David’s

Along with Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and Paludan in Copenhagen, David’s in Cambridge is one of the world’s loveliest bookshops. The apartment above it is where John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia lived when they were in Cambridge. (As a married couple, I guess they couldn’t live in his college, King’s), though I guess the college owned the apartment (and probably the entire city block.). Anyway, it’s a delightful place if you’re a bookish type.

Quote of the Day

”Whom the mad would destroy, first they make gods.”

• Bernard Levin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jerry Garcia | Don’t You Let Deal Go Down

Link

Long Read of the Day

 america against china against america

Fascinating essay by Jasmine Sun, a smart blogger who describes herself as doing anthropology in the tech industry centred on Silicon Valley. This is an account of a visit she and some colleagues recently made to China hoping “to see China’s technological achievements firsthand”.

Here’s a sample:

Chinese engineers also seem more practical than their American counterparts. They’re here to build tech and make money; risk management is for bureaucrats; policy is only relevant insofar as it helps or hurts your work. This is something I think Westerners often get wrong. If you live in a single-party state, you are, on average, less ideological yourself. The politics have already been decided—no point wasting extra cycles coming up with something new.

Overall, I left my conversations with Chinese technologists feeling real admiration: they faced unimaginable uphill battles from US restrictions and a competitive domestic market. Low margins and a thin capital environment don’t stop people from shipping high-quality work. Sure, such rhetoric could be performative chest-puffing. But their mindset was locked in. One could argue that Chinese are trained their whole lives for this—competition only makes them stronger. As Charles put it: They had the fucking juice.

It’s a long read, but consistently interesting because she’s such a sharp observer That’s the anthropologist for you, I guess. I liked many of her small insights. Example for conversations with Chinese people who came back from the US “For some I spoke with,” she writes, “I sensed that the quality of life gap made them more skeptical of liberal democracy. The Chinese system does stupid things, but so does America, they implied. At least the trains work.”

It was also interesting to read it alongside Dan Wang’s new book.

My commonplace booklet

Tilting at Windmills

There is one respect (and one only) in which Trump reminds me of Cervantes’s hero, Don Quixote: both are hostile to windmills. Don Q saw them as giants rather than machines. Trump has a deep and irrational hatred of them because they threaten the fossil fuel industries to which he is viscerally attached. But the really funny thing about his tweet, according to Paul Krugman, is that New Jersey has no windmills. After taking office, he promised to halve electricity prices. Currently they’re going up, partly because of the demands of tech companies and AI — and possibly also because of the stress placed on the grid by crypto, in which Trump has a massive stake. Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

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The parched meadow

Seen on a cycle ride the other day. It’s beginning to look as though the UK now has only two seasons: wet and dry. There hasn’t been any serious rain for a couple of months — and it shows.

Quote of the Day

“Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart: Marriage of Figaro | Contessa perdono (‘Countess, forgive me’) | Glyndebourne, 2012

Link

The closing scene of the opera in which the Count begs his long-suffering wife for forgiveness. Opera is a preposterous art form, but when all the moving parts mesh — as in this Glyndebourne performance — it can be wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

Suicide as a bargaining tactic

Really thoughtful essay by Ian Leslie, about a subject I’d never seen discussed before: how suicidal behaviour and “misery signalling” can function as social bargaining tactics, examining a viral case of a young artist’s public declaration of suicidal intent and its broader evolutionary psychological context.

In December last year a young artist called Joseph Awuah-Darko took to Instagram to declare his decision to end his life. He posted a video of himself in tears, followed by an artfully produced video montage of happier moments: Awuah-Darko afloat in a sun-dappled swimming pool; reading a book in a treehouse; standing thoughtfully on a bridge; presenting the camera with an origami bird. In the accompanying text, which began with a quote from Joan Didion, he explained that the burden of existence had become unbearable. He cited depression, struggles with debt, violence in the news, the rise of AI, and his bipolar disorder, which made his lows very painful. He announced that he had moved to the Netherlands to pursue assisted suicide.

This post elicited abundant sympathy. A few days later he posted again, this time to launch “The Last Supper Project”. Awuah-Darko said that while he was navigating the Dutch euthanasia bureaucracy, he wanted some company. He invited his followers to cook him dinner at their home. All you had to do was click on his bio, find a slot in the calendar, and he’d turn up at the appointed hour. “I want to find meaning again with people while I have time still left on earth,” he said.

Thousands took him up on it…

Turns out that this is an older story than we (or certainly I) knew. Suicidal ‘bargaining’ has a long history. Evolutionary psychologists see it as “the bargaining model of depression”.

So many books, so little time

Dan Wang on understanding China (and the US)

I first discovered Dan Wang years ago, when he was a tech analyst living in China. At the end of every year, he published online a long, long letter reflecting on the year just past. I found it fascinating and thought-provoking, not least because it invariably challenged Western conventional wisdom about that vast and mysterious country.

But a few years ago, he moved from China to the US, and his annual letter vanished. And that, I thought, was that.

But now he has produces something wider-ranging but also, I suspect, quite profound — a book about the difference between China and its rival superpower, the US. His basic framing is that China is an engineering state, relentlessly building big, while the United States has transformed into a ’lawyerly society’, stalling every attempt to make change, both good and bad.

Having listened to this podcasted conversation between Wang and Jonathan Schneider, I decided that it was high time I read the new book. So I bought it on Kindle and started to read. I’m finding it quite compelling and nicely written.

You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Brad DeLong — a smarter guy than me — has read it and regards it as a must-read. Here’s an excerpt about it on his blog.

Breakneck sees China as the country of the sledgehammer. Breakneck sees America as the country of the gavel.

China’s technocratic engineering élite solves problems with concrete, steel, and scale—roads, bridges, power plants, hyperscale projects. The impulse extends to society: the one‑child policy and repression in Tibet and Xinjiang. This technocracy prizes order, control, and visible achievement.

America’s lawyer élite solves problems by assigning and vindicating rights to property and security. Enterprise and innovation follow as people live as they wish. The reflex response to any problem is to create another entitlement or right, pulling more people into the set required for agreement and approval.

My commonplace booklet

“One way to think about AI-based text-generation tools like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is as clairvoyants. They are mediums that bring the words of the past into the present in a new arrangement. GPT-3 is not creating text out of nothing, after all. It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by a living interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a very real way, communing with the dead.”

Nicholas Carr in ”The medium is the Medium”

  This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 5am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!