Beach no uitable

Sign on the dunes of a lovely Donegal beach.

Quote of the Day

“I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.”

• John Updike

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Political Science

Link

The ultimate satirical take on nuclear superiority.

Long Read of the Day

Process knowledge is crucial to economic development

Henry Farrell’s review of Dan Wang’s book is a great read (as is the book itself, as I’m discovering). Here’s how Henry’s piece concludes, but the entire review is worth your time.

If Dan is right, we need to understand how to build up and maintain process knowledge, as an essential element of economic development, and even the good society. China has done pretty well at this, without necessarily planning to, but as Dan suggests in passing, it is less certain in its capacity to maintain it. The United States used to have it, but has shifted its focus to other things. Both societies are organized around large scale abstractions – the Leninist engineering state, and the formalizations of administrative law. Creating and maintaining process knowledge requires us to foster different kinds of institutions and interactions, which we’ve barely begun to think about in the changed context of the mid-21st century.

My commonplace booklet

Woz: ‘I Am the Happiest Person Ever’

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, has just turned 75. He’s one of my heroes, partly because he’s. always seemed uncorrupted by wealth. Which is why I liked this excerpt from Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog:

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

After which Gruber commented:

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too. The two Steves were so very different in so many ways, yet at heart, both exemplified that intersection between technology and the liberal arts.

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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”

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