Quote of the Day

“I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better”

• Glenda Jackson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

JS Bach | And At The Hour Of Death (Arr. Badzura) | Víkingur Ólafsson

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’

Great review by Rob Miller of Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’.

Last week Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger went down, for everyone in the world, for six hours. The services were unavailable not just to their ordinary users, but to those inside Facebook; there were stories of technicians sent to repair the damage being unable to access Facebook’s data centres, because the service that checked their badges and unlocked the doors was one of those that was offline.

After the collective global meltdown, the accounts of what happened began to emerge and coverage switched to how the problems had occurred.1 Predictably, virtually all of them contained the phrase “human error”. “It was simply human error,” said The Times. “The outage was caused by human error that occurred while an engineer was doing routine maintenance work,” offered USA Today’s fact-checking department.

If there’s anyone whose gears are ground by this invocation of “human error” to explain incidents, it’s Sidney Dekker…

Really illuminating and worth a read. Also led me to get Dekker’s book.

Tom Morey, inventor of the Boogie Board, dies at 86

Nice NPR obit:

Using his degree, Morey went to work for Douglas Aircraft as an engineer but left to start his own surf shop in 1964, according to the Post. By this time Morey had already begun experimenting with surfboard designs.

But it wasn’t until Morey left Southern California that he created the first Boogie board. In 1971, Morey was living in Hawaii when he cut a large piece of polyethylene foam in half. He then worked to shape the foam with an iron after putting pages of the Honolulu Advertiser on top. By the time he was done Morey had a short board with a mostly rectangular body and a rounded nose. It weighed around three pounds — a fraction of what traditional surfboards weighed at the time.

With his new creation in hand, Morey went to the beach to test it out.

”I could actually feel the wave through the board. On a surfboard, you’re not feeling the nuance of the wave, but with my creation, I could feel everything,” Morey said as he recounted his first ride to SurferToday.com.

I never used a Boogie board, but my kids did and got a lot out of it.

’Performative’: How the meaning of a word became corrupted

Lovely little disquisition by Wilfred M. McClay in The Hedgehog Review on misuse of the term ‘performative’ (a crime to which this blogger pleads guilty).

In defense of performative, it is a technical academic word that was invented to serve a particular purpose. The British philosopher J.L. Austin (1911–60) was an influential exponent of the view that our use of language must in some instances be understood as a form of action, and not merely as a system of signifiers that record and order the structure of reality. His most famous work, How to Do Things with Words (1955), is the locus classicus for the understanding of what he called a “performative utterance,” and he would go on to label such utterances “speech acts,” uses of language that are not describing something—indeed, are not even susceptible of being judged true or false, real or artificial—but doing something.

Chart of the Day

I know this is US only, but just look at the cost of university tuition.

Chart comes from a typically thoughtful post by Noah Smith.

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

The Quince tree

Quinces are fascinating fruits, always looking battered like sailors after a night on the town.

Quote of the Day

”That’s not exercise, it’s flagellation.”

• Noël Coward on Squash

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

EELS | That Look You Give That Guy

Link

Long Read of the Day

The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks like

Stunning series of interactive visualisations by the Guardian. Not so much a long read as a long and sobering browse. Don’t know what it looks like in print, but it really works online.

Paddy Moloney and Frank Zappa

Stories about Paddy keep coming. Here’s a nice snatch of dialogue from the BBC Radio show Midweek presented by Libby Purves (Whom God Preserve) on which Frank and Paddy appeared.

Libby: I think we should break it to you that Frank has been known to sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.

Paddy: Really? I’m very sorry for your troubles, Frank.

Libby: We were going to invite him to do it with the Chieftains backing.

Paddy: Well, we’ll have a go. It’s early in the morning.

Frank: What we did with that particular song was that on St Patrick’s Day in 1988, we were working in a town in the US and we had an Irish population and an Italian population, so during the soundcheck in the afternoon, we put together an arrangement that combined ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and the theme from ‘The Godfather’. (laughter)

Libby: The perfect combination…

Many thanks to Nibor for the tip.

Game-theory and diplomacy

Really interesting piece on how diplomats are beginning to appreciate how applied mathematics might be useful in international negotiations. It’s based on a conversation with Michael Ambühl, a professor of negotiation and conflict management at ETH Zurich and was the chief Swiss negotiator when Switzerland was negotiating the deal that it now has with the EU.

The Lab for Science in Diplomacy, a collaboration between ETH Zürich where Ambühl is based and the University of Geneva, will also focus on “negotiation engineering”, where existing mathematical techniques such as game theory are used either to help frame a discussion, or to play out different scenarios before engaging in talks.

I particularly enjoyed this bit:

Ambühl said that, as Switzerland’s chief EU negotiator, he ran a game theory simulation ahead of talks that led to Switzerland joining the Shengen area and a raft of agreements with the EU on tax, trade and security. The analysis indicated that it was in Switzerland’s interest for the negotiations to take place as a package rather than sequentially, and so the Swiss government insisted on this as a basis for talks.

Did the EU do their own analysis? “I don’t think so,” said Ambühl. “We didn’t tell them that we did game theory.”

Which of course makes one wonder if Michel Barnier had some backroom boffins working for him when he was ‘negotiating’ with the Brexiteering clowns.

On second thoughts, he didn’t need game theory, just re-runs of Laurel and Hardy.

My Commonplace booklet (Eh? See here)

We’ve had a cheeky little mouse in our utility room for about a week, and our elegant cat (who sleeps in the adjacent kitchen) was supremely indifferent to the presence of the little blighter, regarding him (or her) with the disdain of a Dowager Duchess contemplating a boot-boy.

But then the other night the mouse Went Too Far — climbing onto a worktop and nibbling away at the tiny, deliciously sweet, tomatoes that are still emerging from our green house. This was deemed by me to Too Much. Something Had To Be Done. (In capital letters.)

My wife (a compassionate and generous soul) fearing that I would do something drastic (like setting a violent mousetrap) then took preemptive action. She retrieved a non-lethal trap that we had once used successfully in the attic and on Sunday night set it up in the Utility Room, baited with a piece of cheese. Yesterday morning she came down early to find the little creature wandering round the (spacious) trap clearly wondering if there was more cheese where that from. Her captor then gently walked with the trap to the nearby wood and released him (or her) into the wild before returning to a cat — and a husband — demanding to know where was the bloody mouse.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining that her humane approach to the matter reminded me of Robbie Burns’s lovely poem To a Mouse , addressed to a wee beastie whose nest had been disturbed by a plough in November 1785.

This is how it begins:

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

Read it from the link in its entirely and relish the immortal phrase that Burns gave to the English language (via his native Scots dialect)

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

 This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

Wine of the Day

I don’t know what those French vineyards are complaining about this year. Our vine is doing just fine.

Quote of the Day

In 2013, Lou Reed died. It was late October. The last thing he asked for was to be taken outside, into the light. Laurie Anderson, his wife, was by his side.

Afterwards, she wrote:

“I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou’s as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn’t afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life — so beautiful, painful and dazzling — does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.”

• From a lovely profile of Anderson by Sam Anderson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

James Galway & The Chieftains | Over the Sea to Skye

Link

Nice demonstration of how Paddy Moloney could attract classical musicians to work with the Chieftains.

Long Read of the Day

A Post-Neoliberal Regulatory Analysis for a Post-Neoliberal World

Terrific blog post from the Law and Political Economy Project.

It’s an insightful critique of cost-benefit’s roots in neoliberalism’s obsession with wealth maximisation.

Contemporary cost-benefit analysis is profoundly undemocratic. The complex technocratic techniques that define the methodology render it inaccessible to all but a rarified elite of highly trained economists (or those with the resources to hire them). Moreover, the anti-democratic nature of this process results in policies that do not align with the preferences of most citizens. While treating economic growth as the summum bonum of public policy may reflect value preferences within the field of economics, recent polling confirms that large majorities of voters across the political spectrum oppose using the goal of wealth maximization to guide regulatory decision-making. Instead, they are willing to forgo some economic growth to advance public interest policies like safer drinking water and effective action on climate change. Thus, contrary to defenders claims of moral neutrality, cost-benefit analysis simply substitutes the value judgments of economists for those of ordinary citizens.

Worth reading in full, and a useful antidote to the cringing acceptance of CBA as an ideologically neutral of assessing costs and benefits of public action.

Client-Side Scanning is not a silver bullet

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In August, Apple opened a chink in the industry’s armour, announcing that it would be adding new features to its iOS operating system that were designed to combat child sexual exploitation and the distribution of abuse imagery. The most controversial measure scans photos on an iPhone, compares them with a database of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and notifies Apple if a match is found. The technology is known as client-side scanning or CSS.

Powerful forces in government and the tech industry are now lobbying hard for CSS to become mandatory on all smartphones. Their argument is that instead of weakening encryption or providing law enforcement with backdoor keys, CSS would enable on-device analysis of data in the clear (ie before it becomes encrypted by an app such as WhatsApp or iMessage). If targeted information were detected, its existence and, potentially, its source would be revealed to the agencies; otherwise, little or no information would leave the client device.

CSS evangelists claim that it’s a win-win proposition: providing a solution to the encryption v public safety debate by offering privacy (unimpeded end-to-end encryption) and the ability to successfully investigate serious crime. What’s not to like?

Plenty, says an academic paper by some of the world’s leading computer security experts published last week…

Read on

Facebook’s fall from grace looks a lot like Ford’s

Good essay in Wired by Mar Hicks making the case that sometimes the history of regulating older industries has lessons for the present.

Haugen, who revealed internal documents showing that the company was aware of its products’ harms, said that she wishes to fix rather than destroy Facebook, but these are not the only two options. The third, regulation, is at its heart not about patching up broken, dangerous companies and their products but is about changing the social, political, and business landscape that allowed them to grow unchecked, operating as rapacious, destructive entities. It ensures not only that the present companies’ harms are stopped but also that new companies cannot take their place and continue the same destructive business models. As we approach peak Facebook news fatigue, it’s worth remembering that regulation of new technologies in this way has a strong historical precedent in the US. And this long lead up has almost always been part of it.

To understand how Facebook will likely land after its fall from grace we need to look at the striking similarities between earlier regulatory battles and what is going on now. Before there was Big Tech, there were the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors—and an infamous memo that cemented in the collective consciousness of the American public that strong regulation was a necessity, not a nicety. Though it may be difficult to see through the haze of history, there are important parallels between Big Tech today and the US auto industry in the mid-20th century, which also once seemed to be an unstoppable juggernaut.

The auto industry is indeed an instructive parallel. After campaigner Ralph Nader published Unsafe and Any Speed,

auto executives lined up before Congress. They told the American public and those who represented them that they were doing their best to make cars safer and less polluting and that there was little they could do to immediately undo the harms produced by their product. Executives downplayed the scale of the public safety crisis and often claimed to be unaware of the extent of their products’ harms to consumers. Their answers were, of course, largely a charade aimed at saving profits and staving off regulation for as long as possible.

Sound familiar?

But for years after that, Ford instead cut corners on safety, producing cars like the Ford Pinto that removed key safety features in order to get to market quickly and hold down manufacturing costs to reap maximum profit. In 1977, the infamous Ford Pinto “memo,” which was uncovered by Mother Jones investigative reporters, detailed the company’s horrifying cost analysis of past and future accidents. According to the memo, the gruesome deaths and full-body burns suffered by Pinto occupants in rear-end collisions amounted to an acceptable loss because, once lawsuits or other settlements were paid out, they would amount to less than the cost of fixing the Pinto design to prevent the gas tank from exploding. The cost of fixing the design was $11 per car.

For Facebook, paying Nick Clegg’s $2,7m salary, employing 40,000 moderators, being fined by the FTC, enduring horrendous publicity and having executives dragged before Congress are all just the costs of running such such an insanely profitable business model. And the company will continue to run it until it’s stopped by hard-nosed and realistic government action — as the automobile industry in the US was, eventually.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

From Private Eye:

The Billionaire boss of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, today launched a new venture that promises to revolutionise the way people shop.

“This is very exciting,” he told a roomful of sycophantic reporters. “I have come up with an idea for a new experimental retail space, where people conduct transactions, spending money on items in real time. I call it a Sales hub of Profits or a S.H.O.P.”

Mr Bezos is confident that hi so-called “shop” will catch on and soon there will be “shops’ everywhere, possibly in a row, in a design that he has called “the high street”.

“It may take a lot of getting used to by customers for customers, as it involves walking and some possible eye-contact with strangers, rather than staring at a computer screen and clicking a mouse.

“But I truly believe this disruptive revolution in retail technology may one day replace online shopping. My only worry is that some greedy online techno-nerd will come up with a way of putting my ‘shops’ out of business, leaving my ‘high streets’ empty and boarded up.”

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

Cambridge’s Answer to the Sydney Opera House

The University’s Sports Centre in West Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving.”

*  Russell Green

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Canadian set | Bjarte Eike | Barokksolistene

Link

What a way to start a day!

Long Read of the Day

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous

Nice New Yorker essay by Chris Hayes on the futility of over-use of the Internet.

This how it opens:

Imagine, for a moment, you find yourself equipped with fennec-fox-level hearing at a work function or a cocktail party. It’s hard to focus amid the cacophony, but with some effort you can eavesdrop on each and every conversation. At first you are thrilled, because it is thrilling to peer into the private world of another person. Anyone who has ever snuck a peek at a diary or spent a day in the archives sifting through personal papers knows that. Humans, as a rule, crave getting up in people’s business.

But something starts to happen. First, you hear something slightly titillating, a bit of gossip you didn’t know. A couple has separated, someone says. “They’ve been keeping it secret. But now Angie’s dating Charles’s ex!” Then you hear something wildly wrong. “The F.D.A. hasn’t approved it, but also there’s a whole thing with fertility. I read about a woman who had a miscarriage the day after the shot.” And then something offensive, and you feel a desire to speak up and offer a correction or objection before remembering that they have no idea you’re listening. They’re not talking to you.

Then, inevitably, you hear someone say something about you. Someone thinks it’s weird that you’re always five minutes late for the staff meeting, or wonders if you’re working on that new project that Brian started doing on the side, or what the deal is with that half-dollar-sized spot of gray hair on the back of your head. Injury? Some kind of condition?

Suddenly—and I speak from a certain kind of experience on this, so stay with me—the thrill curdles…

Great stuff.

Video of the Day

Director Peter Jackson has made a three-part documentary about the Beatles using lots of previously unseen film footage. It launches (on Disney, I think) soon.

This is the official trailer.

Paddy Moloney RIP

Fine, well-informed, obit in The New York Times which gets the measure of the man:

For nearly 60 years the Chieftains toured extensively and released more than two dozen albums, six of which won Grammy Awards. They were particularly known for their collaborations with artists from other genres, including Van Morrison, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Nanci Griffith and Luciano Pavarotti.

“Over the Sea to Skye,” the Chieftains’ collaboration with the flutist James Galway, peaked at No. 20 on the Billboard classical album chart in 1996. “San Patricio,” a 2010 collaboration with the guitarist Ry Cooder that fused Celtic and Mexican influences, reached No. 37 on the Billboard 200 and topped the Latin album chart. “Irish Heartbeat,” the group’s collaboration with Mr. Morrison, charted in 1988.

“Our music is centuries old, but it is very much a living thing,” Mr. Moloney told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1989. “We don’t use any flashing lights or smoke bombs or acrobats falling off the stage.” He added, “We try to communicate a party feeling, and that’s something that everybody understands.”

In 2012, when he was vice president, President Biden told People magazine that his desire was to sing “Shenandoah” with the Chieftains “if I had any musical talent.” He invited them to perform at his inauguration this year, but Covid-related restrictions kept them from traveling.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

According to his onetime rival for the Conservative leadership, Rory Stewart, Johnson is “the most accomplished liar in public life—perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister.” Johnson, Stewart wrote last year, has “mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie—which may inadvertently be true.” — Tom McTague, “Is Boris Johnson a Liar?”, The Atlantic.

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

Rural idyll

Upper reaches of the river Dove, Derbyshire

Quote of the Day

“The war against global warming has no precedent in human history because it is “us vs. us,” each of us against our own consumerist habits and addiction to economic growth.”

• Editorial, Noema magazine

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Così fan tutte | Soave sia il vento

Link

Nicolas Rivenq as Don Alfonso, Miah Persson as Fiordiligi and Anke Vondung as Dorabella sing the trio ‘Soave sia il vento’ in the 2006 Glyndebourne Festival Production..

I once heard this sung at Glyndebourne in an earlier production. Ravishing. It’s a lovely opera and, like almost all opera, deeply politically incorrect.

Long Read of the Day

 Can Anyone Reshape the State?

Interesting (and canny) essay by Nicholas Colin that I missed on its publication in January 2020, when Dominic Cummings was in his pomp and the British state had yet to have its bruising encounter with reality in the shape of Brexit and Covid. In a way, it’s an explanation of why Cummings was bound to fail in his fantasy of re-making the UK state. But it’s much more wide-ranging than that.

Well worth a read.

Stagflation 2.0 looms

I’ve had to stop listening to the Today programme (again) because of my irritation with the increasing — and clueless — obsession with (a) “shortages” at Christmas and (b) rising inflation. The historical amnesia of mainstream media is a thing to behold. And it’s clear that nobody editing these shows remembers the 1970s and what happened after the Yom Kippur war and the quadrupling of oil prices.

Which is why an article by the Yale economist Stephen Roach published in the Financial Times in May last year was worth digging up. It may be behind the paywall (I can never tell because I have a subscription), but here’s the bit of the piece that registered with me:

In the early 1970s — despite periodic pressure from globally traded commodities — inflation was primarily a local affair, driven by domestic labour markets, national regulatory regimes and relatively closed economies that did not depend much on cross-border trade. The advent of global supply chains changed all that.

They arose from Japan’s just-in-time production systems of the 1980s and took flight thanks to plunging transportation costs, new technologies and breakthroughs in supply logistics. The IMF estimates that almost three-quarters of the increase in trade between 1993 and 2013 was due to the growth of supply chains. With trade rising fivefold in those 20 years, the chains helped power global economic expansion.

As significantly, they were an important source of disinflation. Before Covid-19 hit, the Bank for International Settlements estimated that global inflation would have been about one percentage point higher were it not for the supply-chain enabled efficiencies of global production.

Therein lies the inflationary risk for the post-coronavirus world. As part of a growing backlash against globalisation in general, and China in particular, nations are threatening to bring their offshore platforms back home. Tokyo has set aside ¥243bn of its record ¥108tn rescue package to help Japanese companies pull their operations out of China. Larry Kudlow, economic policy chief to US President Donald Trump, has hinted at similar anti-China measures for American companies.

This reshoring flies in the face of everything we learnt about comparative advantage from David Ricardo. Reshoring may well increase the security of supplies. But it will also involve higher-cost domestic producers.

Yep. One sobering thing about that excerpt is that it points out the global implications of Toyota’s invention of the ‘Lean Machine’ (or just-in-time production). Obvious, once it’s been pointed out, but I missed it at the time. Also, nice to see the reference to Ricardo.

Chart of the Day

From Scott Galloway.

Political literacy is on the rise in the US. Who knew?

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“Even it you want to get rid of the state and replace it with something else, remember Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” — Nicholas Colin

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

Penance

Seen yesterday outside King’s Cross station.

Hail to the Chief Chieftain

Paddy Moloney, the founder and inspiration of the Chieftains, the folk group which made Irish music known and appreciated worldwide, has died at the age of 83. He was a gifted musician, performer and composer, but also someone who earned the admiration and affection of countless great musicians who had nothing to do with Irish music.

For those who don’t know about him, this hour-long BBC documentary provided an excellent account of his career and of the evolution of the Chieftains into world-renowned musicians.

And see below for Paddy and Liam O’Flynn in action.

Quote of the Day

”Is there a cure for film criticism?”

• Pauline Kael

Not to my knowledge.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn & Paddy Moloney | Duelling Chanters

Link

The two greatest Uileann pipers of my lifetime. Both now gone from us. Sigh.

Long Read of the Day

The Counterintuitive Mechanics of Peloton Addiction

An exploration by Anne Helen Petersen which is, she says

an outgrowth of my relationship with the bike, which, as you’ll see, is predicated on a particularly noxious relationship with exercise in general. You might have a very different relationship with exercise and, by extension, your Peloton — and I hope you’ll share it. But I think this particular type of relationship, much like disordered eating and body image, is more common than most understand.

This is the first thing I’ve read about stationary bikes that I found interesting. It’s confessional and well written.

Who are the censors now?

Social-media companies are, of course. But so are payment-processors, says an intriguing piece in The Economist:

Now the boundary of censorship is being extended further, into the pornography business. From October 15th adult websites worldwide will have to verify the age and identity of anyone featured in a picture or video, as well as the ID of the person uploading it. They will need to operate a fast complaints process, and will have to review all content before publication. These requirements are being imposed not by regulators but by Mastercard, a credit-card giant.

Websites can always choose not to work with Mastercard. But given that the company handles about 30% of all card payments made outside China, to do so would be costly. Visa, which manages a further 60% of payments, is also taking a firmer line on adult sites. And the trend goes beyond porn. In the shadier corners of the web, and in industries where the law is unclear or out of date, financial firms are finding themselves acting as de facto regulators.

Since the turn of the century, “payments have become a tool of domestic and international policy,” says Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. After the 9/11 attacks of 2001 America introduced new anti-money-laundering rules and more targeted sanctions. This system—a “21st-century precision-guided munition”, as a former head of the CIA called it—obliges financial firms to block payments to the individuals on a list which today runs to 1,604 pages. Funnily enough, it doesn’t mention Stripe.

For want of an apostrophe…

A cautionary tale from The New York Times:

A missing apostrophe in a Facebook post could cost a real estate agent in Australia tens of thousands of dollars after a court ruled a defamation case against him could proceed.

In the post last year, Anthony Zadravic, the agent, appears to accuse Stuart Gan, his former employer at a real estate agency, of not paying retirement funds to all the agency’s workers.

At issue is the word “employees” in the post, which read: “Oh Stuart Gan!! Selling multi million $ homes in Pearl Beach but can’t pay his employees superannuation,” referring to Australia’s retirement system, in which money is paid by employers into super accounts for employees. “Shame on you Stuart!!! 2 yrs and still waiting!!!”

What people search for on the Net

One of the most interesting books I read last year was Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. He used to work at Google and argues that knowing what people search for can be extraordinarily revealing about both people and society. It turns out that people will ask Google questions that they would never, ever confide to another person.

AnswerThe Public is an interactive website that enables you to type in a one or two-word phrase and will then produce (I guess from parsing Google auto-complete phrases) ordered lists of what questions people ask about that word or phrase.

I typed in ‘algorithms’ because I’m interested in the extent to which people do (or don’t) understand what algorithms are. Results (beautifully graphed) were interesting and sometimes illuminating.

Worth a try.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“Most old books are momento memento mori for distant selves, since the person who read them no longer exists.” — Julian Baggini

I thought of this a couple of years ago at a second-hand book stall where I came on a textbook I had used — and understood — when I was an engineering undergraduate. A key concept in one section was that of a Nyquist diagram — a useful tool for determining the stability of feedback systems. That stuff was meat and drink to me once, but I had struggled to come to grips with it again at the bookstall. I decided that it was something that I no longer needed to know, and replaced the book on the bookseller’s pile, consoling myself with the thought that “that was then and this is now”.

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

Taken on a magical walk along the upper reaches of the river Dove, Derbyshire

Quote of the Day

”All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”

• Evelyn Waugh, who nevertheless fathered seven children.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn | Piano Sonata in D, H.XVI No.42 – 1. Andante con espressione | Alfred Brendel

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Last Days of Intervention

Very thoughtful, long essay in Foreign Affairs by Rory Stewart, one of the few British politicians who has been talking sense about Afghanistan over the last few years. It was outside the paywall when I read it on Sunday. Hopefully it still is.

To the Americans and their allies, it seemed impossible that the U.S. military, with its fleets of gunships and cyberwarfare capabilities, its cutting-edge plans for counterinsurgency and state building, and its billions of dollars in aid and investment, could be held off by a medieval group that lived in mud huts, carried guns designed in the 1940s, and rode ponies. The interveners continued to believe that the international community could succeed in nation building anywhere in the world, provided that it had the right plan and enough resources. 

Blowing the whistle on Facebook is just the first step

Francis Haugen is a courageous and astute whistleblower, and we should salute that, says Maria Farrell (Whom God Preserve) in a fine blast, but

she is not the arbiter of what should be done. So far, when asked about solutions, she’s made vague gestures toward “regulation,” but in the context of her belief that “the version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart.” To this way of thinking, there is a reachable version of Facebook that would do less harm and be OK. This incremental approach is no surprise. Haugen has already worked for 15 years for companies with names that are synonymous with surveillance capitalism. She doesn’t have a problem with the basic business model of extracting people’s data to sell ads. She just has a problem with Facebook being the most egregious of a very bad bunch.

What triggered Maria’s ire (and mine when I read it) was this quote from Haugen:

”I have a lot of empathy for Mark, and Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach.”

This is just another articulation of the ‘founder-worship’ that is one of the most disfiguring aspects of Silicon Valley ideology. Maria has memorably excoriated it before — as, for example, in her celebrated Prodigal Techbro essay, and she now returns to the fray:

Insider critiques are uniformly based on the feeling that “Mark” or “Sheryl” either don’t really understand the harms they do, aren’t sufficiently informed about them, or just want to do the right thing but are trapped in a system of wrong incentives. “It’s one of these unfortunate consequences,” Haugen says, “No one at Facebook is malevolent, right? But the incentives are misaligned.” But Facebook created its own incentives from nothing, hiring Sheryl Sandberg to build its data-extractive, advertising-based business model. Its focus on growth above all else is what made its platform an extreme amplifier of disinformation and hate, simply because that’s what drives clicks. And the amount of money the trillion dollar company spends on moderating content and following up on the direct incitements to violence it generates is miniscule.

End of the republic?

Just remembered this from Heather Cox Richardson’s blog on September 24:

On Monday, we learned that after last year’s election, John Eastman, a well-connected lawyer advising former president Donald Trump, outlined a six-point plan to overturn the outcome of the election and install Trump as America’s leader. They planned to cut the voters’ actual choice, Democrat Joe Biden, out of power: as Trump advisor Steve Bannon put it, they planned to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” This appears to have been the plan that Trump and his loyalists tried to execute on January 6.

That is, we now have written proof of an attempt to destroy our democracy and replace it with an autocracy.

This was not some crazy plot of some obscure dude in a shack in the mountains; this was a plan of the president of the United States of America, and it came perilously close to succeeding. The president of the United States tried to overturn the results of an election—the centerpiece of our democracy—and install himself into power illegitimately.   If this is not a hair-on-fire, screaming emergency, what is? 

Yep. Especially when one remembers that nearly half the US electorate voted for Trump.

See also Maybe We Should Be Talking More About the Trump Coup Memo in Mother Jones.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“The sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it.” — Mark McGurl in his book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s free!

Quote of the Day

“Whenever things are frightening, it is a good idea to measure them”

• Daniel Kehlmann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

David Lindley | Starting All Over Again

Link

Long Read of the Day

Remystifying Supply Chains

By Venkatesh Rao

This is a very long read, but worth it. It’s the best ting I’ve ever read on supply chains, the conduits on which our world is built, and the malfunctioning of which has been wreaked by Covid. Rao has been fascinated by these chains for a long time and has written a lot about them. In this essay, he gathers a lot of ideas together to argue that our current models for thinking about supply chains are obsolete because they assume that chains are merely complicated networks rather than complex systems with unpredictable emergent behaviours.

You need to make an appointment with this.

China is cutting its tech giants down to size. What should we learn from this?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

This is story of two parallel universes. Over in the western one, neoliberal capitalism rules. In the other – the Chinese universe – a different system presides. In both universes, government concern over the growing power of giant tech companies has been growing for a while, but there the similarities end.

In the west, governments and legislatures were asleep at the wheel as the tech companies zoomed along their rapid growth paths. But in the past few years, democratic institutions have belatedly lumbered into action, or at any rate into a semblance of activity…

Read on

Americans Need an AI Bill of Rights

Interesting piece in Wired by the Science Adviser to the US President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and his Deputy.

What machines learn depends on many things—including the data used to train them.

Data sets that fail to represent American society can result in virtual assistants that don’t understand Southern accents; facial recognition technology that leads to wrongful, discriminatory arrests; and health care algorithms that discount the severity of kidney disease in African Americans, preventing people from getting kidney transplants.

Training machines based on earlier examples can embed past prejudice and enable present-day discrimination. Hiring tools that learn the features of a company’s employees can reject applicants who are dissimilar from existing staff despite being well qualified—for example, women computer programmers. Mortgage approval algorithms to determine credit worthiness can readily infer that certain home zip codes are correlated with race and poverty, extending decades of housing discrimination into the digital age. AI can recommend medical support for groups that access hospital services most often, rather than those who need them most. Training AI indiscriminately on internet conversations can result in “sentiment analysis” that views the words “Black,” “Jew,” and “gay” as negative.

Yeah. We know all that. But what should be done about it?

The authors have decided to borrow an idea from UA constitutional history.

Soon after ratifying our Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government we had just created—enumerating guarantees such as freedom of expression and assembly, rights to due process and fair trials, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Throughout our history we have had to reinterpret, reaffirm, and periodically expand these rights. In the 21st century, we need a “bill of rights” to guard against the powerful technologies we have created.

Our country should clarify the rights and freedoms we expect data-driven technologies to respect. What exactly those are will require discussion, but here are some possibilities: your right to know when and how AI is influencing a decision that affects your civil rights and civil liberties; your freedom from being subjected to AI that hasn’t been carefully audited to ensure that it’s accurate, unbiased, and has been trained on sufficiently representative data sets; your freedom from pervasive or discriminatory surveillance and monitoring in your home, community, and workplace; and your right to meaningful recourse if the use of an algorithm harms you.

In the coming months, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be developing such a bill of rights, working with partners and experts across the federal government, in academia, civil society, the private sector, and communities all over the country.

The White House wants “to hear from and engage with everyone”. The email address is ai-equity@ostp.eop.gov

Wonder if it’ll catch on on this side of the Pond.

My Commonplace booklet

(Eh? See here)

• “When Umberto Eco’s second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, was published in English, I reviewed it, and I must have been in an unusually bad mood, because I hated it, and said so. Not long after the review appeared I was at a literary gathering in a stunningly grand room in the Louvre, in Paris, and when I arrived the first person I saw coming towards me was Umberto Eco himself. We had never met before, and this was obviously not likely to be the happiest first encounter, or so I thought. But Eco, in a moment of expansive generosity, spread out his arms to embrace me, and cried out, in greeting, “Rushdie! I am the bullshit Eco!” — Salman Rushdie

• “The common complaint that one has too many books, rather like the confession that one has had too many lovers, is usually a boast in not very good disguise “ — Julian Baggini.

This blog is also available as a daily newsletter. If you think this might suit you better why not sign up? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. And it’s . free!