Vanishing point

In Donegal, after the rain.

Quote of the Day

”Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

• Ernest Hemingway

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, BWV 202 | ”Wedding Cantata”: No. 7, Aria.

Link

Long Read of the Day

What’s become of The Times & Co.?

If, like me, you’re a subscriber to the New York Times, you may be puzzled by the strangely contorted way it is covering the presidential election. In particular, the way it continues to fall into the ‘balance as bias’ trap is a mystery.

Turns out that Jeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and NYU professor, is likewise puzzled. And on his Buzzmachine blog he’s written the most insightful analysis of the phenomenon that I’ve come across. In it he discusses — and dismisses — two of the prevailing explanations of the phenomenon (the effect of the Timess increasing reliance on subscription revenue; and the idea that liberalism is bad for business in a mainstream publication) and advances an interesting theory of his own.

His most intriguing thought (for me, anyway) is the question of why journalists seem so averse to critical reflection on what they do for a living. Jeff has a book coming out soon about this.

I began the book intending to write a defense of internet freedoms, but it became a critique of media’s moral panic over the internet and the impact that is having on those freedoms. News institutions as companies never acknowledge their own conflict of interest in covering what they see as a new competitors on the net.

I see a much larger problem at work: Journalists and news executives — and I include myself in this critique — were never equipped with the tools of theory and history to inform self-reflection on our field and to imagine alternative means and models of serving our publics.

This is why I hold that simply teaching the craft and skills of journalism in journalism schools is wholly inadequate to the profound challenges in our field. Journalists see themselves as producers of the commodity they call content and they define their value according to their roles in that process of manufacture. They would be better served to also learn from the disciplines of media studies, communication, history, sociology, ethics, and others — empowering them to reimagine and reform our field.

He’s dead right about this. And if journalism as a trade (for it isn’t a profession) is to endure, its teachers and practitioners have to grapple with more than just reporting so that they can understand what’s happening to the media ecosystem.

Books, etc.

Just started on this. I’m reviewing it for Sunday 22 September in the Observer.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  Mountain Bike Flips on a Moving Train. Do not try this on any British train.

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How the wind blows

This is what happens to a tree growing up on Ireland’s so-called ‘Wild Atlantic Way’.

Quote of the Day

”Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Birmingham

Link

Wonderful song.

On This Day 23 Years Ago…

I still think that Jeff Jarvis’s memoir is the best thing written about that terrible day.

Yes, I am blessed to be alive.

I was a block away from the World Trade Center, at Broadway and Liberty Street, when the first of the two towers collapsed yesterday morning. Completely engulfed in its debris, I joined a mob running away, screaming, unable to see, unable to breathe anything but the black cloud.

As the first of the tidal wave of debris bore down on us, some people crouched behind large concrete planters, believing they would protect them. But I kept running. I fell. Others fell around me. I got back up and kept running. I heard large pieces of the destroyed building hitting cars on the street. I heard more terrified screams.

There was no air. I breathed through my handkerchief and even so, my mouth, nose and lungs were filled with black. There was no light. I could see nothing, only black. I slammed into a building, and a tree, and another building.

I heard people and asked where we were. No one answered. I kept going and finally saw light at Chase Plaza II, where the building managers opened the doors, letting us refugees and much smoke inside…

Keep reading.

My commonplace booklet

How Joe Biden Engineered Apple’s New AirPods

Interesting blog post by Matt Stoller.

Apple said that after FDA clearance in the fall, the hearing features will be available via a software update. The AirPods Pro 2 will cost $249.

To set up hearing enhancement, users can take a hearing test inside the Apple Health app that’s based on the pure-tone test used by audiologists. The results of the test automatically adjust your AirPods’ sound levels, or you can download the test as a PDF to show an audiologist. (You can also input existing hearing test results into the Health app.)

Apple engineers turning AirPods into hearing aids is wonderful, but it’s not a uniquely difficult endeavor. In fact, what’s happening here is that a set of elected leaders opened up a market closed off by a cartel that had secured a comfortable position, shielded by the Food and Drug Administration. And engineers, many of whom care deeply about hearing, acted in this new legal space to create tools to help people live better lives…

Joe Biden’s administration enabled this, in other words.

There’s a general lesson here. It is that lots of worthwhile things that can be done (in the sense that they are technically feasible) are not being done because doing so would threaten the comfortable rents being extracted by incumbent companies — especially ones that have captured regulators in their industries.

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Stoned

Taken on the north shore of Galway Bay, with the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in the far distance. The cairn was built by person or persons unknown. But it was asking to be photographed!

Quote of the Day

”Anyone can make a political case so compelling that he or she can’t see the flaws in it.”

• Henry Farrell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chet Atkins, Leo Kottke and Doc Watson | Last Steam Engine Train

Link

Really fine example of the emergent properties of three great guitarists when you put them together.

Long Read of the Day

There is no “woke mind virus”

Striking essay by Dan Williams about the pernicious idea that if people disagree with you they must be suffering from the cerebral equivalent of Covid.

In the past several years, talk of the “woke mind virus” has itself gone viral among right-wing culture warriors. In a recent interview, Elon Musk alleged that the mind virus had even killed his child. What he meant was not that it had actually killed his child—they are very much alive—but that his child is transgender and so, apparently, dead to him.

According to Musk, he was “essentially tricked into signing documents” allowing his child to take puberty blockers, which “are actually just sterilization drugs.” This experience radicalised him: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”

The only polite term for this delusion is horseshit. Or, as Williams puts it,

Ideas, including bad ones, are not infectious mind viruses. This metaphor rests on an inaccurate picture of human psychology and social behaviour that functions to demonise, not understand. Because of this, it poisons public debate, increases polarisation, and hinders our collective capacities to understand the world and each other.

Great essay. Worth your time if you are as irritated by culture wars as I am.

So tech titans are not above the law after all

Yesterday’s Observer column

On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him. He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.

The mogul in question, Pavel Durov, is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist.

Media profiles of Durov bring to mind Churchill’s celebrated description of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Durov left Russia because the Facebook clone he co-founded with his brother Nikolai in 2006 led to conflict with the Kremlin…

Read on

Later…

This from the New York Times:

Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.

The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.

And this fascinating account by Politico on how the French authorities closed in on Durov.

My commonplace booklet

**Intel’s problems in a nutshell:

• Intel doesn’t have the best manufacturing
• Intel doesn’t design the best chips
• Intel is out of the game in AI

Devastating summary by Ben Thompson, who for a long time had been giving Intel the benefit of the doubt.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Churchill: the naked truth

He made quite an impression during his time as the guest of two presidents. The chief usher at the White House recalled that “In his room, Mr Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.” Churchill’s bodyguard remarked how President Franklin Roosevelt knocked on the door of the prime minister’s suite during Churchill’s first White House visit in December 1941, only to find that “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.” Roosevelt, clearly flustered, offered to leave, but Churchill demurred: “You see, Mr President, I have nothing to hide.” The two leaders then spoke for an hour.

From the Economist’s review of Mr Churchill in the White House by Robert Schmuhl.

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The Bridge

Crossing the Severn last Sunday.

Quote of the Day

I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

• Peter Thiel, writing in an online libertarian journal in 2009

Footnote Palantir, the company founded by Thiel (with investment from the CIA) now has the contract to build a data platform for the UK’s NHS.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Edward Elgar | Salut d’amour Op. 12 | Berliner Philharmoniker

Link

Pure schmaltz, but what the hell.

Long Read of the Day

 Silicon Valley is an aristocratic culture

Background: On Sunday last, my Observer column was about the reading habits of the Silicon Valley crowd. It was prompted by reading a reading list created by Patrick Collison, and a Substack post by Tanner Greer commenting on the list and arguing that the literary ‘culture’ of Washington D.C. differs critically from the reading habits of Silicon Valley.

Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) has taken issue with this in his usual erudite way.

The actual difference, as I see it, is not one between the philistines of the Beltway and the bibliophiles of the Valley. It is between a technocratic culture in which the public display of a sound general education is irrelevant and an aristocratic one where it can be a valuable asset. Doing well in DC policy circles depends on technocratic knowledge, bureaucratic ruthlessness and connections that are mostly acquired through work or shared education. To do well in Silicon Valley, you want these things, but you also may prosper better if also you appear to have cultivated the appropriate personal dispositions. Being able to talk in the right ways about certain books may persuade others that you might have those dispositions. Hence, it makes it more likely that your start-up will be picked for Y Combinator, get early funding from the right places and so on.

Most of the elements of this explanation are already there in Tanner’s post, but they are partly obscured by his embrace of Silicon Valley’s self-generated mythology of disruption and rebellion. To the extent that Silicon Valley, unlike DC, has a ‘canon’ of books, it is not because Silicon Valley people care more about books than their Beltway equivalents. It is because book-learning does a different kind of cultural work in the Valley than inside the Beltway…

Like everything Farrell writes, it’s interesting. And his conclusion is rather different from Tanner’s. “Silicon Valley has changed remarkably in the intervening two decades,” he writes.

Its culture now centers not simply on technology but the exercise of power. Powerful founders and funders not only aspire to make lots of money, but to reshape the world along better lines. They see themselves as a political elite as well as a financial one, and they are looking to educate themselves, often in ways that reinforce their own values and understanding of their own benevolent role. They want to be formed, and accidentally or consciously form others too.

Worth your time if you are interested in this stuff.

Books, etc.

Screenshot

Unlike more sensible people I am more wired than is good for me. But I’ve also always carried a paper notebook — and still do. So I was interested to see this book — and then find “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era”, an interesting excerpt from it, by its author.

Might even have to read it. For now, though, I’ve just scribbled a note in my notebook.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The Geek’s Prayer

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,

the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

From Phil Giammetti’s Mastodon, via Quentin.

Feedback

• On Monday I mentioned an historian’s view that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life have something to do with the skills on display at the Democratic Congress? Rex Davies is sceptical. “Having taught presentation skills internationally, I deduced that the American educational tradition of ‘show & tell’ is the cause. Children are required to address their classmates on a regular basis in the U.S. education system. Experience of public speaking in these formative years accounts for their oratorial expertise in later life. Subsequent bible-bashing may burnish these skills but simple practice – from an early age – makes perfect.

• And on the Tesla cartoon… David Ballard added a cautionary note: “Also be careful of the autocratic transmission!”

• The photograph of the beautifully maintained Alvis car in last Friday’s edition prompted Mark Sherman, a wizard restorer of older American vintage cars to send a photo of one of his beautifully-restored black Packards “which occasionally causes someone to comment that they look ‘gangsterish’. I point out that back in the day – gangsters drove Cadillacs, Police drove Lincolns, and the Judge that sentenced you drove a Packard…”.

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The wisdom of dogs

This is one of my favourite photographs. It was taken in Antibes in August 2010. We were driving along the beachfront on a blisteringly hot Sunday afternoon when I suddenly saw this scene. The owners of the little dog were lying in the sunshine, baking like sausages on a spit. And it seemed to me that their pet was reflecting on the foolishness of human animals. Smart mutt.

Quote of the Day

”Asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.”

• Edsger Dijkstra, a great computer scientist.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sorcha Richardson | Map of Manhattan

Link

Long Read of the Day

Stone Age builders were good engineers.

That’s the conclusion of a study of a 6000-year old monument as reported in a recent paper published in Nature.

The Neolithic farmers and herders who built a massive stone chamber in southern Spain nearly 6,000 years ago possessed a good rudimentary grasp of physics, geometry, geology and architectural principles, finds a detailed study of the site.

Using data from a high-resolution laser scan, as well as unpublished photos and diagrams from earlier excavations, archaeologists pieced together a probable construction process for the monument known as the Dolmen of Menga. Their findings, published on 23 August in Science Advances1, reveal new insights into the structure and its Neolithic builders’ technical abilities.

A truly astonishing read. “These people had no blueprints to work with, nor, as far as we know, any previous experience at building something like this,” says study co-author Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “And yet, they understood how to fit together huge blocks of stone” with “a precision that would keep the monument intact for nearly 6,000 years”.

My commonplace booklet

The public discourse about ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) is messy and incoherent with everyone on a spectrum that ranges from doom/existential risk at one extreme to cynical shrugging it off as just another tech fad (like crypto, say) at the other. From the beginning I’ve been pragmatic about the technology: the thing it first reminded me of was the spreadsheet — and it looked to me to be really just a new tool for human ‘augmentation’ as dear old Doug Engelbart would have put it.

I still see it that way, but am sometimes berated by sceptics with talk of ‘hallucinations’, the alleged absence of real use-cases for the technology and so on.

All of which is by way of explaining why I welcomed something posted this week by Andrew Jassy, the CEO of Amazon and someone who really does know about use-cases. Here’s his post:

One of the most tedious (but critical tasks) for software development teams is updating foundational software. It’s not new feature work, and it doesn’t feel like you’re moving the experience forward. As a result, this work is either dreaded or put off for more exciting work—or both.

Amazon Q, our GenAI assistant for software development, is trying to bring some light to this heaviness. We have a new code transformation capability, and here’s what we found when we integrated it into our internal systems and applied it to our needed Java upgrades:

• The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).

• In under six months, we’ve been able to upgrade more than 50% of our production Java systems to modernized Java versions at a fraction of the usual time and effort. And, our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes.

• The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.

This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q. It’s been a game changer for us, and not only do our Amazon teams plan to use this transformation capability more, but our Q team plans to add more transformations for developers to leverage.

Of course that particular use of the technology is very specific. But the numbers are impressive, and I think credible.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  My First Trip to Norway, With A.I. as a Guide. A NYT journalist asked three ‘AI’ travel planners for advice, and then wrote it up. As someone who doesn’t do package holidays, cruises (or guided tours), this wouldn’t appeal to me. But maybe it works for some people.

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Petrolhead nostalgia

As long-suffering readers of this blog know, I am a recovering petrolhead — and the only member of my extended family who can recognise vintage cars at sight. I spotted this beautifully-preserved 1960s Alvis TD21 in a car park the other day. When I was a kid I thought of an Alvis as the kind of car a gent with private means and handmade tweed suits might own, rather than a Jaguar MkII which would seem — to him — a bit raffish. (I can say this because I once had a blue MkII, and I was definitely a bit raffish then. Fortunately, the Yom Kippur war and the quadrupling of oil prices cured me of that particular addiction.)

Quote of the Day

“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

• Paul Valery, Pieces sur l’Art, 1934.

Amazingly prescient. Just like David Bowie about ‘music like water’ (in 2002) and E.M. Forster about the Web (in 1909.

Thanks to Philip Steadman for pointing me to it.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Long Time Traveller | Wailing Jennys

Link

Long Read of the Day

Real estate shopping for the apocalypse

Wonderful New Yorker essay by Patricia Marx on the market for domestic nuclear bunkers in the US.

What if they’re right? What if a nuke drops, or climate change turns the world into a foaming puddle, or the next pandemic is spread through selfies? Billionaires have recently been spending millions building themselves customized bunkers, in the hope that they can ride out the apocalypse in splendor. In January, a video surfaced of the rapper Rick Ross bragging that his bunker will be better than Elon Musk’s bunker. (Musk is not known to have a bunker, but that’s a detail.) Ross’s bunker will have multiple “wings” and a “water maker.” Also, plenty of canned goods. Ross’s bunker might even have its own bunker. But what about me—and, if I’m being generous, you? Are there affordable underground shelters available for us to hole up in?

A few months back, I started to scan real-estate Web sites. Hmm, I wondered. Might throw pillows brighten up the underground scheelite mine in Beaver County, Utah, that was converted into a community fallout shelter during the Cold War (a steal at nine hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, when you consider how many light-bulb filaments you could make from the leftover tungsten you could knock loose)? Or how about the concrete-and-steel stronghold in Hilliard, Ohio, built by A.T. & T. and the Army in 1971 to protect the nation’s communications system in case of nuclear attack? It comes with a “1970’s-era smoking room.” (Note to self: Take up smoking a few months before world ends.) Would house guests get the hint if I mentioned that my new home had three-thousand-pound blast-proof doors? ($1.25 million for nine acres.)

Keep reading. It’s a scream.

Books, etc.

I’ve just discovered this — a book by Dan Mulhall about my native land as the 19th century morphed into the 20th. The blurb says that

“it describesthe political and cultural ferment that gripped Ireland the last time a century turned. Based on contemporary books and newspaper sources, and copiously illustrated with photographs from the period, this book offers a stark insight into the conditions that prevailed in the Ireland of 1900. There is an account of the crimes that captured public attention at a time when urban and rural poverty were rife, the emigrant ship remained a common experience and the workhouse often provided a last refuge for the poor and the old.”

I know Dan slightly. He was the Irish Ambassador to the UK when I first met him (and was later Irish Ambassador to the US, after which he retired). He’s also a keen and knowledgeable Joycean (he wrote a chatty, readable guide to Ulysses, for example), and he was the only diplomat I knew of who tweeted regularly about Joyce, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and related matters. So I’d better catch up with A New Day Dawning before I run into him again.

My commonplace booklet

From Tortoise media’s newsletter yesterday:

Time capsules rarely attract more fanfare at their unveiling than their installation, but an unexpected one at London’s National Gallery certainly has. Constructors uncovered a letter entombed within one of two false concrete columns in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing. The letter was written in 1990 by donor John Sainsbury (Sainsbury and his two brothers Simon and Timothy originally donated £40 million to the National Gallery for its extension) and snuck into the column during its installation. It details Sainsbury’s great disdain for the column, which he described as “a mistake of the architect” that the National Gallery would “live to regret”. Regret indeed, as more than 30 years on, the letter was discovered in the pillar’s demolition during the wing’s redevelopment, due to reopen in May next year. John Sainsbury died in 2022, but the 1990 letter makes clear how he would have felt. It reads: “Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary column.” A gloriously petulant “I told you so” from beyond the grave.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From the current issue of Private Eye (Which God Preserve)

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The millennial spire

A church that is over 900 years old, framed by autumnal leaves.

Quote of the Day

”When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures.”

• Timothy Snyder

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Peter Maxwell Davies | Lullaby for Lucy (1981)

Link

Words by the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown for the birth of Lucy Randall, the first child born in Rackwick, Hoy, in 32years.

Long Read of the Day

Stranded Astronauts and the Biggest Disruption In (modern) Business History

An interesting and instructive essay by Andrew McAfee whose book The Geek Way on how corporations have changed and evolved over a century or more. There’s a whiff of techno-worship and whiggery in his writing, but he’s invariably interesting and knowledgeable. I found this particular essay informative, and it contains some charts that make one sit up, especially the ones that compare the West and East coasts of the US. He begins with the irony of how Boeing (an old-style industrial corporation) took an unconscionable time to build a spacecraft that could take astronauts to the International Space Station, but is unable to take them back to earth. So they will have to be rescued by — guess what? — by a SpaceX rocket built by Elon Musk’s geeks! And it turns out that they only brought underwear for a short stay.

My commonplace booklet

Barry Blitt’s front cover of the current issue of the New Yorker.

Linkblog

Stolen iPhone. I Survived.

David Birch’s iPhone was stolen. He’s written a really helpful account of how he mitigated the potential damage. He sums up the lessons thus:

If your iPhone is snatched:

First, use your laptop (or a friend’s laptop) log in to your Apple account immediately, wipe the iPhone and change your iCloud password. Do this before you call the police or anyone else.

Second, use your spare phone (or a friend’s phone) and call the phone company get the number blocked.

Third, call the police and get the crime number you will need for your insurance. The police are not going to do anything about getting your phone back (it would take every police officer in Britain to do something about this).

To which I would add — if you’re in London (and especially in Westminster — where almost a third of the thefts occur — do not walk around with your iPhone in your hand or in an accessible pocket.

The latest figures (from the Office of National Statistics) show that over the last decade mobile phones have overtaken cash and payment cards as the items most often stolen from individuals in the UK.

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Before the Fall

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.”

• David Bowie, speaking to the New York Times — in 2002!.

Amazingly perceptive. Apple’s iPod was just a year old and we were all carrying our music around with us, rather as Victorian tourists in India carried bottles of boiled water. And now we just turn on the tap marked ‘Spotify’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major, K. 332: II. Adagio | Seong-Jin Cho

Link

Long Read of the Day

You may think that; I couldn’t possibly comment

Lovely blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) on the vexed topic of the comments that appear under many articles published online.

When you arrive at the bottom of a story on a news site, you will—especially if the story appears in the “Opinion” section—often find yourself effectively being invited to comment on what you’ve just read. Come on, you’re not just a reader now: you’re also one of the people with the power to make your voice heard! At last you can stick it to The Man!

So what’s your reaction when you find that 1,500 people have already commented on the article?

So when you see that number, do you think: wa-hey! This must have some fun going on, it’s time that people heard my view on this too.

Or do you think: there cannot possibly be any value in being the 1,501st comment below this story.

My guess is that you fall into the latter category. And yet there are plenty of people out there who do not. They see an article with 200 comments—arguably more than even a quite devoted reader who reaches that point is going to bother with—and think to themselves what this really needs is my opinion, because that’s what people have been missing in all this.

Read on.

Speaking personally…. I’ve always been opposed to comment streams that are not moderated — and many (most?) are not because moderation costs money. What unmoderated commenting reveals is that most people haven’t the faintest idea of how to formulate an argument.

Years ago I had an interesting conversation with a well-known journalist who had recently taken up photography and was delightedly posting his work on Flickr — and also following other photographers on the platform. He particularly liked the pictures of one of his followees and one day wrote to him complimenting him on an image but suggesting that it might have been even more effective if it had been cropped in a certain way.

And the response? “Go f**k yourself.”

Constructive criticism is an art not widely understood..

Books, etc.

David Spiegelhalter (Boris Johnson’s least favourite statistician) has a new book coming in September. Hooray!

AI cheating, the education system and common sense

Yesterday’s Observer column:

LLMs are a burning issue for the humanities in particular because the essay is such a key pedagogical tool for teaching students how to research, think and write. More importantly, perhaps, the essay also plays a central role in how they are graded and assessed. The bad news is that LLMs threaten to make that venerable pedagogy untenable. And that there’s no technical fix in sight.

The good news is that the problem isn’t insoluble – if educators in these disciplines are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching to the new reality. Other pedagogies are available. But they require, if not a change of heart, two changes of mindset.

The first is an acceptance that LLMs – as the distinguished Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik puts it – are “cultural technologies”, like writing, print, libraries and internet search. In other words, they are tools for human augmentation, not replacement.

Second, and more importantly perhaps, is a need to reinforce in students’ minds the importance of writing as a process…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

On the language of LLMs

Rob Nelson has a marvellous essay on his Substack

At its core, the debate over how to treat LLMs is about the relationship between computation and cognition. Enthusiasts don’t see a problem with using the concepts of human cognition to describe the behavior of LLMs. For skeptics, human thought is vastly more complex than the computational processes happening in even the largest models, and because LLMs do not understand context, they do not know anything. Using words like think, write, or speak to describe what LLMs do is a category error. As Edsger Dijkstra analogized, asking if a machine can think is as relevant as asking if submarines can swim.

The essay is particularly good on the confusions that arise when machine-learning researchers use terms like ‘attention’ in a very specialised way — as a word to describe the information processing that occurs in a transformer-based LLM, but which is totally unlike how we use the term in ordinary human-to-human discourse. Just to underline the problem, the seminal 2017 research paper in which Google researchers announced the conceptual breakthrough represented by the ‘transformer’ model had the provocative title “Attention Is All You Need”.

Feedback

My comments on how the Breugel painting in last Wednesday’s edition highlighted the ways agriculture has changed over the centuries reminded Joe Dunne of another painting — John Constable’s ‘The Cornfield’.

(For a zoomable version click here)

Joe thinks that in the painting Constable was criticising the impact of the Industrial Revolution on farming. Young people were moving to the cities to work in factories where they could get better and stable wages. And he lists evidence in the painting supporting this conjecture. For example:

• There are only three workers in the field compared to 20 in Breugel’s 1565 ‘The Harvesters’.
• The gate is hanging off its hinges – nobody to fix it (the donkeys & sheep have access to the wheat field so it’s vulnerable to damage).
• The farmer inside the gate of the wheat field is quite old (stooped) indicating the youth have left for the city.
• The plough is still out in the open and therefore rusting even though it’s now August (corn is ripe) and the ploughing was done in March. No staff to look after it properly.
• The tree on the left of the painting is dead – no staff to render the lane safe by cutting it down.
• The young boy in the foreground is looking after the sheep – no mature adult available to do this job.

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