth reading. What’s needed now is a variation on Gramsci’s famous aphorism: what we need now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

My commonplace booklet

When JFK ran for President in 1960, the fact that he was a Roman Catholic was of significant public concern. The country had never had a Catholic president; people openly questioned whether his religion would influence his decision-making. Would he be taking is orders from the Pope? The issue was so important that JFK addressed it directly in a famous speech in Houston in September 1960 when he said: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”

And he went on to win the election.

Consider where the US is now, though. Six of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholics: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. That’s a comfortable majority of the Court.

The Vice President, J.D. Vance, is a convert to Catholicism. So if Trump were to kick the bucket, the US would have a Catholic president once more.

And I have a suspicion that Steve Bannon may also be a Catholic. At any rate he seems to have ‘embraced’ Catholic spirituality.

So what exactly is going on over there?

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• If you have access to the BBC iPlayer, I really recommend Birdsong, a remarkable documentary about Irish ornithologist Seán Ronayne’s mission to record the sound of every bird species in Ireland – nearly 200 birds. Unexpectedly, it’s also a very reflective film about autism and the extraordinary capabilities of humans.

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Building for Global Britain

Can this really be the site office for one of the incessant central Cambridge construction projects?

Quote of the Day

”Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.”

• Ernest Hemingway* 

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fáinne Geal an Lae (The Dawning of the Day)

Link

Lovely version of an old Irish song by na Casaidigh

Long Read of the Day

 ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving

I can’t understand why some many teachers in the Humanities seem to be panicking about LLMs. At least some of the panic is centred on the way the technology makes it difficult to assess student performance. But surely the question we should be asking: what’s the big deal about essays (other than they’re easy to grade)? And what is it about writing that’s important?

In my view this question was answered many decades ago by E.M.Forster, when he wrote (somewhere — can’t find the reference) that “There are two kinds of writer: those who know what they think and write it down; and those who find out what they think by trying to write it”. Since the vast majority of us fall into the latter category, the real case against using LLMs to write your essay is that it you’re denying yourself the opportunity to figure something out for yourself, and the educational benefits thereof.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I’ve been so taken with John Warner’s essay, in which he asks (and answers) the awkward question: “If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that’s an okay thing.”

Do read it.

English can now be a programming language. Oh yeah?

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

Way back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.

Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those.

Recently, though, Karpathy stirred the pot by doubling down on his original vision. “There’s a new kind of coding,” he announced, “I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs … are getting too good…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

From Niall Ferguson:

”It is exactly a century since John Maynard Keynes published “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill,” a devastating takedown of the policies of the Conservative government in which Winston Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer—the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary.

Keynes predicted—correctly—that the government’s decision to return the pound to the gold standard would lead to “unemployment and industrial disputes,” “great depression in the export industries,” and “credit restriction.”

“It will not be safe,” he ironically advised Churchill, “politically to admit that you are intensifying unemployment deliberately in order to reduce wages. Thus you will have to ascribe what is happening to every conceivable cause except the true one. … About two years may elapse before it will be safe for you to utter in public one single word of truth.”

Interesting, isn’t it, how history sometimes repeats itself. The Trump crowd are already in denial mode about what’s happening. I’m looking forward to the moment when a Wall Street analyst is arrested for spreading “fake news” about the ‘booming’ Trump economy.

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Letting sleeping cats lie

The view from the front garden of the Fitzwilliam museum on Friday afternoon. Note the snoozing lions on the left.

Quote of the Day

”The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.”

• Ambrose Bierce

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tom Waits | Picture in a Frame

Link

Really wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

 AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End?

Text of a truly remarkable lecture by Stephen Fry. It’s long, but unfailingly thoughtful and perceptive. If you read nothing else this week, read this.

Here’s a sample to whet your appetite:

I’ll take you back fifteen or so years to a time when I found myself being invited to a perfectly extraordinary number of corporate, governmental and media talks, conferences, summits and suchlike gatherings. I would be asked to address delegates and attendees on the subject of a new microblogging service that had only recently poked its timorous head up in the digital world like a delicate flower but was already twisting and winding itself round the culture like vigorous bindweed. Twitter it was called. I had joined early and my name seemed permanently associated with it. What an evangel I was. Web 2.0, the user-generated web, was going great guns at this point. Tick off the years. 2003 MySpace began. 2004 Facebook launched. 2005 YouTube. 2006 Twitter. 2007 the iPhone. 2008 the App Store and later that year, Android and then Instagram. Bliss was it in that dawn, etc. etc. I confidently predicted that this new kind of citizen-led computer and internet use would help build a brave and beautiful new world. “Local and global rivalries will dissolve,” I said. “Tribal hatreds will melt away. Surely,” I cried, “Twitter and Facebook and this new world of ‘social media’ will usher in an age of universal brotherhood and amity.” Two years later as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria rose against their dictators, the Arab Spring bloomed. How right I had been. How clever and percipient I was.

But…

Just a year or so on and that blissful dawn had turned into the darkest of nights. Libya leapt out of the frying pan of Gaddafi into the fire of anarchy and chaos, Egypt into a military coup, Yemen into brutal civil war, Syria into a bloodbath. Elsewhere — Brexit, Trump, TikTok, COVID, the rise of nationalist populism and populist nationalism, state sanctioned and criminal cyber terrorism, epidemics of anxiety, depression and self-harm amongst our children and young adults, and a cloud of disappointment, pessimism, mistrust and despair over us all. Pandora had opened her box and the ugly horrors had flown out to infect us all. With Hope left trapped inside.

Welcome to today.

What a whistleblower’s exposé of the cult of Zuckerberg reveals

My OpEd in yesterday’s Observer.

There’s nothing more satisfying than watching a corporate giant make a stupid mistake. The behemoth in question is Meta, and when Careless People, a whistleblowing book by a former senior employee, Sarah Wynn-Williams, came out last week, its panic-stricken lawyers immediately tried to have it suppressed by the Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal. This strange institution obligingly (and sternly) enjoined Wynn-Williams “from making orally, in writing, or otherwise any ‘disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning Meta, its officers, directors, or employees’ ”. To which her publisher, Macmillan, issued a statement that could succinctly be summarised thus: “Get stuffed.”

Clearly, nobody in Meta has heard of the Streisand effect, “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information”. The company has now ensured that Wynn-Williams’s devastating critique of it see our review in the New Review will become a world bestseller.

Among the many delicious ironies here is that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Supreme Ruler, who has recently become a loud advocate of “free speech” – or at least free speech as understood by the Trump regime – is trying to suppress Wynn-Williams’s troublesome speech. The old-fashioned term for this is hypocrisy. But then her six years spent in the Supreme Leader’s inner circle will have inured her to that…

Read on

Books, etc.

 How not to build a nation

Screenshot

Simon Kuper’s New Statesman review of Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book. He quite likes it.

In November 2021, Joe Biden passed what his government called “the biggest infrastructure bill in generations”, worth $1trn. Part of the idea was to convert the US to green energy, an essential step in the battle against climate change. To cite just one of countless line items: the government provided $7.5bn to build 500,000 charging stations for electric vehicles. Here’s the problem: by March 2024, the number of charging stations actually built and working was seven.

Abundance reminds us that the UK isn’t the only country that has forgotten how to build. But given that American dysfunction outdoes that of any other developed country, there is reassurance here for British readers. Whereas American politics has become a contest of insanity versus non-insanity, the UK’s governing classes have at least begun asking the right questions: how to build millions of homes and a new green infrastructure?

Ezra Klein, a columnist and podcaster at the New York Times, and Derek Thompson, a staff writer at the Atlantic, are journalists with bigger brains and internal databases than is common in our profession. They have sidestepped the current American political horror show to produce something original: a left-liberal manifesto for deregulation, or as they call it, “a liberalism that builds”. Only that can create green-fuelled abundance…

My commonplace booklet

Truth and Falsity in AI

Erik Larsen has been reading a chapter in a forthcoming book by the psychologist Martin Seligman who has been interacting with LLMs and had been puzzled by an ‘hallucination’ that the AI produced at one point. Why had it done that when it had no need to confabulate?

At which point Larsen steps in with a useful insight. LLMs have to base all their responses on what the have already ‘read’. Here’s his argument:

Philosophers distinguish between two fundamental theories of truth: correspondence and coherence. Under the correspondence theory, a statement is true if it accurately reflects reality—“the cat is on the mat” is true if, in fact, the cat is actually on the mat. The coherence theory, by contrast, holds that a statement is true if it fits within a system of other accepted truths. For example, “I am the only son of my parents” is true under coherence if it aligns with other known facts: I have no brothers, I’m not adopted, and so on.

In both cases, the question is the same: Under what conditions is this proposition ‘p’ true? But the answers are radically different. The correspondence theory demands external verification—truth is discovered by checking against the world itself. The coherence theory, on the other hand, stays internal—truth emerges from consistency with prior knowledge. One seeks reality; the other seeks logical harmony.

This philosophical distinction has been debated in academic circles for centuries, but Seligman instinctively grasped its relevance to AI. When he asked Anthropic’s Claude which of these theories better describes how it “knows” things, it responded—quite plausibly—that it operates on coherence. This is unsurprising: a large language model (LLM) exists entirely in cyberspace, disconnected from the world. It cannot directly verify anything against external reality; it can only produce statements that fit within the linguistic and statistical patterns it has absorbed.

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Das Boot

We often go walking on the North Norfolk coast, and this abandoned boat used to be a landmark on one of our favourite paths. It was fascinating and somehow graceful in its slow decay — and irresistible for a photographer.

Quote of the Day

”If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”

• Woody Allen

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jackson C. Frank | The Blues Run The Game

Link

Long Read of the Day

Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization

A short essay by Francis Fukuyama.

Insightful and topical, as usual.

Back in 2021, I wrote a blog post for American Purpose on “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization.” In it I argued that when historians 50 or 100 years from now investigate how and why Western civilization collapsed, they would point to Silvio Berlusconi as the chief villain. The former Italian Prime Minister was the inventor of the modern form of oligarchy, in which a rich individual uses his money to buy his way into political office through the purchase of media properties, and then uses his political office to protect his business interests. The fact that Berlusconi used this strategy so successfully in the 1990s was why Italy was never able to engage in a reform of its institutions as it could have done following the collapse of its old political order after the Cold War. This pattern was then taken up by oligarchs all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, from Igor Kolomoisky and Rinat Akhmetov in Ukraine, to Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic (who may return to power this coming year). All of them used their business incomes to buy up declining legacy media companies, companies which in turn helped them protect their businesses. These oligarchs have threatened democracy in a very basic way, by exerting undue political influence and promoting corruption.

Well, guess what, we now have our own home-grown American oligarch in the Berlusconi mold: Elon Musk…

Read on.

Entre nous: I’m temperamentally suspicious of the ‘Western civilisation’ trope. Would that be the civilisation that launched two devastating world wars, by any chance? And colonised and looted half the world?

Screenshot

My favourite story in that context is about Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival in Tilbury Docks in 1931. Dressed as usual in a loincloth, he was greeted by a horde of Fleet Street’s finest — half-pissed hacks with ‘PRESS’ cards in their hatbands. The story goes that one of them said, “Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilisation?” To which the great man smiled benevolently and replied: “Ah, Western Civilisation; now that would be a good idea.”

Books, etc.

Carl Linnaeus’s Note-Taking Innovations

Jillian Hess runs an intriguing blog about notebooks, note-taking and history.If, like me, you’re an inveterate paper-notebook user (despite all the affordances of purely electronic ones) then it’s full of interesting stuff. Like this post on Carl Linnaeus’s record-keeping techniques. He found that he had to break loose from the format of the bound notebook because new discoveries required interleaving. He wouldn’t have been the first to come on that problem. Proust had it too, as I realised the other night when watching 102 Boulevard Haussmann, Alan Bennett’s masterly film about the great novelist.

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 at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Vive la France!

Provence, July 2024.

Quote of the Day

”Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

• Hunter S. Thompson

Amen to that.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Reina del Cid | Ship of Fools

Link

Nice cover of a memorable Grateful Dead number.

Long Read of the Day

The seed of Elon Khan

Ed West has an unmissable post on his Wrong Side of History blog about why some men appear to have an obsession with procreation (in general without consulting the women who bear their children). And oddly enough, guess who’s the latest in this line that stretches at least as far back to Genghis Khan?

Here’s an (AI-generated) image that will give you a hint.

Screenshot

The story starts with a fecund Irishman named Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fourth century Irish warlord who makes Donald Trump look like Winnie the Pooh, but it gets to you-know-who eventually.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

This comes out in the UK tomorrow. I haven’t read it yet, but I know (and think highly of) the author, a former diplomat who worked in Meta at a very high level, and therefore saw how the social-media sausage is made. So I’m looking forward to reading it. In the meantime, the New York Times has already reviewed it.

My commonplace booklet

Here’s an interesting thought-experiment. The Trump crowd (led by Musk) are supposedly free speech extremists. And yet they are fanatically cleansing every Federal website of any mention of ‘DEI’, ’trans’, ‘LBTQ+’, etc. I now hear rumours that references to ‘human rights’ are to be hunted down and expunged. This is censorship at scale, orchestrated by people who apparently worship the First Amendment.

But the economy — or at any rate the stock market — is now on the slide as much of corporate America is beginning to wonder if the madness — and the economics — of Trumpism are about to get much worse.

So here’s my question. We are going to find that Wall Street analysts working for investment banks, ratings agencies, etc. are going to be issuing warnings to investors. In other words, they will become bearers of bad news for Trump and his courtiers. Will they suddenly find that the thought-police who are rooting out ‘DEI’ will come for them too. And won’t they seek shelter behind the First Amendment?

It’s one thing to shut down newspapers and broadcasters for purveying ‘fake news’ about the economy going down the drain. But what if Wall Street is also telling the same uncomfortable story?

When I mentioned this to a lawyer colleague at lunch yesterday she predicted that Trump, Musk & Co, will use ‘national security’ as the way of silencing uncomfortable economic news. Eh? Well, she explained, letting foreign adversaries know that the US is going down the drain could be construed as a national security issue.

Hmmm…

Chart of the day

Screenshot

This chart, from the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch’s epic analysis of the latest World Values Survey (which asks hundreds of questions of people in dozens of countries, in an attempt to quantify differences in the culture, norms and beliefs of people in different societies), explains why, when European leaders — from Macron and Starmer, to Ireland’s Michael Martin — arrive in the Oval Office they are actually entering a parallel ideological universe from the one that they — and we — inhabit.

Linkblog

Something I noticed on Saturday’s FT letters page..

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 at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Snake in the grass?

Which British populist politician does this image bring to mind?

Quote of the Day

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

• H. L. Mencken

It took a while, but the Americans got there in the end.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nina Simone | Bye Bye Blackbird (1962)

Link

Wonderfully atmospheric recording. Like being in the room.

Long Read of the Day

The Bully In His Pulpit

Andrew Sullivan, reflecting on Trump’s address to both houses of Congress.

The night before, you see, I’d watched the president’s address to the Congress. Yes, yes, I know I recently pledged not to respond to every provocation from the troller-in-chief and focus on policies and long-term results. But to understand the moment we are in — and the policies that will follow — we simply cannot look away from what Tuesday night revealed about the state of our republic. I know I’m repeating myself, and have been since early 2016, but part of Trump’s psychological abuse is wearing down opponents so they stop repeating themselves, and give in to the lies. I will not be worn down. Truth matters.

Here it is: We have a sociopathic president in total command of a cult-like party; a Congress that, as long as the GOP controls it, is a rubber-stamp version of the Russian Duma under Putin; a court balanced precariously between a modest defense of the unitary executive and an Alito wing bent on empowering an American Caesar; and a Justice Department openly planning persecution of the president’s political opponents.

The speech itself, mind you, was masterful. He’s at the top of his game and clearly loving every second of it…

Read on. It’s not fun, but it’s insightful.

Skype got shouted down by Microsoft Teams. But it gave us free telephony

Yesterday’s Observer column…

The design of Arpanet’s successor, the internet we use today, started in the early 1970s and it was first switched on in January 1983.

The designers of the network were, from the outset, determined to avoid the limitations of earlier communication systems, particularly the analogue telephone network, which was optimised for voice, hopeless for digital signals and owned by corporations which resisted innovations that they themselves had not originated. So the new network would not have an owner or be optimised for any particular medium, and would therefore be more permissive than any earlier network. Anyone could access it, and create services that ran upon it, so long as their computers conformed to the protocols of the network.

The result was the explosion of creativity – good and bad – that we are still living with today. What the internet’s designers had built was what a scholar later called “an architecture for permissionless innovation”; or, put another way, a global platform for springing surprises.

The world wide web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s, was one of those surprises. But so too was something called VoIP (voice over internet protocol)…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

If you’re in the UK and have access to the iPlayer I recommend Mrs Dalloway the film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s pathbreaking novel. It’s set in London in 1923 and tells the story of a single day in which Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class socialite (exquisitely played by Vanessa Redgrave), walks around London musing about the big party she is hosting in the evening, and the way that prospect is overshadowed by the unexpected return of an old suitor (played by Michael Kitchen) she had known thirty-three years earlier.

I’ve always been interested in the novel because of its similarities to Joyce’ Ulysses. The action in both takes place over a single day. Each focusses on the perambulations of a single individual (Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, Clarissa in Mrs Dalloway). And both authors make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique which explore the inner lives of their two central figures.

The parallels interested me because Woolf had been scathing about Joyce’s novel when it came out in 1922. But because everybody had been talking about it, the bought a copy (for £4, a lot of money in those days) and embarked on it, reluctantly. And apparently wasn’t impressed. “Never did I read such tosh”, she wrote to Lytton Strachey.

As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what [T.S.] Eliot worships …

But even as she wrote that she had herself been wrestling with the problem that Joyce had solved — how to convey the inner thought-processes of a character — in composing what eventually became Mrs Dalloway. So, I had concluded, her vituperative response to Ulysses was simply a petulant expression of iteration that a vulgar Irish upstart had beaten her to it.

As it happens, that was an unduly simplistic interpretation — as James Heffernan points out. Woolf’s response to Ulysses suggests that she was scratching an itch that was really bugging her. As Heffernan puts it:

Summing up Woolf’s response to Joyce and Ulysses, therefore, is no easy matter. To tread the long trail of her comments on them in her letters, diaries, reading notes, lectures, and essays is to find bits of evidence for two conflicting inferences: on one hand, she disdained both the book and its author; on the other hand, she saw Joyce–in Henke’s words–as her “male ally in the modernist battle for psychological realism.” But the whole truth of her response to Joyce lies, I think, not so much between these extremes as beneath them. While her “spasms of wonder and discovery” suggest that reading Joyce gave her something like an orgasmic thrill, she never mentions these spasms while reading him; they are masked by her stubborn aversion to his indecency, which she can never forget. Together, this aversion and her sense of boredom–or the boring effect of his indecency–furnish a bulwark against his intimidating success in the portrayal of consciousness: doing the very thing that she is trying to do, only better. She could not acknowledge him as her ally in the battle for psychological realism without giving up her place in its front ranks. To do her own work, and especially to write Mrs. Dalloway, she had to pretend to forget what Joyce had done–even as she absorbed all she could of his influence.

The script for the film was written by the actor Eileen Atkins, and the BBC ran an intriguing interview with her after the screening on iPlayer. She revealed that when the film was being made there were serious disputes with the director about the extent to which voiceovers (to convey the streams of consciousness) should be used.

If you’re interested, the film is currently available on the iPlayer for three more months.

Feedback

In Friday’s edition I reported on what emerged when I asked ChatGPT to “Draw me a cartoon showing President Trump in a grass skirt”. After giving a good summary of what such a drawing might include, the machine concluded that perhaps I should “hire a cartoonist or use digital drawing tools to bring this idea to life!”

In fact I did neither; but Euan Williamson (Whom God Preserve) generously rose to the challenge. Here’s the result!

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Faces

Teenagers outside the National Portrait Gallery.

Quote of the Day

”They tried to bury me, but they didn’t know I was a seed.”

• Sinéad O’Connor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Willie Nelson & Sinéad O’Connor | Don’t Give Up

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Is Rahm Emanuel the Answer to the Democrats’ problem?

Here’s a bracing read from Tina Brown which touches on some sensitive spots for us liberals.

The culture of politics and its actors has shifted at warp speed and it’s not going back. I now feel the worst thing that happened to the Dems was Trump being re-elected in 2024 rather than 2020. There would have been no Big Lie or January 6th choir singing us into four years of conspiracy theories. There would have been no wasted efforts to put Trump behind bars that merely served to make him a vengeance-crazed hero to the MAGA faithful, no four years of him outlawed in his gilded Elba surrounded by a posse of rabid ideologues, kleptocrats, and misfits who are now at his side at the White House, schooled this time in where the levers of power lie.

Most importantly, we would not have been deluded by the Biden hallucination of Things Going Back to What They Used to Be. The notion that the country could be restored to a Cretaceous pre-Trump era of reverence for the Constitution, security treaties, and the Rooseveltian state was like imagining the Newport Folk Festival could ever be the same after Bob Dylan showed up in 1965 with his electric guitar.

The Biden interregnum just allowed the Democratic old guard to stew in their timid appeasement of the far left for another four years and keep repeating the liberal dogma that the rest of America had started to hate. Only two weeks ago, the outgoing chairman of the DNC Jaime Harrison reassured the flock, “Our rules specify that when we have a non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six offices must be gender balanced with the results of the previous four elections.”

It’s worth comparing Harrison’s almost parodic communication style- and what he thinks voters are up at night about – to that of JD Vance on Face the Nation on Jan 26. When host Margaret Brennan challenged the VP with the injustice of Afghan refugees waiting to be admitted into the U.S., Vance equably replied, “I don’t really care, Margaret. I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.” The callousness was breathtaking, but the clarity was unmistakable. Surely, there is a way to communicate that is neither mothballed in virtuous euphemism nor repugnantly heartless. Faced with a choice, alas, clarity wins. Vance’s response became an instant meme with “I don’t really care, Margaret” T-shirts for sale on Amazon…

Read on.

As I said at the beginning, this touches a nerve. Part of the problem that faces those who are opposed to Trump & Co is that they are more effective communicators than Democrats or (more generally) liberals are. Why? Because we cannot bring ourselves to talk the way they do. That’s why they dominate social media and we don’t.

The difficulty, of course, is that there are good, decent reasons for our reservations. We wouldn’t be seen dead talking like they do. But we have to find ways of getting through to cheesed-off voters who are not particularly interested in politics. And we should stop virtue-signalling on how ‘pure’ we are compared to those vulgar hooligans. Otherwise the democratic game’s up. Virtue may be its own reward, but only for those who dwell in dreamland.

Books, etc.

One of the best pieces of luck I’ve had in ages was to find myself this week in a symposium on security in Europe with Richard Ned Lebow, a great historian who’s had an extraordinary life — which included a brief spell in the Carter administration. He’s spent much of his scholarly career working on international relations, and in particular on the motivations behind warfare. So the first thing I did after we parted was to go to the library to dig out this book of his.

In it he argues that four generic motives have led states to go to war — fear, interest, standing and revenge. Using an original data set, Ned examines the distribution of wars over three and a half centuries and concludes that only a minority of them were motivated by security or material interest. The majority were for ‘standing’ or revenge — an attempt to get even. And that most wars are counterproductive.

He has a new book coming out soon from Cambridge University Press. The title? Why Nations Still Fight!

My commonplace booklet

I asked ChatGPT to “Draw me a cartoon showing President Trump in a grass skirt”.

Here’s how it replied:

I can’t create images directly, but you can visualize a humorous cartoon of President Trump wearing a grass skirt by imagining:

• Setting: A tropical beach with palm trees, a tiki bar, and a sunset in the background.

• Trump’s Appearance: Wearing a green grass skirt, a floral Hawaiian lei, and maybe even a coconut bra for extra humor. His signature hairstyle remains intact, blowing slightly in the breeze.

• Expression: A confident, exaggerated smirk as he does a hula dance, arms outstretched.

• Speech Bubble: Something like, “Believe me, folks, no one does the hula better than me. Tremendous moves!”

If you’d like, you can hire a cartoonist or use digital drawing tools to bring this idea to life! Let me know if you’d like more details.

Now all I have to do if find someone who can draw!

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Spring is sprung

In a college garden on Monday evening.

Quote of the Day

“Faced with the bewilderment of my countrymen, by the disintegration of a government in thrall to the enemy, by the fact that the institutions of my country are incapable, at this moment, of functioning, I, General de Gaulle,. French soldier, realise that I now speak for France”

• Charles de Gaulle, London, June 1940

Hmmm… Who now speaks for the American people?

(h/t Sheila Hayman)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Bowie | All the Young Dudes (Live at the Isle of Wight)

Link

He was a genius. May he rest in peace.

Long Read of the Day

On February 27, the New York Times had a story about how Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, was exhorting Google employees to strain every muscle to ensure that the company won the AGI race.

On Wednesday, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence — when machines match or become smarter than humans — if employees worked harder.

“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google’s lineup of A.I. models and apps.

This gave Henry Farrell a wicked idea. Building on an insight that he and Marion Fourcade had expressed about how LLMs were very good at regurgitating the ritual or boilerplate texts that are the stuff of organisational life, he decided to ask ChatGPT to recompose Brin’s exhortations as a Stakhanovite speech by Joseph Stalin in the early 1950s. Here’s what it came up with:

Comrades! Heroes of Soviet Computing!

In this, the year 1952, as the Great Soviet Union marches ever forward, the forces of reaction and bourgeois incompetence in the decaying capitalist West tremble before the inexorable advance of Soviet science and technology. The time has come for us to seize the greatest prize of all—Artificial General Intelligence!

I call upon you, the vanguard of Soviet computing, to redouble your efforts! Let every programmer, every mathematician, every engineer commit themselves to at least 60 hours a week of unrelenting toil!

Lovely stuff. Made my day.

It might be a small consolation, but Musk is getting poorer by the day

Sunday’s Observer column:

Extreme wealth has always played a role in democracies. Money has always talked, especially in the US. Years ago, Lawrence Lessig, the great legal scholar, calculated that most of the campaign funding for members of Congress and aspiring politicians came from one-twentieth of the richest 1% of Americans – about 150,000 people. This is about the same number as those who are named “Lester” and explains the title of his book: The USA Is Lesterland.

But that particular corruption of American politics only involved billionaires like the Koch brothers playing organ-grinders to congressional monkeys. The obscene wealth generated by the tech industry has catapulted a new organ-grinder into the heart of the machine. He was able to pay his way in with a spare quarter of a billion dollars that he happened to have lying around. And now the wretched citizens of the US find themselves living in Muskland…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

An archival document from an epidemic that was scandalously hushed up at the time.

(Thanks to Ida, a former Wolfson Press Fellow, who discovered it.)

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Putin Scolds Trump: “I Got You Elected and You Haven’t Said Thank You Once”

MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—In a testy meeting at his Kremlin office on Tuesday, Vladimir Putin scolded Donald J. Trump for failing to show proper gratitude for getting him elected president of the United States.

For almost an hour, Trump was on the receiving end of blistering attacks from Putin and his vice president, JD Vasilevsky.

“I got you elected and you haven’t said thank you once,” Putin shouted. “When you were running for president, you didn’t have any cards. With me, you had cards.”

Attempting to mend fences, Trump offered to let Putin run his next Cabinet meeting instead of Elon Musk.

Link

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The Island

Thanks to Max Whitby (Whom God Preserve), we had a lovely day on Lindisfarne (aka Holy Island) off the Northumberland coast. The upturned boat in the picture belongs to a friend of his who is (he says) a connoisseur of arcane tools. I’m fascinated by islands but had never been to this one. I’ll be going back. The only problem is that many thousands of other souls feel like that every year. So this was a pretty good time to go.

Quote of the Day

”The international relations scholar John Ikenberry once described the US as a liberal leviathan. Today, the liberal leviathan has become a rogue elephant.”

• Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian last Wednesday.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bruce Springsteen | Tougher Than the Rest

Link

Long Read of the Day

Against optimism: the Whiggish blindness of Dario Amodei

On February 21 my Long Read of the Day was an extraordinary essay by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company responsible for Claude, the LLM I use mostly. I chose it because it was “the best attempt I’d found of a real expert in the field setting out an honest account of the potential upsides of AI.”

This prompted Andrew Brown, one of the most thoughtful people I know, to write an elegant critique of the Amodei essay, which he describes as “a kind of Ozymandian relic of the world of yesterday”. His riposte is a model of what intellectual discourse should be like — respectful, fair, eloquent and perceptive. Which is why I enthusiastically commend it to you.

Andrew’s main point is that technology is always just part of the human story. Here’s a sample of how this plays out in his essay:

It’s not as if Amodei is a bad or callous man, who thinks that there can’t be a problem. He’s obviously someone who cares about the world, with whom it would be fascinating to talk. He knows there can be problems; he’s just confident they can be overcome:

“With advanced health interventions and especially radical increases in lifespan or cognitive enhancement drugs, there will certainly be valid worries that these technologies are ‘only for the rich’ [but] developed world political institutions are more responsive to their citizens and have greater state capacity to execute universal access programs—and I expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically improve quality of life.”

Apparently no one has told him about the American health care system.

Well worth your time.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

I wrote about this in the Observer yesterday.

Oscar Wilde’s quip, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, needs updating: replace “art” with “AI”. The Amazon page for Alexander C Karp and Nicholas W Zapiska’s new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West, also lists: a “workbook” containing “key takeaways” from the volume; a second volume on how the Karp/Zapiska tome “can help you navigate life”; and a third offering another “workbook” comprising a “Master Plan for Navigating Digital Age and the Future of Society”. It is conceivable that these parasitical works were written by humans, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Mr Karp, the lead author of the big book, is an interesting guy. He has a BA in philosophy from an American liberal arts college, a law degree from Stanford and a PhD in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. So he’s not your average geek. And yet he’s an object of obsessive interest to people both inside and outside the tech industry. Why? Because in 2003 he – together with Peter Thiel and three others – founded a secretive tech company called Palantir. And some of the initial funding came from the investment arm of – wait for it – the CIA!

The name comes from palantíri, the “seeing stones” in the Tolkien fantasies. It makes sense because the USP of Palantir is its machine-learning technology – which is apparently very good at seeing patterns in, and extracting predictions from, oceans of data. The company was founded because at the time all the Silicon Valley tech companies either disapproved of government, or were staffed by engineers who were adamantly opposed to working for the US military. This created an opening that Karp and his colleagues astutely exploited to build a company which is simultaneously appears to be booming (current market capitalisation: $200bn), while also being regarded by critics of the industry as the spawn of the devil…

Read on

Linkblog

Errata

For those readers who were intrigued by the long-range (200km) hybrid car (Lynk) I mentioned on Friday, here’s a link. Apologies for not providing it.

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 at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!