Dreaming…

… of making a sale perhaps? Seen in a Provencal market.

Quote of the Day

”New money shouts. Old money whispers.”

• Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mick Flannery | Boston

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Long Read of the Day

Big Serious Books Can Really Be Your Intellectual Friends

A lovely essay by Brad DeLong that he had dug out of his archives in which he muses about the importance of books he has read in the past.

Here’s how it opens:

There are urgent, human voices behind the books on your shelf. Let Niccolò Machiavelli remind you: the best intellectual company is always within arm’s reach. Don’t ask “what if your library could talk back?” Recognize that it can and does, if you have the right kind of mind to engage in deep, close, active reading. Shift from thinking of yourself as engaged in an academic ratrace. Instead take the black squiggles on the page that is the information code, and from them spin-up a SubTuring instantiation of the mind of the author of the book, and run it on your wetware. And argue with it.

Thus books transform from dry texts into lively interlocutors—and being able to see that shift might just save your sanity. Treat your books as people, not objects.

Then step into the ancient courts of ancient thinkers, and find yourself among true friends.

And afterwards, you feel like Dante claimed he had felt:

I saw the Master of the Men who Know,
seated in philosophic family….

There all look up to him, all do him honor:
there I beheld both Socrates and Plato,
closest to him, in front of all the rest;

Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance,
Diogenes, Empedocles, and Zeno,
and Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus;

I saw the good collector of medicinals,
I mean Dioscorides; and I saw Orpheus,
and Tully, Linus, moral Seneca;

and Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy,
Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna,
Averroés, of the great Commentary.

I cannot here describe them all in full;
my ample theme impels me onward so:
what’s told is often less than the event…

Musk and co should ask AI what defines intelligence. They may learn something

Sunday’s Observer column:

In 1999, two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, came up with an interesting discovery that is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It refers to a cognitive bias where individuals with low ability in a specific area overestimate their skills and knowledge. This occurs because they lack the self-awareness to accurately assess their own competence compared with others. The US president is a textbook example, but so too are many inhabitants of Silicon Valley, especially the more evangelical boosters of AI such as Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Both luminaries, for example, are on record as predicting that AGI (artificial general intelligence) may arrive as soon as next year. But when you ask what they mean by that, we find the Dunning-Kruger effect kicking in. For Altman, AGI means “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work”. For Musk, AGI is “smarter than the smartest human”, which boils down to a straightforward intelligence comparison: if an AI system can outperform the most capable humans, it qualifies as AGI.

These are undoubtedly smart cookies. They know how to build machines that work and corporations that one day may make money. But their conceptions of intelligence are laughably reductive, and revealing, too: they’re only interested in economic or performance metrics. It suggests that everything they know about general intelligence (the kind that humans have from birth) could be summarised in 95-point Helvetica Bold on the back of a postage stamp…

Read on

So many books, so little time

If you love libraries then you might enjoy this little Japanese novel which I came across in a French bookstore. It’s about a disparate group of individuals who are, in one way or another, drifting, and who visit a particular library in search of answers to questions that bother them. In a way it’s an endearing tribute to the transformative power of libraries. And to this blogger, whose life was transformed in the 1950s by a Carnegie library in a small Irish town, it resonates.

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Horsepower

Interesting artwork outside a gallery in the Var.

I liked the detail of the animal’s ‘head’.

Quote of the Day

“So long as men worship Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable”

• Aldous Huxley (in Ends and Means, 1937)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Big Bill Broonzy | Summertime Blues

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Seems appropriate when posted from a place where it’s 35 degrees today!

Long Read of the Day

The fight for Europe’s future – ‘

Really sobering assessment by Timothy Garton Ash.

Europe is in the early years of a new era. The continent is now witnessing a great struggle between two Europes: liberal and anti-liberal, internationalist and nationalist, the Europe of integration and that of disintegration. Who wins will be decided by the strength and skill of domestic political forces, but also by external developments over which Europeans have little or no control.

This still nameless new period of European history began on February 24 2022, with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Beginnings in history, as in romance, are crucial. In the first seven years after 1945, the US-led west created most of the key international institutions we have to this day, including the UN and Nato. The European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1952, set the course for what eventually became the European Community. In the first seven years after 1989, Europe and the US effectively decided to extend the existing Euro-Atlantic order, including Nato and a European Community that was deepened to become today’s European Union, to much of the eastern half of the continent.

The two overlapping periods in which this order was created and extended, but then eroded — the postwar (ie after 1945) and the post-Wall (ie after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 1989) — came to a simultaneous crashing end with the start of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022. The institutions still exist, but the context is transformed. Now we’re in this new era’s Year Four — the counterpart, if you will, of 1949 for the postwar and 1993 for the post-Wall.

The word Zeitenwende, catapulted into the English language by the then German chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech to the Bundestag on February 27 2022, is sometimes translated as “turning point”. But the whole point is that it’s not a point. The change from one era to another may be kick-started by a dramatic event on a single day, but it takes years for the character of the new era to be shaped and recognised — and even longer for it to acquire a lasting name. You want to know what really became of the Zeitenwende? Come back in 2029…

It’s long, informed and wise. Brew coffee, read and ponder.

So many books, so little time

I’m reading this extraordinary book by Phillip Steadman, and am blown away by it. Phil is an architect and back in the day he and I were colleagues in the Technology Faculty of the Open University. He went on to the Bartlett School at UCL and eventually I went back to Cambridge but we’ve kept in touch. I first realised that in addition to being an architect he was a perceptive art critic when he published Vermeer’s Camera in 2001. In that book he made a persuasive case that the great Dutch realist painter had used a camera obscura to assist him in his work.

This was, I think, a controversial proposition in some art-history circles at the time, but what made Phil’s book special was the way he used geometrical analysis to show that a particular Vermeer painting (Lady Seated at a Virginal) had been painted from several viewpoints, which suggested that the artist had used a booth-type camera obscura when creating it. This idea was later taken up by an American film-maker who made a documentary film — Tim’s Vermeer — about the process Vermeer might have used in creating that particular work. If you’re interested, Philip gave a fascinating lecture about the research that went into the book.

Now he’s done much the same thing for Canaletto, the artist whose paintings of Venice shaped the way we have imagined the city. The book charts the analysis of how Canaletto worked, and Philip and an Italian colleague built a mobile camera obscura to reproduce many of the scenes that figure in the artist’s work. It’s a striking example of how to be scrupulously scholarly while also being readable and accessible.

My commonplace booklet

In last Friday’s edition I quoted Tyler Cowen’s puzzlement on visiting Paris at the number of young women there who sported publicly visible tattoos. Turns out that it’s not just in Paris. We’re much further south and it seems to be a trend here too. Something’s up.

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All the news that’s fit to wear

Quote of the Day

”Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

• Vint Cerf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Aria | Lang Lang

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Long Read of the Day

Our gilded age

I chanced upon an account of the grotesque extravaganza of Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice (spoiler alert: keep a sickbag handy) and it reminded me of a remarkable article by Sarah Churchwell in the Financial Times. In it, she argues that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, published a century ago, has some eerie resonances with our current gilded age of billionaire excess.

She writes of Dan Cody, for example, the multimillionaire tycoon in the novel, who becomes Jay Gatsby’s early mentor.

Such figures, having already grabbed the world’s spoils, can to a great extent shape the destinies of those around them. In fact, images of despoliation shape The Great Gatsby from beginning to end, from narrator Nick Carraway’s description of “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” at the start, to the “vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house” at the novel’s bravura close.

Gatsby reaches beyond the moral failures of its characters to expose carelessness as a political force. This includes not only the oligarchy’s immunity from consequence, but also the way extraction was equated with success. The unheeding brutality of so-called world-builders has returned most recently in the dark fantasies of Trumpism, and in Silicon Valley’s fatuous motto, “move fast and break things”…

Great stuff. Worth a read. It also has some wonderful juxtapositions of stills from the various film versions of The Great Gatsby and photographs from the Trump inauguration and other contemporary excesses.

So many books, so little time

Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve) is a great reader who believes (as I do) that writing marginal notes in a printed book is a good way to draw attention passages that might be worth referring back to.

But what do you do when you’re reading an eBook on a tablet?

In a nice blog post, he outlines a solution he’s found to the annotation problem. It’s an app called Nebo which, he says,

can read accurately some really foul handwriting. It’s much better than the handwriting recognition built in either to Windows or the iPad OS. Despite some oddities of formatting, I’d guess the error rate, even on my handwriting, is about one word in fifty. So what I do now is to use the split screen on the iPad with whatever I am reading down one side, and Nebo on the other. Both the Kindle app and Zotero will allow you to attach notes to highlighted text, so I write the notes on the Nebo side and then copy and paste them into the reading side. Of course it’s more faff than simply writing onto the margins of a paper, but I think it is worth the extra effort to have something that can so easily be brought into whatever I am writing. This may be wrong. Perhaps the discipline of typing up handwritten notes would fix things yet more firmly in my aged brain.

I’ve used Nebo for ages and can testify to its ability to manage my handwriting. And I also have to agree with Andrew’s parting shot:

Of course none of these tricks is really a substitute for the thing you have to do if you are to understand a worthwhile book, which is to read it at least twice over, carefully.

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