One of our cats, who persists in taking up a step midway down the stairs, and is resolutely unmoved by warnings of the attendant dangers thus posed to descending persons. Her obduracy reminds me of PG Wodehouse’s explanation of the superior attitude manifested by cats: they know that the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as gods.
“What can convey the veritable brain-washing, the total preoccupation, the drugged and haunted condition which this new poet induced in some of us? We were like new-born goslings forever imprinted with the image of an alien and indifferent foster parent, infatuated with his erudition, his sophistication, yet sapped and ruined by the contagion of his despair.”
Cyril Connolly on the impact of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land on his generation.
Four remarkable articles.
Ron Deibert: “Three Painful Truths About Social Media”, Journal of Democracy, Volume 30, Number 1, January 2019. link – lovely, synoptic summary of our current reality, by a scholar who seem more of the dark underbelly of our networked world than most of us.
Paul Nemitz, “Constitutional democracy and technology in the age of artificial intelligence”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 15 October 2018, p376. link. Magnificent essay by the Principal Adviser to the European Commission on why judgements about ethical AI cannot be left to the tech companies.
David Silver et al, “A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play”, Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6419, pp. 1140-1144, 07 Dec 2018 link. The full scientific report by DeepMind researchers on their ALphaZero machine, which taught itself to acquire superhuman capabilities in playing certain games.
Gary Kasparov, “Chess, a Drosophila of reasoning”, Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6419, pp. 1087, 07 Dec 2018. Lovely commentary by a former Grandmaster on AlphaZero’s accomplishments.
Seen in a street in Oslo just down from our hotel.
Interesting NYT column by Tom Friedman:
Clean energy is a problem of scale. If you don’t have scale, you have a hobby. I like hobbies. I used to build model airplanes. But you can’t mitigate climate change as a hobby. The reason I called for a Green New Deal was first and foremost to convey that this undertaking required a massive, urgent response commensurate with the scale and time frame posed by accelerating disruptive climate.
For too long, he continues, “green” was viewed as a synonym for a project that was “boutique, uneconomical, liberal, sissy and vaguely French”.
I wanted to recast green as geostrategic, capitalistic, economical, innovative and patriotic. My motto was, “Green is the new red, white and blue.” I did not believe in being a “nice” green. I believed in being a mean green. I believed greens should be as brassy, bold, big sky and in-your-face as any oil and gas executive.
Splendid Observer column by Andrew Rawnsley:
What would Mr Corbyn do when he and his members desired something contradictory? How would he act when they had fundamentally different worldviews? Would he put aside his own preferences in deference to the sovereignty of the Labour people? Or would he behave just like the “establishment” politicians he has spent a lifetime condemning and seek to subordinate the will of the members to his own opinions?
We now know. The Brexit blowtorch has burnt away many fantasises. One of the items on the bonfire of illusions is the notion that the Labour leader is in some way a special one, so different to all other politicians as to be almost not a politician at all. It turns out that he is just another manoeuvring, equivocating hack when he wants one thing and his members want the opposite.
This split is not a slight difference of opinion on a low-order issue. We are talking about something a bit more important than how to regulate the provision of manhole covers. This is about the most significant question to face Britain for decades. Some 73% of people currently identifying as Labour supporters think that the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU. That rises to a whopping 89% among Labour members. As you might expect to follow, most Labour members and most Labour voters want the party to come out in full support of another referendum on Brexit, a move that would transform the chances of the country being given a fresh choice.
The bottom line, as Rawnsley observes, is that sometimes, the simplest explanations for human behaviour are the best ones. The Labour leader is not making any effort to prevent Brexit because he doesn’t want to prevent Brexit. So if Labour supporters want another referendum (and we now know, courtesy of Tim Bales’s research that they do), they will have to learn from their leader’s time-honoured practice and rebel against him.
This morning’s Observer column:
Way back in the 1950s, a pioneering British cybernetician, W Ross Ashby, proposed a fundamental law of dynamic systems. In his book An Introduction to Cybernetics, he formulated his law of requisite variety, which defines “the minimum number of states necessary for a controller to control a system of a given number of states”. In plain English, it boils down to this: for a system to be viable, it has to be able to absorb or cope with the complexity of its environment. And there are basically only two ways of achieving viability in those terms: either the system manages to control (or reduce) the variety of its environment, or it has to increase its internal capacity (its “variety”) to match what is being thrown at it from the environment.
Sounds abstruse, I know, but it has a contemporary resonance. Specifically, it provides a way of understanding some of the current internal turmoil in Facebook as it grapples with the problem of keeping unacceptable, hateful or psychotic content off its platform…
See also Tyler Cowen’s ‘trilemma’ piece
“Good economists know that the correct answer to any question in economics is: it depends.”
Dani Rodrik, “Rescuing economics from Neoliberalism”
From his latest Bloomberg column:
I’d like to suggest a simple trilemma. When it comes to private platforms and speech regulation, you can choose two of three: scalability, effectiveness and consistency. You cannot have all three. Furthermore, this trilemma suggests that we — whether as users, citizens or indeed managers of the platforms themselves — won’t ever be happy with how speech is regulated on the internet.
One view, which may appear cynical, is that the platforms are worth having, so they should appease us by at least trying to regulate effectively, even though both of us know they won’t really succeed. Circa 2019, I don’t see a better solution. Another view is that we’d be better off with how things were a few years ago, when platform regulation of speech was not such a big issue. After all, we Americans don’t flip out when we learn that Amazon sells copies of “Mein Kampf.”
The problem is that once you learn about what you can’t have — speech regulation that is scalable, consistent and hostile to bad agents — it is hard to get used to that fact. Going forward, we’re likely to see platform companies trying harder and harder, and their critics getting louder and louder.
I like his ‘trilemma’ idea. It reminds me of Dani Rodrik’s one, which says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.