Peak Viewing
The Peak District viewed from Stanage Edge. Note the strategically-positioned crow.
Photo by my son Pete.
Quote of the Day
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …”
- Max Planck
A striking quote often summarised as “Science advances one funeral at a time”.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bach | French Suite No 4 | Murray Perahia
This was on the car radio the other day.
When I reached my destination, I sat, entranced, until it ended.
Long Read of the Day
On The Moral Economy of Tech
A transcript of a remarkable talk by Maciej Ceglowski, one of the sharpest observers of digital technology around (and also the creator of Pinboard.in, which he describes as “bookmarking for introverts” and which has played a central role in my workflow for many years).
I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.
As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.
The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.
But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence…
It does. This is really worth your time.
Books, etc.
James Scott, RIP
One of the most distinctive social scientists of his time died last Friday. I came to his work late, when I stumbled on his book Seeing Like a State when I was trying to understand how modern states came into being. It was basically a critique of what Scott called “high modernism”, a mindset of rulers to force “legibility” on their subjects by (as Wikipedia puts it) “homogenizing them and creating standards that simplify pre-existing, natural, diverse social arrangements. Examples include the introduction of family names, censuses, uniform languages, and standard units of measurement. While such innovations aim to facilitate state control and economies of scale, Scott argues that the eradication of local differences and silencing of local expertise can have adverse effects.”
Reading the book, I was sometimes reminded of The Open Society and its Enemies, but the most amusing impact it had on me was a kind of admiration for the Norman Conquest, the relentless thoroughness of which evoked Scott’s portrayal of the search for ‘legibility’. What else, after all, was the Domesday book [italics] for [unitalics] than to give William an informed idea of who his new realm’s 268,984 landowners were, how wealthy they were, etc.?
Brad DeLong wrote an interesting review of Seeing Like a State in which he gently chided Scott for not acknowledging his debt to Hayek and the Austrian economists. “One one level”, he wrote, the book
is an extraordinary well-written and well-argued tour through the various forms of damage that have been done in the twentieth century by centrally-planned social-engineering projects— by what James Scott calls “high modernism” and the attempt to use high modernist principles and practices to build utopia. As such, every economist who reads it will see it as marking the final stage in the intellectual struggle that the Austrian tradition has long waged against apostles of central planning. Heaven knows that I am no Austrian—I am a liberal Keynesian and a social democrat—but within economics even liberal Keynesian social democrats acknowledge that the Austrians won victory in their intellectual debate with the central planners long ago…
Scott’s work seems to have been highly generative (a bit like Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty in that respect), stimulating a lot of reflective writing on his themes and preoccupations. I’m thinking, for example, of Henry Farrell’s thoughtful meditation on “Seeing like a Finite State Machine”.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
Cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, showing what has become of the US Supreme Court.
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.
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