Blues
Quote of the Day
”The logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.That is the goal towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver.”
- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan and the Band | Forever Young
My favourite recording of the song.
Norah Jones also did a lovely cover of it at a memorial event for Steve Jobs.
Long Read of the Day
I’m 53 years old. I’m 36 in my head.
A school friend recommended this essay in The Atlantic. I remembered it when having a convivial lunch with two of my kids and one of my grandsons the other day. A couple of weeks earlier we’d had a family get together to celebrate my birthday and at lunch the kids roared with laughter when they realised that I am actually a year older than I thought I was.
Here’s how the essay opens…
This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.
She is 76.
Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair. Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”
Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.
As one might suspect, there are studies that examine this phenomenon. (There’s a study for everything.) As one might also suspect, most of them are pretty unimaginative…
Lovely essay. Do find time for it. And thanks to Ivan for spotting it.
The machine began to waffle – and then the conductor went in for the kill
Yesterday’s Observer column…
A few weeks ago, when researching a column about the conception of “intelligence” that’s embedded in supposed “AI”, I put the following question to Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude. “Large language model [LLM] machines like you are described as forms of artificial intelligence. What is the implicit definition of intelligence in this description?”
The machine speedily provided an admirably lucid reply. “The implicit definition,” it admitted, “is remarkably narrow and reflects several problematic assumptions,” and it then went on to outline some of those. “LLMs,” it concluded, “represent an implicit belief that intelligence is fundamentally about processing and manipulating symbolic information” and “treat intelligence as pure computation that can happen in isolation from the messy realities of lived experience.”
Impressed by this, I remarked in the column that “I couldn’t have put it better myself”. Upon seeing this admission, an alert reader sniffed confirmation bias and set about conducting an experiment himself with Claude…
Tom Lehrer R.I.P
The great musical satirist has gone to the Great Cabaret in the sky. There’s a nice obit in the New York Times. But if you want to remember him at his best, just dig out videos of some of his performances. Like this one.
I loved the idea that he always had one foot in academia and the other in a more frivolous world — that of entertainment. And his explanation of why he eventually stopped writing satirical songs: ““Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
May he rest in peace.
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