Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly (Cmichel67 CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fine portrait of an interesting man. See today’s Long Read.

Quote of the Day

”Just a little more reverence, please, and not so much astonishment.”

• (Sir) Malcolm Sargent, admonishing a choir rehearsing Handel’s ‘For Unto Us a Child is Born”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Shaun Davey | Liam O’Flynn | Newfoundland

Link

I know I’ve linked to this in the past, but it’s one of my favourite pieces. It is St Patrick’s Day, after all. And Liam was the greatest piper of my lifetime.

Long Read of the Day

 Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist

Kevin Kelly, who has been around even longer than I have, is an acquired taste for some. But I’ve always enjoyed reading him even when I thought he was wrong. This long and unfailingly interesting conversation between him and Noah Smith is good value.

This is how Noah introduces it:

Essentially, if you look at the fast-changing world of technology and you ask “Where is this all headed?”, and “Where should this all be headed?”, then Kevin Kelly is a natural person to ask. And in the interview that follows, that is basically what I asked him. I especially focused on his idea of the “technium”, which is all of human technology acting together as a single natural system or organism. We talk about whether this technium exists in competition with Earth’s natural environment, or whether the two can exist in harmony. We also discuss AI, social media crypto, and we talk about whether and how technological development can be actively steered. He also dispenses a bit of helpful life advice.

The interview itself is interesting throughout. Kelly’s idea of the ‘technium’ has always seemed a bit wacky to me (it invariably reminds me of Langdon Winner’s question about whether artefacts have politics) but his exposition of it here is entertaining and thoughtful. Running through the whole piece is his incurable techno-optimism. But then that was always his trademark.

His observations on machine-learning are right on the money, though.

Nonetheless, right now machine learning is overhyped. It is not sentient, and not as smart as it seems. What we are discovering is that many of the cognitive tasks we have been doing as humans are dumber than they seem. Playing chess was more mechanical than we thought. Playing the game Go is more mechanical than we thought. Painting a picture and being creative was more mechanical than we thought. And even writing a paragraph with words turns out to be more mechanical than we thought. So far, out of the perhaps dozen of cognitive modes operating in our minds, we have managed to synthesize two of them: perception and pattern matching. Everything we’ve seen so far in AI is because we can produce those two modes. We have not made any real progress in synthesizing symbolic logic and deductive reasoning and other modes of thinking. It is those “others” that are so important because as we inch along we are slowly realizing we still have NO IDEA how our own intelligences really work, or even what intelligence is. A major byproduct of AI is that it will tell us more about our minds than centuries of psychology and neuroscience have.

Anyway, that’s enough from me. Read it yourself and ponder. I hope you enjoy it.

Small earthquake in Silicon Valley: not many dead

My Observer column next Sunday takes a sardonic view of what happened to the Valley’s favourite bank. But in the meantime Dave Karpf’s Three thoughts on Silicon Valley Bank will keep you entertained.

The myth of Silicon Valley is that it is a font of innovation, the place where the future is being invented. I’ve written before about the underlying ideological project here — in which the inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers and investors are the heroic change-makers, while governments, regulators, and existing institutions are obstacles to be overcome or villains to be defeated. There’s something galling about just how… reduced the whole phenomenon has been by the simple act of interest rates rising. It’s a real Wizard of Oz moment… Really? Low interest rates? Is that all this has ever been?

It’s a nice piece. Insightful too about how Peter Thiel basically pulled the plug on the bank.

My commonplace booklet

This is crass, but also oddly impressive. Landing a plane on a helipad atop an unspeakable hotel.

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The beach approaching sundown

Shows how difficult it can be shooting into the light. Flawed photograph, but I didn’t want to miss it.

Quote of the Day

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”

• Detective Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jackson Browne with David Lindley | Before The Deluge, June 26, 2010

Link

Long Read of the Day

Salt-Seeking

I found this reflective blog post by Venkatesh Rao to be intensely thought-provoking. That’s partly because he’s such an interesting thinker, but also because the topic he’s on about is close to my heart — and indeed to this newsletter.

Rao has come up with a striking metaphor for thinking about writing in different media — salt-seeking — which he thinks is superior to the more familiar metaphor of “coming up for air”.

One of the effects of this evolutionary history is that all air-breathing life has to seek out perhaps the most important chemical that’s ubiquitous in the oceans but not trivial to find on land: salt. Salt-seeking is one of the most fundamental behaviors of terrestrial life. Animals in the wild seek out salt licks even at great risk of predation. Humans with salt deficiencies have serious problems, and beyond a point of salt deprivation, you die.

He’s thinking about this because, like me, he runs a blog on the open Web as well as a newsletter. “This past February,” he writes,

“has possibly been the first time in the 15-year history of this blog that I haven’t posted for a full calendar month. Or at least one of a handful of very rare periods. And I feel a sort of mysterious nutritional deficiency in my psyche. It feels similar to how I feel if I go without eating vegetables for too long, but more elemental. A kind of vague chemical unsettledness…

Read on. It’s worth it, especially if you’re interested in the Web as the nearest thing we’ve got to a genuine public sphere.

My commonplace booklet

From the you-couldn’t-make-it-up Department

Apparently some people have difficulty composing 140-280-character messages. Hence this Reuters story.

Koo, an India-based social media app that aims to rival Twitter, has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help users more easily create posts, the company’s co-founder told Reuters.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence bot that can create prose in response to prompts and has set off a tech industry craze over generative AI.

Koo users will be able to use ChatGPT directly within the app to help them draft posts about current events, politics or pop culture, said Mayank Bidawatka, co-founder of Koo, in an interview.

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Light and Shade

Quote of the Day

”Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to is.”

• Arnold Palmer (who won the Masters four times, the PGA Championship three times, the US Open in 1969 and the British Open twice)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | My Song | 1978

Link

Long Read of the Day

Claims That AI Productivity Will Save Us Are Neither New, nor True

Not only does new tech often result in more work for people, says Elizabeth Renieris, but it also introduces additional kinds of work.

Simply put, the AI productivity narrative is a lie. It holds that by automating tasks, AI will make them more efficient and make us, in turn, more productive. This will free us for more meaningful tasks, or for leisurely pursuits such as yoga, painting or volunteerism, promoting human flourishing and well-being. But if history is any guide, this outcome is highly unlikely, save for a privileged elite. More likely, the rich will only get richer.

Because it’s not technology that can liberate us. To preserve and promote meaningful autonomy in the face of these AI advancements, we must look to our social, political and economic systems and policies. As Derek Thompson observes in The Atlantic, “Technology only frees people from work if the boss — or the government, or the economic system — allows it.” To allege otherwise is technosolutionism, plain and simple.

Yep. ‘AI’ may indeed lead to increased productivity, which could be a good thing. But only if the profits from that are equitably shared. Which they are not at the moment — and if tech corporations have their way, never will be.

Regulating crypto

Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) pointed me to Nicholas Weaver’s White Paper, The Death of Cryptocurrency. It’s an interesting, incisive essay, which comes to admirably succinct conclusions, as follows:

Regulators, especially regulators in the United States, often fear accusations of stifling innovation. As such, the cryptocurrency space has grown over the past decade with very little regulatory oversight.

But fortunately for regulators, there is no actual innovation to stifle. Cryptocurrencies cannot revolutionize payments or finance, as the basic nature of all cryptocurrencies render them fundamentally unsuitable to revolutionize our financial system — which, by the way, already has decades of successful experience with digital payments and electronic money.

The supposedly “decentralized” and “trustless” cryptocurrency systems, both technically and socially, fail to provide meaningful benefits to society — and indeed, necessarily also fail in their foundational claims of decentralization and trustlessness.

When regulating cryptocurrencies, the best starting point is history. Regulating various tokens is best done through the existing securities law framework, an area where the US has a near century of well-established law. It starts with regulating the issuance of new cryptocurrency tokens and related securities. This should substantially reduce the number of fraudulent offerings.

Similarly, active regulation of the cryptocurrency exchanges should offer substantial benefits, including eliminating significant consumer risk, blocking key money-laundering channels, and overall producing a far more regulated and far less manipulated market.

Finally, the stablecoins need basic regulation as money transmitters. Unless action is taken they risk becoming substantial conduits for money laundering, but requiring them to treat all users as customers should prevent this risk from developing further.

Comes like a breath of fresh air. If only we had the same for ChatGPT. (Thinks: now there’s an idea.)

Books, etc.

I’d been reading Clive James’s essay on Stefan Zweig in his magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia.

“Zweig’s own achievements,” James writes,

are nowadays often patronised: a bad mistake, in my view. Largely because of his highly schooled but apparently effortless gift for a clear prose narrative, he attained, while he lived, immense popularity not just in the German-speaking countries but in the world entire, and he is still paying the penalty for it. Except in France, where his major works are never out of print, it is usually safer to call him second-rate. Safer, but not sound.

I decided it was high time I read some Zweig. So I downloaded a copy of The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European and embarked upon it. And goddam it, Clive was right.

My commonplace booklet

“”There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive “Mrs. Dalloway” than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.”

• Nathan Heller in “The End of the English Major”

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W.B.’s final resting place

Drumcliffe churchyard, Co. Sligo.

The inscription reads:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman pass by.

I never pass by without calling in. Especially now that the café has re-opened.

Quote of the Day

”Also, I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors. If some depositors get spooked and take their money out, and other depositors evaluate your balance sheet and decide things are fine and keep their money in, and lots more depositors keep their money in because they simply don’t pay attention to banking news, then you have a shot at muddling through your problems.

But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time.”

• Bloomberg’s incomparable Matt Levine, in an instructive and entertaining piece (behind a paywall, alas) about the SVB fiasco. Luckily, my friend Hap (Whom God Preserve) generously gifted me a copy, which had me chortling over afternoon tea.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Julian Bream | Rondo in A minor (Dionisio Aguado)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Willard McCarty, one of the wisest and best-read scholars I know, wrote with an interesting question. He’d been reading Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason and was struck (as many of us have been) by a famous passage about the impact that his ELIZA chatbot had on people who interacted with it. The passage reads:

I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.

“In all the quotations and citations of this anecdote I have seen,” Willard writes, “none gives the secretary’s name. This is of course not surprising when we consider the attitudes of the time, perhaps especially in the technical environment of a computer science department at MIT. One such citation declares that her name is unknown. I would very much like to know it — not enough to book a flight and spend the necessary time in the MIT Archive with Weizenbaum’s papers, but still I think what she did is highly significant and so would like to put it into print.”

He’s right. This woman’s reactions to the chatbot has suddenly acquired a contemporary resonance, as millions of our fellow-humans are unhinged by their interactions with ChatGPT and impute some human-like properties to it. Joe’s secretary deserves to be credited as the first person to have experienced these thoughts.

Pondering Willard’s inquiry, I (of course) set off down a rabbit-hole which turned up The Samantha Test, a thoughtful New Yorker essay by Brian Christian about Spike Jonze’s film Her which, on reflection, struck me as being an appropriate Long Read for today.

Consider this para, towards the end:

So where does that leave us? “Her,” not unlike the Turing Test itself, says more about the nature of human intimacy than it does about the limits of computation. As both an author and a lover of literature, I would be a hypocrite to condemn too strongly the power of indirect or one-way intimacy. I run the disembodied thoughts of some other mind through my own, like code, and feel close to someone else, living or dead, while risking nothing, offering nothing. And yet the communion, I would argue, is real. Books themselves are perhaps the first chatbots: long-winded and poor listeners, they nonetheless have the power to make the reader feel known, understood, challenged, spurred to greatness, not alone.

I hope you enjoy it. I did.

More on Silicon Valley Bank

Interesting details this morning from Tortoise Media’s invaluable daily update:

$42 billion – withdrawals from SVB last Thursday alone

minus $1 billion – balance of the bank’s main accounts by close of business on Friday

$250,000 – maximum deposit usually insured by the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the event of a run, although the Fed lifted that cap at the weekend ensuring all depositors at SVB would be made whole

96 – percentage share of SVB customers with balances over $250,000 as of last week

And now for the UK angle:

£7 billion – deposits at SVB UK, the subsidiary sold this morning to HSBC for £1

Talk about a fire sale.

Academy of Euphemism

It’s a little-known fact that Music Examiners are wizards at wrapping criticism in encouraging syrup. I know this because I am married to a music teacher, who occasionally reads out some of these masterpieces of euphemism from examiners’ reports as a way of stopping me doing what is laughingly called my ‘work’.

Here’s an example:

”A positive tempo was adopted and largely maintained. It was quite heavy in touch for the most part, though some dynamic levels emerged. A few smudges and anxious moments, but much articulation was clear.” 23/30

My commonplace booklet

Well, well. Tom Cruise, arguably the biggest star in movie history, and the man who brought Hollywood back from the dead after the pandemic, has never won an Oscar.

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“A group of anti-fascists disrupting a white supremacist gathering”

I was struck by the ingenuity of the heading over this photograph in my Mastodon feed. The person who posted it (@miriamm@mastodon.social) added this explanation:

The photograph titled “Taxis to Hell – and Back – Into the Jaws of Death” encapsulates a moment of great courage and selflessness during one of the most pivotal events of the 20th century. Taken on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day, during the Allied invasion of Normandy, the picture depicts a group of American soldiers as they storm the beaches of Omaha under heavy German fire.

The photographer, Robert F. Sargent, was a member of the United States Coast Guard assigned to document the invasion. He and his camera crew landed on the beach with the first wave of troops. The soldiers in the photograph were members of the 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Big Red One,” tasked with securing a stretch of beach codenamed “Easy Red.”

The amphibious tanks were swamping off the beaches, making the journey even more perilous. The soldiers endured the bitter cold and drenching waves that constantly broke over the vessel. As they approached Omaha Beach, the incoming tide and the German obstacles, which were meant to hinder the Allied invasion, were visible. Sargent observed a disabled amphibious tank and another landing craft that had broached along the beach, just as their landing craft was preparing to lower the bow ramp. Despite the German artillery targeting their landing craft, they managed to discharge all the troops into chest-deep water without any casualties. However, he also witnessed another landing craft positioned close to their port side, which was not as fortunate.

Quote of the Day

”If a lion could talk we would not understand him.”

• Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Count Basie Orchestra | “Lil Darlin”

Link

Long Read of the Day

Something Broke! The Silicon Valley Bank Failure How tech hubris and low interest rates combined to produce a big mess.

Terrific blog post by Adam Tooze on the implosion of the Valley’s favourite bank. It’s the best explanation I’ve seen of how SVB imploded. Interestingly, many (most?) of its depositors were tech start-ups which used the bank to park their VC-provided funds while they were getting organised.

Given the prevalence of libertarian ideology in the Valley, chances are that some of those depositors were ardent believers in the idea of reducing the State to the point (as Grover Norquist, one of their more fanatical brethren once put it, “it could be drowned in a bathtub”).

Now comes an intriguing question. In the US, deposits of $250,000 or less in a failed bank are protected by the government. My guess is that most of those deposits in SVB exceeded that sum. Stand by, therefore, for the pathetic wails and pleas of libertarian investors for help — from the government they have, to date, been unable to drown in said bathtub.

The hypocrisy involved will not be exhibited only by depositors. As Tooze points out, SVB was not stress-tested by regulators. Why not?

Because in 2018 the regulations were changed and SVB was leading the charge pushing for the onerous regulations to be lifted.

The executive who led the lobbying charge, one Greg Becker, was — according to Business Standard — the same Greg Becker who

“sold $3.6 million of company stock under a trading plan less than two weeks before the firm disclosed extensive losses that led to its failure. The sale of 12,451 shares on Feb. 27 was the first time in more than a year that Becker had sold shares in parent company SVB Financial Group, according to regulatory filings. He filed the plan that allowed him to sell the shares on Jan. 26.”

Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the ‘enshittification’ of the internet

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the great tech critic, we now have a term for this decay process in online platforms – enshittification. “First,” he writes, “they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” Enshittification results from the convergence of two things: the power of platform owners to change how their platforms extract value from users and the nature of the two-sided markets – where the platforms sit between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other and then raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them…

Do read the whole thing

Books, etc.

If you drive (as we often do) across the Fens from Cambridge to Ely, there comes a wonderful moment when suddenly the silhouette of Ely Cathedral appears on the horizon and one appreciates why in medieval times it was known as “the Ship of the Fens”. When viewing it from close up, though, the thought that never fails to come to mind is of the immense power, wealth and resources that were needed to create such a monument in the Middle Ages.

This is true for all of the great cathedrals of Europe, which is why the arrival of a new book about their construction is interesting. Matthew Lyons has a nice review of it in The Critic magazine.

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The Sea, the Sea

Maghera Beach, Co Donegal.

Quote of the Day

”What’s a thousand dollars? Mere chicken feed. A poultry matter.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ye Banks and Braes O’Bonnie Doon | The Philharmonic Winds

Link

I heard this sung on Radio 3 the other day, but prefer this orchestral version.

Long Read of the Day

 How The Friedman Doctrine Leads To The Enshittification Of All Things

This blog post by Mike Masnick is about about a topic that’s dear to my heart — the neoliberal dogma that the only function of a company is to maximise shareholder value.

Once you’ve gone public, even if you have executives who still want to focus on pleasing users and customers, eventually any public company is also going to have other executives, often with Wall Street experience, who talk about the importance of keeping Wall Street happy. They’ll often quote Milton Friedman’s dumbest idea: that the only fiduciary duty company executives have is to increase their profits for shareholders.

This goes back to something I wrote more than 15 years ago, talking about Craigslist. At the time, Craigslist was almost certainly the most successful company in the world in terms of profits per employee. It was making boatloads of cash with like a dozen employees. But the company’s CEO (who was not Craig, by the way) had mentioned that the company wasn’t focused on “maximizing revenue.” After all, most of Craigslist is actually free. There are only a few categories that charge, and they tend to be the most commercial ones (job postings). And this resulted in some arguing that the company lacked a capitalist instinct, and somehow this was horrible.

But, as I wrote at the time, this left out the variable of time. Because maximizing revenue in the short term (i.e., in the 3 month window that Wall Street requires) often means sacrificing long term sustainability and long term profits…

Good essay IMO.

To put it another way, an outfit like Meta (neé Facebook) could be run by clones of Mahatma Gandhi and St Francis of Assisi and it would still be a toxic enterprise.

Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia

Here’s a nice example of good investigative reporting. An American petrochemicals giant and the government of Singapore said they were transforming old trainers into playgrounds and running tracks.

Reuters put that promise to the test by planting Apple AirTags inside 11 pairs of donated shoes.

At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.

There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.

These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.

Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore…

That reminded me of a moment about thirty years ago when I was in in the shoe department of Gray’s, a sportswear retailer in Cambridge (now long gone) and an elderly lady came in with a pair of her grandson’s trainers. She explained to the young salesperson that these had been a very good buy, but now the soles were beginning to crack and she would like to have them re-soled.

I’ll never forget the look on the shop assistant’s face.

Noam Chomsky (and colleagues) on ChatGPT et al

I was waiting (and hoping) for this — Chomsky’s observations on contemporary chatbots.

These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach…

This last observation really strikes home. A couple of weeks ago I spent two days watching my three-year-old grand-niece effortlessly learning language. What was particularly striking was not so only her sponge-like capacity to absorb information, but also the tacit skills displayed by the adults in the family as informal language teachers. She already knows more about the world than any number of neural networks.

My commonplace booklet

How to age as a woman

By Maureen McEly, courtesy of McSweeney’s.

Based on current celebrity beauty standards, the goals are clear: you need to look like you’re in your twenties until you’re thirty-five, then look thirty-five until you’re dead. Also, regardless of age or retirement eligibility, all women should have supple, lineless skin with no evidence of sunspots, muscle movement, or laughter. The only indication that you’ve been on Earth long enough to outlive a household pet should be the look in your eyes, which peer wearily out of your flawless, youthful face like a haunted doll.

There’s lots more in that vein.

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Footsteps

On a Donegal beach towards the end of the day.

Quote of the Day

”Conservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are.”

• Geoffrey Madan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Fanny Mendelssohn | Overture in C Major

Link

Triggered by a conversation I had with a friend the other day.

Long Read of the Day

 What being a hospice volunteer taught me about death and life

Lovely — and moving — account by Anna Tims of the personal impact of working in a hospice.

I ignored my deadlines that morning. Instead, I Googled hospices. A hospice in the next county was seeking a volunteer to write the life stories of patients in its day centre. This felt reassuringly familiar ground. I applied. Within a month, I was listening to strangers recounting their loves and their losses. Their trust took my breath away. So did the intimacy of hearing memories that had never been shared and regrets that had never been expressed.

Each interview would start the same way: with an apology. The patients apologised for having led boring lives that were not worth recording. Then, as they rewound the years, I realised they were discovering for the first time that they were a pivotal part of a story; that they had made an imprint on the world. A life recounted can make sense in a way that life lived does not. I heard the anguish of a Second World War pilot haunted by the bombs he’d dropped on Germany. I recorded the childhood of a German woman who had grown up beneath those bombs. An ex-convict confided his years of alcohol addiction in the hope that his story of redemption might be shared to help others. I accompanied octogenarians through the hopes of their youth to the resignation of their ending, and, when each story was printed and handed over, those strangers felt almost as familiar to me as family.

Do read it all. It’s worth it.

My commonplace booklet

How many dogs can you get into a Conga line?

See here for the answer.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

What’s On?

St John’s Street, Cambridge, yesterday. One of the delights of living in a university city is that there’s always something on.

Quote of the Day

”To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle.”

• George Orwell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Four men and a dog big band | Cambridge Folk Festival (2012)

Link

Sadly, I missed this particular gig.

Long Read of the Day

 You Are Not a Parrot And a chatbot is not a human.

And a famous computational linguist is very worried what will happen when we forget this.

Tired already of all the guff about ChatGPT?

Me too.

But this essay by Elizabeth Weil provides a welcome break from the nonsense. And, among other things, it’s a memorable profile of a great woman, Emily Bender. She’s an academic at the University of Washington and co-author (with Alexander Koller) of one of the great papers on the subject.

This is how it begins:

Say that A and B, both fluent speakers of English, are independently stranded on two uninhabited islands. They soon discover that previous visitors to these islands have left behind telegraphs and that they can communicate with each other via an underwater cable. A and B start happily typing messages to each other.

Meanwhile, O, a hyperintelligent deep-sea octopus who is unable to visit or observe the two islands, discovers a way to tap into the underwater cable and listen in on A and B’s conversations. O knows nothing about English initially but is very good at detecting statistical patterns. Over time, O learns to predict with great accuracy how B will respond to each of A’s utterances.

Soon, the octopus enters the conversation and starts impersonating B and replying to A. This ruse works for a while, and A believes that O communicates as both she and B do — with meaning and intent. Then one day A calls out: “I’m being attacked by an angry bear. Help me figure out how to defend myself. I’ve got some sticks.” The octopus, impersonating B, fails to help. How could it succeed? The octopus has no referents, no idea what bears or sticks are. No way to give relevant instructions, like to go grab some coconuts and rope and build a catapult. A is in trouble and feels duped. The octopus is exposed as a fraud…

You get the point. Now read on. It’s worth every minute.

The truth about Harvard

Harvard, as everyone knows, is a hedge fund with a nice university attached. It also makes a big song and dance about its “needs-blind” admission processes. This sanctimonious cant is not, er, exactly supported by evidence.

For example, here’s Benedict Evans’s summary of a serious paper by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ransom, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, no less.

A study of admissions preferences to Harvard, an American university: roughly 15% of admissions and over 40% of white admissions would not be admitted on merit, and only got places because their parents attended or gave money or because they’re good at running.

That’s meritocracy for you.

My commonplace booklet

One of the unintended consequences of doing a cryptic crossword every morning (as we do) is that you find yourself tunnelling down rabbit-holes. The solution to one clue in yesterday’s puzzle was “creepers”, which led me to embark on one of my pointless disquisitions on the fact that in my long-distant youth Teddy Boys were famous for (among other things) their exotic shoes — which were known as “Brothel Creepers”. At which point, my fellow-solver (reasonably) asked “Why?” Never having visited a brothel, I was reduced to opening and shutting my mouth like a stunned carp, and so the only thing to do was to resort to a search engine.

Which I did, and found this — “The story behind brothel creepers”. Its author, Elizabeth Finney, explained that,

The creeper shoe was originally developed by George Cox in 1949 under the name “Hamilton” and was inspired by the crêpe-soled desert boots worn by WWII soldiers posted across the deserts of North Africa. Due to the landscape and extreme climate, the soldiers’ boots had thicker soles, which became popular on their return to England. The term “brothel creepers” was coined from those soldiers who found themselves in darker parts of Soho and King’s Cross to embrace those seedier pastimes.

So now you know!

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