Gone Fishin’?

Quote of the Day

”No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Soave sia il vento | Cosi fan Tutte

Link

Long Read of the Day

Remembering Pope Benedict’s Challenge

As long-time readers will probably realise, I am not a fan of organised religion. But I am also increasingly appalled by the moral bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic machine that is currently running — and ruining — our lives, not to mention the planet. How is it possible that we tolerate what is being done to our societies — the unfairness, the social exclusion, the poverty, the unconscionable levels of inequality, the hypocrisy and dishonesty of those in power — even in so-called democracies like the UK? And to think that this is happening in societies that are wealthy enough easily to eliminate many of these social ills if we really wanted to. What are the values that are implicit in our tacit acceptance of this? And where did we get them from?

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why I was struck by this Editorial in Noema magazine by its Editor, Nathan Gardels. It’s about a long-running disagreement between the former Pope Benedict (aka Ratzinger) and political philosophers like Jürgen Habermnas, who I guess is the nearest thing we liberals have to a pontiff. The core of the disagreement is the question of where do we get our values from? Ratzinger’s argument is that, in the end, the deliberative, consensual process that Habermas envisages as the source of them is (a) inadequate and (b) in so far as it has a reality it actually derives from our shared histories as former Christian cultures.

It’s a very interesting read IMO. And a reminder of what a good magazine Noema is.

Books, etc.

From Laleh Khalili’s LRB review of When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.

”Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation. It begins with an account of McKinsey-driven cost-cutting at US Steel, which led to the deaths of two steelworkers. Similar measures at Disney resulted in a young man being crushed to death on the Big Thunder Mountain rollercoaster. Decades after the consequences of smoking became clear, McKinsey continued to work for the big tobacco producers. As the extent of the US opioid epidemic became apparent, McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma to find ‘growth pockets’ where OxyContin could be more easily prescribed, and lobbied regulators for laxer rules on prescriptions. McKinsey’s unethical activities pack the pages of this book, while its supercilious vocabulary of ‘values’ and ‘service’ runs like an oil slick over slurry.

The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the theology of capital. This holds that workers are expendable. They can be replaced by machines, or by harder-working employees grateful they weren’t let go in the last round of redundancies. Managers are necessary to the functioning of corporations – or universities, or non-profit organisations – and the more of them the better. Long working hours and bootstrap entrepreneurialism are what give meaning to life. Meritocracies are a real thing. Free trade, laissez-faire capitalism and reduced regulation are necessary stepping stones towards the free market utopia. There is also a faith that this work is helping ‘create positive, enduring change in the world’, as McKinsey’s mission statement puts it.”

Spot on.

Thanks to Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Joseph Weizenbaum’s Original ELIZA code

If, like me, you’ve always been fascinated by Joe Weizenbaum’s famous computer-based Rogerian therapist, ELIZA, then you’ll enjoy this.

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On the Beach

My grandson Jasper on one of my favourite beaches.

Quote of the Day

“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

• Blaise Pascal

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brownie McGhee | Good Morning Blues

Link

Just the thing for a Monday morning!

Long Read of the Day

Choosing Secure Passwords

Really helpful advice from Bruce Schneier, who knows this stuff inside out.

The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to explain how they’re broken. The general attack model is what’s known as an offline password-guessing attack. In this scenario, the attacker gets a file of encrypted passwords from somewhere people want to authenticate to. His goal is to turn that encrypted file into unencrypted passwords he can use to authenticate himself. He does this by guessing passwords, and then seeing if they’re correct. He can try guesses as fast as his computer will process them—and he can parallelize the attack—and gets immediate confirmation if he guesses correctly. Yes, there are ways to foil this attack, and that’s why we can still have four-digit PINs on ATM cards, but it’s the correct model for breaking passwords.

There are commercial programs that do password cracking, sold primarily to police departments. There are also hacker tools that do the same thing. And they’re really good.

The efficiency of password cracking depends on two largely independent things: power and efficiency.

Power is simply computing power. As computers have become faster, they’re able to test more passwords per second; one program advertises eight million per second. These crackers might run for days, on many machines simultaneously. For a high-profile police case, they might run for months.

Efficiency is the ability to guess passwords cleverly…

Read on to get to his advice. Better still, take it.

Computers need to make a quantum leap before they can crack encrypted messages

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Since the early 1980s, physicists and computer scientists such as Richard Feynman, Paul Benioff, Yuri Manin (who died last weekend at the age of 85) and Britain’s David Deutsch have been thinking about a different idea – using some ideas from subatomic physics to design a new and very distinct kind of computing engine – a quantum computer. In 1985, Deutsch published a proposal for one. And in recent times, companies such as Google and IBM have begun building them.

Why is that relevant? Basically because quantum computers are potentially much more powerful than conventional ones, which are based on digital bits – entities that have only two possible states, on and off (or 1 and zero). Quantum machines are built around qubits, or quantum bits, which can simultaneously be in two different states.

At this point, you may be anxiously checking for the nearest exit. Before doing so, remember that to understand subatomic physics you need first of all to divest yourself of everything you think you know about the physical world we ordinary mortals inhabit. We may sometimes be rude about people who believe in fairies, but particle physicists fervently believe in the neutrino, a subatomic particle that can pass right through the Earth without stopping and we take these scientists seriously…

Do read the whole piece.

My commonplace booklet

Ukraine Army Video Tells Russians How to Surrender to a Drone

I knew that drones were changing warfare, but I never thought of this. One of the many things Putin didn’t understand is the ingenuity of the Ukrainians.

And btw, if you’d like some insight into why the Russians have run into such trouble, this podcast is pretty informative.

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The Boss

Quote of the Day

”We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.”

• Dora Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Walkin’ Blues (Acoustic Live)

Link

Long Read of the Day

A Civil War Over Semicolons

Very nice piece by Gail Beckerman in The Atlantic about how LBJ’s (and Robert Moses’s) biographer, Robert Caro, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, have been arguing with each other for 50 years.

The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn. Then there’s their method: Caro puts on a dark suit every day, writes his drafts out in longhand, and copies them onto carbon paper using his Smith Corona typewriter, after which Gottlieb marks them up with a pencil—like a couple of cobblers still making shoes with an awl. Whatever deal Caro got from Gottlieb and Knopf in the 1970s, it has allowed him to work monastically on this biography project seemingly without any other source of income. As Caro’s longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit, says of the arrangement in Turn Every Page, a new documentary about Caro and Gottlieb, “I doubt that it could ever happen again.”

Very few authors get that kind of editorial attention nowadays, so it’s interesting to discover what it’s like when it happens.

Particularly nice if you’ve read any of Caro’s LBJ volumes, or indeed his great biography of Robert Moses.

Books, etc.

The art of book reviewing

A well-done review is a fine thing. This one by Carolyne Larrington of Marion Turner’s  The Wife of Bath: A Biography is a gem.

How does an Oxford academic follow up a prize-winning trade book, a newly researched biography of Geoffrey Chaucer? And, moreover, in lockdown, when archives and libraries are largely inaccessible? Marion Turner, the newly elected J R R Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at Oxford, has avoided ‘second-book syndrome’ with a breathtakingly simple idea: a biography of Chaucer’s most famous character, Dame Alison (or Alice), weaver, pilgrim, businesswoman and serial participant in the marriage market, better known as the Wife of Bath. Informative, clear-sighted, entertaining and as opinionated as its subject, Turner’s new book is a wonderful introduction to the lives of 14th-century women, The Canterbury Tales and the fascinating ways in which Alison has been read and misread since she first hoisted up her voluminous skirts to show her fine red stockings during the last decade of the 14th century…

Almost enough to make one want to buy the book.

California here we don’t come

In the 1980s I thought that California might be a nice place to live. This blog post by Doc Searls (Whom God Preserve) suggests that I may have been right to resist the temptation.

Most of California has just two seasons: rain and fire. Rain is another name for Winter, and it peaks in January. In most years, January in California isn’t any more wet than, say, New York, Miami or Chicago. But every few years California gets monsoons. Big ones. This is one of those years…

Worth reading.

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Quote of the Day

””Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it”

• Greta Garbo

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Die Forelle, D550

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Mars Religion

Terrifically caustic essay by Maciej Cieglowski about the current obsessions about going to Mars…

When you hold on to a belief so strongly that neither facts nor reason can change it, what you are doing is no longer science, but religion. So I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.

Outside of NASA, the Mars faith shades darker. It is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die. Elon Musk, the Martian spiritual leader, has talked about the need to “preserve the light of consciousness” by making us a multiplanetary species. As he sees it, Mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk. And it’s not just enough to explore mars; we have make it a backup for all civilization. Failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave.

That is some heavy stuff to lay on a small, rocky world…

It is.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for spotting it. I enjoyed his acerbic take on it too:

The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission — how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat? — get no love from Elon Musk. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.

My commonplace booklet

Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

Link

As some Tesla owners (including this one) will confirm.

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Yeats’s Fortress

One of my favourite places in Ireland. It’s a 16th century fortified Hiberno-Norman tower house built in Ballylee by the De Burgo family. It was originally known as Ballylee Castle but is now known as Thoor Ballylee (where Thoor is the Irish for ‘tower’) because the building was restored by William Butler Yeats in 1919 as a retreat for himself and his family. They lived there for ten years.

There’s a plaque on the wall that reads:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George.

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

Quote of the Day

”Don’t cheer, boys. Those poor devils are dying.”

• Admiral J.W. Philip, on passing a burning Spanish ship at the battle of Santiago on July 3, 1898.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Cailín na Gruaige Donn

Link

Literally, the girl with brown hair.

Long Read of the Day

Exit by Hari Kunzru

This is worth reading. Kunzru is a terrific novelist, but this is him turning a laser beam onto something that has preoccupied many of us for at least a decade — the ideological underpinnings of the tech imaginary.

One measure of how perceptive the essay is that he’s spotted the significance of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s old man.

One of the most quietly influential books about libertarian political exit is The Sovereign Individual, which was written in 1997 by the antitax activist (and future Newsmax board member) James Dale Davidson with the editor William Rees-Mogg, the father of the Conservative minister and arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. Together the authors imagine a “cognitive elite” who will operate outside political control:

”At the highest plateau of productivity, these Sovereign Individuals will compete and interact on terms that echo the relations among the gods in Greek myth. . . . The new Sovereign Individual will operate . . . in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically. Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium.”

Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied.

Do read the piece. It’s worth your time.

’Fine dining’ is not so fine, apparently

Whenever I hear the phrase “fine dining” I would have reached for my revolver if I possessed one. I’ve always seen it as a pretentious euphemism for what one of my more irascible friends calls “starvation at £100 a plate”.

Anyway…

This rant is prompted by the news, courtesy of the New York Times that the Copenhagen restaurant Noma, supposedly the world’s best eatery, is closing its doors. Its founder, René Redzepi, says that fine dining at the highest level, with its gruelling hours and intense workplace culture, has hit a breaking point: “It’s unsustainable.”

Given that two of its current specialities are grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine, and saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl I get the unsustainability bit. So the global class of gastro tourists that “schedules first-class flights and entire vacations around the privilege of paying at least $500 per person for its multicourse tasting menu” will just have to find somewhere else to set fire to $100 bills.

Apparently Noma will become “a full-time food laboratory, developing new dishes and products for its e-commerce operation, Noma Projects, and the dining rooms will be open only for periodic pop-ups” and Mr Redzepi will morph into “something closer to chief creative officer”. Hopefully from then on he’ll be able to sleep nights.

Books, etc.

From Craig Brown’s biography of the late Princess Margaret. The passage comes from a chapter about the alleged sexiness of the princess when she was a young woman.

”It was in the early 1950s that Pablo Picasso first began to have erotic dreams about Princess Margaret. Occasionally he would throw her elder sister in for good measure. From time to time Picasso shared these fantasies with his friend, the art historian and collector Roland Penrose, once even confiding in him that he could picture the colour of their pubic hair.”

It’s clear that I’ve led a sheltered life.

My commonplace booklet

Disguising solar panels as ancient Roman tiles in Pompeii

Now this is an interesting idea.

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Travel in style

Glimpsed in Provence last Summer. Seems a long time ago just now.

Quote of the Day

”We’re all endowed with certain God-given talents. Mine happens to be punching people in the head.”

• Sugar Ray Robinson, world middleweight champion boxer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Jesus on the Mainline | New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

Link

I know, I know: I’ve highlighted this at least a couple of times. The reason: every time it comes up on one of my playlists, I turn up the volume until the neighbours come armed with noise abatement orders. I’m not a religious man, but I wouldn’t mind having it played at my funeral.

Long Read of the Day

Nothing is Real: Craig Brown on the Slippery Art of Biography

I think this essay by Craig Brown is the best thing I’ve ever read on the biographer’s trade. It’s full of insights and sharp observations.

For example:

In the first paragraph of his biography of the Queen, Robert Lacey describes Her Majesty at Balmoral on the Thursday after the death of Princess Diana, reading the newspapers. “Digesting their angry sermons with the long-practised pensiveness which caused her eyes to narrow, her jaw would firm slightly as her thought processes started, shifting her chin forward a fraction—a signal to her staff to think one more hard thought before they opened their mouths.”

This passage raises any number of questions. Was the intrepid Mr Lacey in the Balmoral breakfast room that September morning, perhaps hiding under the table with a periscope to hand? If not, how could he know that the Queen’s reading “caused her eyes to narrow?” And how does anyone, let alone the Queen, set about practising pensiveness? And — since, presumably, Lacey was crouching in her brain, like one of the Numbskull cartoon characters in The Beezer, could he please explain what, if anything, was going on in The Queen’s brain before she firmed her jaw and “her thought processes started”?

Or this:

In 2003, at the age of 45, Mark Lewisohn began researching a history of the Beatles. Ten years later, he published the first volume. The extended version runs to 1698 pages, and only takes the Beatles up to the end of 1962, and the recording of Love Me Do. Lewisohn is now 62, and expects to be well into his seventies before his trilogy is complete. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary achievement, but the detail sometimes threatens to smother the whole. For instance, you may well want to know that George Harrison’s first car was a Ford Anglia. Fair enough. But do you really need to know that it was a second-hand two-door blue Ford Anglia 105E Deluxe, bought by George from Brian Epstein’s friend Terry Doran who worked at a car dealership in Warrington?

It’s all in aid of understanding the perennial problem facing the conscientious biographer: what to put in — and what to take out.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And if you’re ever bored, Ma’am Darling — Brown’s hilarious biography of Princess Margaret — will see you right.

Books, etc.

One of my sisters gave me this for Christmas. It’s a collection of 11 essays by one of Ireland’s most prolific writers. Initially I thought it would be just one of those collections that writers’ agents bully them into publishing while they are working on the next novel. And because I read most of the periodicals in which his longer pieces appear I expected no surprises.

I was wrong. There’s a marvellous long essay on the Irish judicial system in the 1980s which was published in 2007 in The Dublin Magazine and which I hadn’t seen. And even re-reading some essays that I had read before in periodicals made me see them in a different light. This is especially true of his astonishingly open account of being diagnosed with, and treated for, cancer. Turns out that you can’t judge a book by its cover. My sister has good taste.

My commonplace booklet

Potato-shaped stones are better for skimming, say experts

Link

Scientists have identified particular types of stone that can produce “almighty” leaps out of the water when skimmed across the surface.

While aficionados of the pursuit favour thin, flat stones for long-distance skimming, the researchers’ mathematical model reveals that heavier, potato-shaped stones can achieve more dramatic results, which blast the rock into the air.

“Try some wacky stones and see what happens,” said Dr Ryan Palmer, an applied mathematician at the University of Bristol. “Try and throw a stone that looks like a potato. You can get some fun things happening with heavier stones.”

Palmer and his colleague Frank Smith, a professor of applied mathematics at University College London, created the mathematical model to investigate how the shape and mass of an object affect how it skims on the surface of water.

Do not try this at home.

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Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

This is one of my favourite paintings — of a late-night diner in a deserted New York in 1942. Three people, presumably strangers, sit around the counter, physically close yet apparently psychologically isolated — which has often led critics to ‘read’ the painting as an allegory of the alienation of big city life. Not being a critic, I was struck by the fact that my father used to wear a hat very like the one worn by the man next to the woman, and because it reminds me of him I bought a reproduction of it many years ago. Corny, I know, but what the hell. I may not know much about ‘art’ but I know what I like.

Quote of the Day

”Publishers can get their minds halfway round anything.”

• John Le Carré

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fauré | Cantique De Jean Racine Choir of St. John’s College Cambridge

Link

Long Read of the Day

What CHATGPT Reveals about the Collapse of Political/Corporate Support for Humanities/Higher Education

A really thoughtful essay by Eric Schliesser on Crooked Timber, (one of the best blogs on the Web, IMO). What he’s spotted is the risk to the Humanities — already under pressure and threat in a neoliberal world — posed by systems like ChatGPT. After all, if Humanities teachers are saying that (a) ChatGPT is basically a bullshit-generator, and (b) is producing stuff that if created by a human student might get him or her a B grade, then sooner or later ideologically-minded politicians and technocrats might start asking: well, then, what does that say about the Humanities?

“Of course”, Schilesser says at one point,

I am not the first to note that in many ways higher education is a certification machine, where the signal generated by the admissions office is of more value to future employers than the subsequent scholastic record. But it is not a good thing that one can pass our college classes while bullshitting thanks to (say) one’s expensive private, high school education that taught one how to write passable paragraphs.

This state of affairs helps explain partially, I think, the contempt by which so many in the political and corporate class (especially in Silicon Valley) hold the academy, and the Humanities in particular (recall also this post a few months ago). (I am not the first to suggest this; see here; here on the UK; here on Silicon Valley and US politics.) And, as I reflected on the academics’ response to ChatGPT, who can blame them? The corporate and political climbers are on to the fact that producing grammatically correct bullshit is apparently often sufficient to pass too many of our introductory courses. (I started thinking about this in a different context: when a smart student, who clearly adored my lectures, fessed up that they could pass my weekly quizzes without doing the reading.) And if introductory courses are their only exposure, I suspect they infer, falsely, from this that there is no genuine expertise or skilled judgment to be acquired in the higher reaches of our disciplines. To be sure, they are encouraged in this latter inference by the countless think pieces stretching back decades by purported insiders that strongly imply that the humanities have been taken over by bullshit artists. (If you are of my generation you are likely to treat the Sokal Affair (1996) or the letter protesting the intention to award a honorary degree to Derridaby Cambridge University (1992) as ground zero, but obviously one can go further back.)

We are all going to have to absorb this latest instalment of what the late great Robert Hughes called “the shock of the New”. And as I said in my Observer column (see below), we’re already overestimating the short-term impact of the technology while underestimating its longer-term implications.

Interesting times.

The ChatGPT bot is causing panic now – but it’ll soon be as mundane a tool as Excel

Yesterday’s Observer column…

So the ChatGPT language processing model burst upon an astonished world and the air was rent by squeals of delight and cries of outrage or lamentation. The delighted ones were those transfixed by discovering that a machine could apparently carry out a written commission competently. The outrage was triggered by fears of redundancy on the part of people whose employment requires the ability to write workmanlike prose. And the lamentations came from earnest folks (many of them teachers at various levels) whose day jobs involve grading essays hitherto written by students.

So far, so predictable. If we know anything from history, it is that we generally overestimate the short-term impact of new communication technologies, while grossly underestimating their long-term implications. So it was with print, movies, broadcast radio and television and the internet. And I suspect we have just jumped on to the same cognitive merry-go-round.

Before pressing the panic button, though, it’s worth examining the nature of the beast…

Do read the entire piece

Books, etc.

I’m reading Alan Rickman’s diaries at the moment and can see why they’ve had such rave reviews from a legion of famous (and not so famous) actors. It’s basically because he provides a graphic picture of what a terrible life actors have. Even famous ones like him. It’s a chronically unstable, erratic, stressful way to earn a living. We should be grateful that talented people like him want to do it.

My commonplace booklet

Man Ages 15 Years in a Four Minute Timelapse With Photos Taken Every Day From 2007-2022

Link

Sobering stuff. You have to admire his stamina.

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Remembering Jim and Helen

In 1956 Jim and Helen Ede bought four tiny cottages in Kettle’s Yard in central Cambridge and transformed them into an idiosyncratic and charming house — and a place to display Jim’s collection of early 20th-century art. They kept ‘open house’ each afternoon, giving any visitors, particularly students, a personal tour of the collection and eventually gave the house and collection to the University of Cambridge after which they moved to Edinburgh in 1973. Their house became the seed-crystal for a lovely museum which is one of the joys of living in Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter.”

• Fran Lebowitz

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like a Rolling Stone

Link

Long Read of the Day

ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. But it can still be amazingly useful

Entertaining piece on the current obsession du jour by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. And apparently they wrote it all by themselves.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined bullshit as speech that is intended to persuade without regard for the truth. By this measure, OpenAI’s new chatbot ChatGPT is the greatest bullshitter ever. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained to produce plausible text, not true statements. ChatGPT is shockingly good at sounding convincing on any conceivable topic. But OpenAI is clear that there is no source of truth during training. That means that using ChatGPT in its current form would be a bad idea for applications like education or answering health questions. Even though the bot often gives excellent answers, sometimes it fails badly. And it’s always convincing, so it’s hard to tell the difference.

Yet, there are three kinds of tasks for which ChatGPT and other LLMs can be extremely useful, despite their inability to discern truth in general:

Tasks where it’s easy for the user to check if the bot’s answer is correct, such as debugging help.

Tasks where truth is irrelevant, such as writing fiction.

Tasks for which there does in fact exist a subset of the training data that acts as a source of truth, such as language translation…

Hope you enjoy it. I did. But then I have to write about this stuff, so maybe I have strange interests.

My commonplace booklet

One of the many delights of receiving an email from Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) are the disclaimers at their foot. For example:

For avoidance of doubt: This email does not constitute permission to add me to your mailing list.

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

As is the case with every email you’ve ever received, this email has not been scanned for all known viruses.

He also sometimes warns that,

FOR PUBLIC SAFETY REASONS, THIS EMAIL HAS BEEN INTERCEPTED BY YOUR GOVERNMENT AND WILL BE RETAINED FOR FUTURE ANALYSIS

Dunce’s Corner

Many thanks to the numerous readers who spotted unforced error #12,346: My claim yesterday that the Speaker of the House of Representatives was first in line for the Presidency in the event of the death of a sitting president — a heartbeat away, as I put it. Well, actually, as every schoolboy (and girl) knows, the Speaker is second in line, after the Vice-President. Two heartbeats, rather than one. Apologies.

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Welcoming 2023

Keeping a postbox warm in Ely yesterday evening.

Quote of the Day

”The musical equivalent of blancmange.”

• Bernard Levin on the music of Delius

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Don Giovanni | La ci darem la mano

Link

Sometimes the creeps have the best tunes.

Long Read of the Day

 What Happened To Amazon’s Employees After AI Automated Their Work

Intriguing essay by Alex Kantrowitz which addresses the question of how automation affects people’s work.

After Amazon automated its vendor managers’ forecasting, purchasing, and negotiation tasks, I expected to find them sullen. The narrative typically dives into mass unemployment, the end of work, and end times. So I was a bit surprised when they instead seemed matter-of-fact about what happened, unworried about what this new wave of AI portends.

“When we heard ordering was going to be automated by algorithms, on the one hand, it’s like, ‘Okay, what’s happening to my job?’” said Elaine Kwon, a former Amazon vendor manager. “On the other hand you’re also not surprised, you’re like, ‘Okay, as a business this makes sense, and this is in line with what a tech company should be trying to do.’ ”

Another current employee told me that at Amazon, “you’re constantly trying to work yourself out of a job. You should not be doing the same thing day to day. Once you’ve done something consistently, you need to find mechanisms to invent and simplify.”

I think this should be taken with a large pinch of salt. It’s very specific to a particular company, and to people at executive-level in that company. And it comes from a book which seems to me to be unduly awestruck by the so-called ‘titans’ of the tech world. But the question of how automation affects people in white-collar employment is an under-studied area at present — which is why I found it interesting.

Watching Congress losing its mind

The Republicans have a slim majority in the House, which means that they should be able to elect the Speaker. But after two chaotic days and four ballots (some of which I’ve been watching on CSPAN) they haven’t been able to do it. Why? Because Kevin McCarthy, the front-runner can’t get enough votes from his fellow Republicans. This is because he is too nauseatingly slimy even for a party that has lost its mind.

You think I exaggerate? Well, set aside 20 minutes and have a listen to this episode of the NYT’s The Daily  podcast.

None of this would matter to the rest of us except for one thing. The Speaker of the House is next in line for the Presidency. And if Biden were to run and win in 2024, and the Republicans still controlled the House, then this Trump-supporting slimeball would be s heartbeat away from the presidency if Biden or his successor passed away.

It’s making Don’t Look Up look prophetic.

Books, etc.

My notes the other day about reading (or re-reading) novels before watching film adaptations of them struck a chord with some readers. A Dutch friend wrote to say that in recent months he and his wife have been engaged in a similar exercise — and (unlike us) writing short pieces about films which they think deserve multiple viewings.

One of the case studies they’ve looked at is the 2011 film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – adapted from John le Carré’s novel of the same title.

My friend thinks that the film,

is a brilliant adaptation. To translate the 400+ pages novel into a 2-hour film, while keeping the tone and atmosphere of the book. Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, who wrote the scenario, in a sense have first completely deconstructed the book, to later reconstruct it as film. In the process, they moved scenes to new places, deleted a few, condensed long dialogues into images and to fill up gaps invented some new scenes. For my own education and entertainment I performed a detailed analysis of the (strikingly different) openings of the book and the film. It was very helpful and let me notice details of the film you don’t conscientiously see on a first screening.

So now I have some homework to do. It’s decades since I read the novel. And I’ve never seen the film. I have, however, seen and admired the multi-part BBC series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley (which, coincidentally, is currently running on THT iPlayer). But that doesn’t count for this project.

He also suggests listening to Hilary Mantel’s fifth Reith Lecture, which I’m about to do.

My commonplace booklet

I love, use (and collect) fountain-pens. But when you have quite a few of them, you sometimes find that it’s hard to get the ink flowing in one that’s been lying around for a while.

The poet Seamus Heaney was also an avid fountain-pen user. He had a simple trick for dealing with the dried-up pen problem: dipping it in an ink-bottle as if it were an 18th-century quill!

My wife and I learned this from a video at a wonderful exhibition devoted to him in Dublin in 2020, and we’ve been using it ever since. Works a treat.

Of course, it partly invalidates the reason for having a fountain pen in the first place. But what the hell. Consistency, as Oscar Wilde once observed, is a puerile obsession.

Erratum

The link I gave to Leo Breiman’s article on the two cultures in statistical modelling didn’t work for many readers. I’m not sure why, but Seb Schmoller found a link to a version of it that does work:

https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volume-16/issue-3/Statistical-Modeling–The-Two-Cultures-with-comments-and-a/10.1214/ss/1009213726.full

Apologies, and thanks to Seb.

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On the 11th day of Christmas…

Gwydir Street door

Tomorrow’s the last day of Christmas and the partridge has already flown the tree, avoiding the guns of the members of the Royal Family up the road in Sandringham.

Quote of the Day

”I know men aren’t attracted to me by my mind. They’re attracted by what I don’t mind.”

• Gypsy Rose Lee

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Link

Casals | Bach Cello Solo Nr.1, BWV 1007 | recorded in August 1954 in the chapel of a Catholic monastery located south of the small French border town Prades. The audio quality isn’t great, but it’s my favourite recording of it. Casals was 77 when he made it.

Long Read of the Day

 The third magic

A meditation by Noah Smith on history, science, and AI.

Humanity’s living standards are vastly greater than those of the other animals. Many people attribute this difference to our greater intelligence or our greater linguistic communication ability. But without minimizing the importance of those underlying advantages, I’d like to offer the idea that our material success is due, in large part, to two great innovations. Usually we think of innovations as specific technologies — agriculture, writing, the wheel, the steam engine, the computer. The most important of these are the things we call “general purpose technologies”. But I think that at a deeper level, there are more profound and fundamental meta-innovations that underlie even those things, and these are ways of learning about the world…

This is a thoughtful essay, which also provides some astute references to other sources — for example to Leo Breiman’s great essay on the two cultures in statistical modelling, and Eugene Wigner’s famous essay on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”.

Worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

And to boot…

A few years ago I bought a pair of expensive boots more or less on a whim. I haven’t worn boots since I was a small boy and thought that this might turn out to be one of those frivolous purchases that one regrets.

Turns out I was wrong. They took a bit of ‘breaking in’, as the saying goes, but thereafter — somewhat to my astonishment — they became a delight to wear, especially in colder weather. They now look a bit battered, but then so does their owner! And there’s a delightful feeling almost of mutual recognition as one puts them on in the morning.

Looking at them yesterday I was suddenly reminded that both of my grandfathers wore boots all their lives. My father’s father was a Connemara farmer and his boots were black hobnailed ones which, as far as I can remember, never wore out. My other grandfather was wealthy and his boots, also black, were made of softer leather, and were invariably highly polished before he stepped out of doors. Funny to think that their grandson finally got round to discovering their favoured footwear. Age probably has something to do with it…

Also, isn’t the phrase “and to boot…” a strange throwaway line.

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