Deux Amis
Neither of the friends were around when I called, alas.
Quote of the Day
We forget most of our past but embody all of it.
- John Updike
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Michael Hedges | Aerial Boundaries
An amazing musician who died tragically young.
Long Read of the Day
Does Social Media cause anything?
Fabulous essay by Kevin Munger on the Crooked Timber blog.
In the 18 months since I quit Twitter, I can feel the atrophy of my vibe detector. I’m reading more than ever, on Substack and the FT, Discord and group chats — much of the same “content” I would’ve encountered on Twitter, in fact, but without the ever-present spiderweb of the social graph, the network of accounts, RTs and likes that lets me understand not only what someone thinks but what everyone else thinks about them thinking that.
So while I know that I’m missing the vibes, I cannot, of course, know which vibes I’m missing. Knowledge of vibes means never being surprised when someone says something: I know what kind of person they are, and I know what those kinds of people say. This is why Twitter users participate in The Discourse rather than in human-to-human dialogue: given the unknowability of another person, when we openly converse with them, we can always be surprised by what they say.
Although various Discourses now take place both on and between other platforms, the architecture of Twitter is ideal for textual Discourse and it seems to remain the hub.
The first time I was realized I was way off of the main vibe came from the response to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation…
Read on, it’s very insightful. I came across it because I was thinking about Haidt’s book for my Observer column. Munger’s observation about Twitter/X being all about vibes rather than thoughtful discourse is spot on, IMO.
Books, etc.
I’m reading Woolf’s Selected Essays and enjoying them. No. 6 is “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a motor car”. Here’s how it opens:
Evening is kind to Sussex, for Sussex is no longer young, and she is grateful for the veil of evening as an elderly woman is glad when a shade is drawn over a lamp, and only the outline of her face remains. The outline of Sussex is still very fine. The cliffs stand out to sea, one behind another. All Eastbourne, all Bexhill, all St. Leonards, their parades and their lodging houses, their bead shops and their sweet shops and their placards and their invalids and chars-á-bancs, are all obliterated. What remains is what there was when William came over from France ten centuries ago: a line of cliffs running out to sea. Also the fields are redeemed. The freckle of red villas on the coast is washed over by a thin lucid lake of brown air, in which they and their redness are drowned. It was still too early for lamps; and too early for stars…
I’m sure I would have detested Woolf had I met her in person. But I do love her writing.
My commonplace booklet
”AI Finds That AI Is Great In New Garbage Research From Tony Blair Institute”
This was the headline on a report by the 404 site.
The story reads:
A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, presented yesterday by the former Prime Minister himself, predicts that more than 40 percent of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated, saving a fifth of their time in aggregate, and potentially leading to a huge reduction in workforce and costs for the government.
The problem with this prediction, which was picked up by Politico, Techradar, Forbes, and others, is that it was made by ChatGPT after the authors of the paper admitted that making a prediction based on interviews with experts would be too hard. Basically, the finding that AI could replace humans at their jobs and radically change how the government works was itself largely made by AI…
Why is this interesting? Two reasons:
- It makes me even more suspicious about Blair’s multi-million ‘think tank’ — especially given that Blair has, from the outset, been idiotically bullish about ‘AI’.
- And it raises worries that Keir Starmer’s tech team might be getting ‘advice’ about technology from Blair’s gaggle of high-priced consultants/ChatGPT prompters.
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