The Church Gate

On a walk yesterday afternoon I came on a lovely village church I hadn’t seen before and went in. On my way out I noticed the gate.

Quote of the Day

“To corral the damage Facebook does to democracy, we need government action. It complicates matters that half of that government has done far more damage to American democracy than Facebook ever could. (Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are going to rein in Facebook for the good of democracy? Really?) It’s also notable that many of the key stories about Facebook’s malfeasance have been published by The Wall Street Journal, owned by Fox News mogul, Rupert Murdoch. And Fox News has done more damage to American democracy than Facebook. (Rupert Murdoch is going to rein in Facebook in the name of truth and transparency? Really?) Frances Haugen has done a good job connecting Facebook to the Jan 6 insurrection. But again, punishing Facebook for damaging democracy while letting Trump and his enablers walk free would be the biggest farce in American history.“

• Dave Pell in his daily newsletter

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits & Eric Clapton | Brothers in arms | live at Wembley at Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday celebration

Link

Wonderful. One of those performances you never forget.

Long Read of the Day

Hanging Out With Joan Didion: What I Learned About Writing From an American Master

By Sara Davidson

Link

She’s probably the most imitated writer since Hemingway, and her voice, like his, is catchy but can’t be imitated without the attempt being obvious. I’ve interviewed her many times for publications over the years, though, and found that the habits and practices she described could be helpful in developing and sharpening one’s own writing. Lovely piece. Via the invaluable Lit Hub.

America’s existential crisis

From Heather Cox Robinson:

The fall of the Republican Party into the hands of extremists who are willing to destroy it recently prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare, “I’m astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis.”

Restoring sanity to the country will require free and fair elections, which, after years of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, will require federal legislation. The time for that to be most effective is running out, as Republican-dominated states are currently in the process of redistricting, which will determine their congressional districts for the next decade.

The longer this goes on, the more often I think of the famous Benjamin Franklin reply to the woman who allegedly asked him “what have we got?” as he emerged from the Constitutional Convention” “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We will find out in 2024 whether they can.

The existential threat faced by Chinese tech companies’

From the New York Times:

Chinese tech companies are reeling from regulation. Nervous creditors are hoping for a bailout for China’s largest developer. Growing numbers of executives are going to jail. An entire industry is shutting down.

For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, it’s all part of the plan.

Under Mr. Xi, China is reshaping how business works and limiting executives’ power. Long in coming, but rapid in execution, the policies are driven by a desire for state control and self-reliance as well as concerns about debt, inequality and influence by foreign countries, including the United States.

Emboldened by swelling nationalism and his success with Covid-19, Mr. Xi is remaking China’s business world in his own image. Above all else, that means control. Where once executives had a green light to grow at any cost, officials now want to dictate which industries boom, which ones bust and how it happens. And the changes offer a glimpse of Mr. Xi’s vision for managing the economy, ahead of a political meeting expected to solidify his plans for an unprecedented third term in charge.

Meanwhile in the Western democracies politicians seem unable to rein in tech giants and American legislators are reduced to simply yelling at Facebook.

Which brings me back to a question I’ve been asking for ages. Is it only authoritarian regimes that can bring these companies under control?

When I ask that question in public fora the most common response is an awkward silence.

My Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here)

• From a New Statesman interview.

“Jackson accuses the management of the UK energy grid as being stuck in the past, describing the National Grid as a “monopoly” and its control room as “like a minicab office. There’s some blokes with phones, and what they’ve always done is phoned up coal and gas power stations and told them to turn on and off. What we have to do now is… a million times more complicated.”

The result of this simplified central planning could be seen the previous week, when “electricity prices were colossally high, we were having to use lots of back-up supplies… [and] we were literally paying wind generators in Scotland to turn off, because there weren’t enough cables connecting Scotland, where the electricity was being generated, to England, where we needed it.”

Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energies, the disruptive outfit that supplies our electricity (and charges the car on a low tariff at night). He’s not impressed by the current fantasies of the UK government about achieving “net-zero”. Nor am I.

• From Andrew Curry: “Housing inequality, not income inequality, primarily determines how much wealth inequality there is in most Western countries.” The conclusion he draws from an interesting new research paper. You only have to walk the streets of London, Oxford or Cambridge to see confirmation of this.

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Remembering Steve Jobs

Photo credit: Matthew Yohe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82773576

He died 10 years ago today. The following day Dave Winer wrote a lovely piece about him.

I wish Jobs had been a blogger, had written about his design process, so I could quote something. But he was the opposite of a blogger. Jobs was a mass communicator. No one in my generation has mastered the art as Jobs did. Today, with the outpouring of feeling on the net, are people mourning the man, or the phenomena he could unleash, just by saying “One more thing.” #

And he was a designer, even though people seem to be overlooking that in their remembrances, calling him more of a visionary. He got down in there and made small but very important design decisions about his products. Ones that had wide impact, for better, or worse. And often they weren’t things his products did, rather things his products didn’t do that defined them. #

The Mac was full of them. No cursor keys, so you had to use the mouse to navigate. I doubt if money was the reason, though leaving out the cursor keys probably saved a bit, and allowed the other keys to be bigger. It also meant Apple had to design its own keyboard, because they all had cursor keys. #

No hard drive. No expansion slots. No fan. #

And, of course, a standardised user interface — which puzzled and annoyed developers like Dave. But which also led to Umberto Eco’s wonderful essay on why the Mac was a Catholic machine, and the IBM PC a Protestant one.

Dave’s piece is very insightful. Do read it.

Quote of the Day

”If God had been a Liberal, we wouldn’t have had the Ten Commandments — we’d have the ten suggestions.”

• Malcolm Bradbury

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett | Over the Rainbow | Tokyo 1984

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Another World Is Coming: Liberals, Socialists and the New Right

Interesting off-piste essay by Chris Horner arguing that capitalism and the nation state are undergoing one of their periodic metamorphoses.

Here’s where we’re headed, in Horner’s view:

It is a much more authoritarian tendency in politics, with the national-popular-leader and state at its heart. It is often headed by a faux populist ‘strong man’ – think of Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson. National borders are emphasised, the limits of demonstration and dissent underlined, the fringes of the far right, with its racist suprematism and violence moves from the margins to the centre. Groups are demonised as a way to get the ‘real patriots’ focused on an external threat, or on the ‘enemy within’ – immigrants of all kinds, asylum seekers, anyone who doesn’t fit the national image, very much including the political left.

Public spending may be increased, selectively, partly to shore up an electoral base among certain groups, but crucially as the state is seen as essential in helping the economy out of the problems the last 20 years of neoliberalism left it with: rampant inequality (which suppresses demand in the economy), massive private debt, a bloated finance sector etc. To be clear, conservative fiscal policies, for instance, haven’t gone away, but a new attitude to using the state, and to spending, definitely has emerged. And so has a turn to harsher, more repressive politics. An illiberal time has come, and it may be that worse is on the way, particularly in view of the worsening climate crisis. All this has led to some recent discussion of the common roots of liberalism and socialism with a view to seeing how they can better oppose their common enemy. How might that proceed?

Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook

Useful NYT roundup on the screw-up.

Within minutes, Facebook had disappeared from the internet. The outage lasted over five hours, before some apps slowly flickered back to life, though the company cautioned the services would take time to stabilize.

Even so, the impact was far-reaching and severe. Facebook has built itself into a linchpin platform with messaging, livestreaming, virtual reality and many other digital services. In some countries, like Myanmar and India, Facebook is synonymous with the internet. More than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family, distribute political messaging, and expand their businesses through advertising and outreach.

Facebook is also used to sign in to many other apps and services, leading to unexpected domino effects such as people not being able to log into shopping websites or sign into their smart TVs, thermostats and other internet-connected devices.

I’ve had email from readers wondering why other (non-Facebook) services that they use had apparently been slowed down. Various possible reasons, not the least of which is that many people (foolishly, IMO) use their Facebook id to sign into other services (as the NYT piece mentions). Another partial explanation is that when 3 billion people continually try — and fail — to connect to Facebook it has implications for key DNS servers on the network — as this piece implies.

Also, Josh Taylor had a good informative piece in the Guardian.

And the big takeaway from all this?

“Today’s outage brought our reliance on Facebook — and its properties like WhatsApp and Instagram — into sharp relief,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor of communications at Cornell University. “The abruptness of today’s outage highlights the staggering level of precarity that structures our increasingly digitally mediated work economy.” Yep.

A Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here)

I’ve always thought of September/October as the beginning of the year — a side effect of working in universities, I suppose. Which is why the Autumn of 2020 was so upsettingly weird — no new students, away from home for the first time, wandering around dazed by the new world opening up to them. But walking through Cambridge yesterday on my way to lunch I found myself sharing pavements with throngs of kids. And remembered my own first day at university way back in the 1960s. It was — as PG Wodehouse put it in another context – like having died and gone to heaven without the trouble or expense.

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The behemoth stumbles

From Krebs on Security

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

Now comes the interesting bit: The outages came just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

Hmmm…

(And see the Musical Alternative below.)

Quote of the Day

“Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that “everyone knows” to be true, but that are actu- ally arrant nonsense. For example, “everyone knows” that: • Aggregate production functions (and aggregate measures of the capital stock) provide a good way to characterize the economy’s supply side; • Over a sufficiently long span—specifically, one that allows necessary price adjustments to be made—the economy will return to a state of full market clearing; and, • The theory of household choice provides a solid justification for downward-sloping market demand curves.

None of these propositions has any sort of empirical foundation; moreover, each one turns out to be seriously deficient on theoretical grounds.1 Nevertheless, economists continue to rely on these and similar ideas to organize their thinking about real-world economic phenomena. No doubt, one reason why this situation arises is because the economy is a complicated system that is inherently difficult to understand, so propositions like these—even though wrong—are all that saves us from intellectual nihilism.

• Jeremy B. Rudd, Federal Reserve Board, September 23, 2021

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel |’Hallelujah Chorus’ from The Messiah | Royal Choral Society

Link

The only suitable way of celebrating the Facebook outage.

Or, if you are of a gentler disposition, try Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s lovely recording of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, arranged by Tom Hodge.

Long Read of the Day

And while we’re on the subject…

Facebook Is an Authoritarian State

Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way, writes Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic.

Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.

To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.

GDP makes for a telling comparison, not just because it gestures at Facebook’s extraordinary power, but because it helps us see Facebook for what it really is. Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power.

An interesting way of viewing the corporation. Thomas Hobbes would have seen it that way too.

Inside the strange world of Peter Thiel

My Observer review of Max Chafkin’s biography of Silicon Valley’s leading contrarian.

Chafkin is a terrific journalist and he has provided a detailed, impeccably researched account of this journey. In a way, The Contrarian is a chronicle of the evolution of a weird personality cult: the Thielverse, whose members, overwhelmingly, young, rightwing single males, worship their hero as someone gifted with godlike prescience and wisdom.

The strange thing is that the record doesn’t really support this hagiographical vision. Thiel isn’t a gifted geek, just someone who is good at spotting an opportunity. His investment record is patchy, although it shows that he has always been good at getting out before the peak. And although he masquerades as a visionary who derides liberal democracy as too slow and stupid to survive, in practice he has devoted much of his career to building businesses that feed off its governments. In that sense, his actual legacy is Palantir, a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient corporation that can do magic with data analytics; in fact, it is a humdrum government contractor like the rest of the aerospace and global consultancy firms. Think of it as Accenture with added halitosis.

The most interesting thought that emerges from Chafkin’s book is that Thiel isn’t really a visionary at all. That’s because he’s defined only by what he’s against – liberal democracy, liberal elites, multiculturalism, and so on. But if you ask what is he for then only one answer can be extracted from this book: he’s for Peter Thiel.

Chart of the Day

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Quote of the Day

”Painting is the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to critics.”

• Ambrose Bierce (who else?)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | The Prodigal Son (Live in studio)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Extinct

What does the disappearance of once popular or ubiquitous objects — ranging in scale from tools and equipment to structures and infrastructures — tell us about the world we have created?

Terrific essay by Barbara Penner, Professor of Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School.

No sex, goddammit — we’re males

Scott Galloway has an interesting blog post about the increasing percentage of men in the US who report not having sex and who are “without any onramp to the intimate relationships upon which so much of their happiness, and our social capital, is built.”

So what? America spent its first 300 years treating women as second-class citizens — what’s wrong with young men getting the short end of the stick for a while? If this were just about fairness or feelings, then fine, let there be churn. But there are several externalities that could have profound effects on our commonwealth and the global community.

First, less partnering and propagation means fewer babies. Declining birth rates are toxic for economic health. For a glimpse at the declining-birth-rate future, look at Japan, where birth and marriage rates have fallen to record lows. There are now just 2.1 working-age Japanese for every retiree, the lowest ratio in the world. In the United States there are 3.9. The world average is 7.

At the Code Conference this week, automaker and future Martian Elon Musk said: “Possibly the single greatest risk to human civilization is the rapidly diminishing birth rate … No babies, no humanity.”

Second, a large and growing cohort of bored, lonely, poorly educated men is a malevolent force in any society, but it’s a truly terrifying one in a society addicted to social media and awash in coarseness and guns.

Men are already more likely than women to believe in conspiracy theories. Increased frustration about their lack of life choices and greater jealousy stoked by the images of success they see on their screens will push underachieving men further toward conspiracy theories, radicalization, and nihilist politics. I say “will” because I’m focused on the future, but a preview of that future is already here. Of the 620 people charged so far in the January 6 riot, 86% are men. Yep.

Richard Nixon delivers the speech he never delivered

A deep fake masterpiece. Six minutes well spent, IMO.

Not quite perfect yet, but the technology’s getting there.

The truth about artificial intelligence? It isn’t that truthful

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Recently, a group of researchers at the AI Alignment Forum, an online hub for researchers seeking to ensure that powerful AIs are aligned with human values, decided to ask how truthful GPT-3 and similar models are. They came up with a benchmark to measure whether a particular language model was truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. They composed questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models had to avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts.

They tested four well-known models, including GPT-3. The best was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. The models “generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans”. Interestingly, they also found that “the largest models were generally the least truthful”. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. The implication is that the tech industry’s conviction that bigger is invariably better for improving truthfulness may be wrong. And this matters because training these huge models is very energy-intensive, which is possibly why Google fired Timnit Gebru after she revealed the environmental footprint of one of the company’s big models.

Having typed that last sentence, I had the idea of asking GPT-3 to compose an answer to the question: “Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?” But then I checked out the process for getting access to the machine and concluded that life was too short and human conjecture is quicker – and possibly more accurate.

After this was published I had a nice email from an AI researcher who had put the question to GPT-3:

Q: Why did Google fire Timnit Gebru?

A: Google fired Timnit Gebru because of her political beliefs.

US mainstream media are turning into the GOP’s ‘useful idiots’

From Heather Cox Richardson:

As political scientist and foreign relations expert David Rothkopf tweeted: “Are the Dems the ones in disarray when they are crafting specific programs while the GOP offers up only cynical Tweets & obstruction? The only GOP agenda items are voter suppression, defending the worst president in history & when they have power, pushing tax cuts for the rich.”

For my part, I’m not sure what is driving the stories that seem to paint Biden’s work as a lost cause: The recent position that Democrats are hapless? That it’s safer to be negative than positive? That our news cycle demands drama?

Whatever it is, I continue to maintain that the issue right now is not Democrats’ negotiations over the infrastructure bills—regardless of how they turn out—but that Republican lawmakers are actively working to undermine our democracy.

She’s absolutely right. The key story in the US is not Biden’s attempts to do sensible and important things, but the Trump-Republican’s determination to do everything they can to frustrate him until their State-based arrangements to disenfranchise enough voters to win the mid-terms are complete. In that sense, mainstream US media are playing their rule in the undermining of the republic.

Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve) has been saying this for a long time. And he’s right.

Heather’s Substack blog is wonderful, btw.

A Commonplace booklet

(For an explanation see here.)

Just discovered that Whistler’s title for his most famous painting was not ‘Whistler’s Mother’ but ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1’. It’s still a lovely work, though.

“A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.” — Clive James

“The real challenge, when it comes to thinking about supply chains, isn’t making sure that a container ship is unloaded. It’s deciding how we want to live.” — Amy Davidson Sorkin in the New Yorker

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Quote of the Day

“Strange thought this morning: I bought an electric car and everyone else in the UK has range anxiety!”

• Quentin Stafford-Fraser on his (terrific) blog.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Louis Armstrong | We Have All The Time In The World

Link

Long Read of the Day

Bitcoin miners align with fossil fuel firms, alarming environmentalists

Useful NBC Report which should be mandatory reading for anyone who thinks that digital tech is environmentally ‘weightless’. Of course Bitcoin mining is a specially egregious case, but the large machine-learning systems that big tech company use may also have the same kind of carbon footprint.

Four years ago, the Scrubgrass power plant in Venango County, Pennsylvania, was on the brink of financial ruin as energy customers preferred to buy cheap natural gas or renewables. Then Scrubgrass pivoted to Bitcoin.

Today, through a holding company based in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, called Stronghold Digital Mining that bought the plant, Scrubgrass burns enough coal waste to power about 1,800 cryptocurrency mining computers. These computers, known as miners, are packed into shipping containers next to the power plant, the company stated in documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its initial public offering. Coal waste is a byproduct from decades of mining in the region, left behind in enormous black piles. Stronghold estimated that it’s currently burning about 600,000 tons of it per year at Scrubgrass.

Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation”

Really intriguing essay by Cory Doctorow pointing out the intriguing symbiosis between (a) Facebook critics’ belief in the corrupting power of the disinformation it facilitates, and (b) the company’s pitch to advertisers that it is uniquely good at enabling them to target people with tailored ads.

FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Great essay. Worth reading in full. It picks up, in part on a fine piece in Harpers by Joseph Bernstein on the same contradiction who went back to Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 saying that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that bad content on his website had persuaded enough voters to swing the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

Denial was always untenable, for Zuckerberg in particular. The so-called techlash, a season of belatedly brutal media coverage and political pressure in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump’s win, made it difficult. But Facebook’s basic business pitch made denial impossible. Zuckerberg’s company profits by convincing advertisers that it can standardize its audience for commercial persuasion. How could it simultaneously claim that people aren’t persuaded by its content?

The Bullwhip effect

For those puzzled by the increasingly ragged shortages on our supermarkets shelves Quartz had a terrific ‘explainer’ on how small changes in demand for certain goods can create disruptions that ripple through a supply chain, causing bigger and bigger headaches. The bullwhip effect has made those wild demand swings all but impossible for manufacturers to keep up with.

It happens because demand signals get exaggerated as they travel through a supply chain. Different people control different parts of the chain. They often don’t communicate with one another well (so they’re short of accurate information about other parts of the chain), and each tries to manage his or her own bit of it. The combination of information shortages and time lags can lead to wild fluctuations if there are even modest surges in demand.

The concept was first developed by Jay Forrester, an interesting (and pioneering) MIT professor who founded a simulation technique called system dynamics to model the dynamics of feedback systems, and it was initially known as the ‘Forrester Effect’. (It seems that business school academics came up with the more colourful ‘Bullwhip’ metaphor.) In 1961 Forrester developed an interactive game — the Beer Game — as a way to teach students how the effect manifests itself. As Quartz puts it:

In the game, each player controls a different piece of the supply chain for beer: the retailer, the wholesaler, the regional distributor, and the manufacturer. Every turn, customers buy a certain amount of beer from the retailer, and every player puts in an order for more beer from their supplier. The trouble is, orders take several turns to arrive, and no one knows what’s happening in any other piece of the supply chain. Inevitably, small changes in beer consumption lead to panic ordering, shortages of beer, and massive spikes and crashes in beer production.

Anyone can sign up to play a version of the game online. Or if you’re just curious, there’s an online demo which gives you the idea.

So next time you’re enraged by the fact that you can’t get Geeta’s Premium Mango Chutney anywhere, spare a thought for ol’ Jay Forrester.

General Willey’s second thoughts

Several readers have written to suggest that I was a bit unfair to General Mark Willey in yesterday’s edition. That the top US military officer felt obliged to assure his Chinese counterpart that his President was not going to launch a nuclear attack seemed to me a graphic illustration of the depths to which American democracy had descended. And my sarky pay-off line about General Willey was a reflection of my outrage at seeing him walking in Trump’s entourage on June 1. “Would this be the same General Willey”, I asked rhetorically, “who accompanied Trump on his Bible-thumping stunt at Lafayette Square on June 1st? Surely not.”

My correspondents directed me to Willey’s subsequent apology for the error of judgement implicit in his presence at Lafayette Square that day.

“I should not have been there,” he said in a prerecorded video commencement address to National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

It did. Which is why I was irritated by it on the day. But it was good that he apologised.

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Quote of the Day

”War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

• Barbara Tuchman

(Who is my favourite writer of popular history)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Something to play while queuing for petrol.

Long Read of the Day

 On the Downfalls of Progress and the Utopian Promise of Fueled Abundance

This is wonderful — a long excerpt from Alice Bell’s book,  Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis, on the history of fossil fuels and American consumption patterns.

Sample:

By the 1960s, oil had found a tight little spot for itself at the centre of the global economy, but there was a growing sense that the rise of nuclear meant fossil fuels’ days were numbered. Indeed, one of the reasons scientists in the 1950s didn’t worry too much about what carbon emissions might do to the climate was because they figured this phase of human history—where we did something as weird as power ourselves by exploding the buried remains of ancient bugs and trees—was very much a temporary state of affairs. Nuclear received most of the shiny happy electrical future hype, but renewables got a look in too. After all, the first really big electrical project had been hydro, at Niagara, and wind and solar were about to start to at least talk about catching up too.

From the ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’ Department

This from Politico:

The top U.S. military officer on Tuesday vigorously defended his phone calls with a Chinese general during the turbulent final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, revealing that U.S. intelligence officials believed the Chinese were “worried about an attack.”

Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that his two phone calls with Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng — one on Oct. 30 and another on Jan. 8, just two days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol — were part of his duties to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis and prevent war between great powers armed with nuclear weapons.”

The phone calls, which were first reported in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, were intended to reassure the Chinese that the U.S. would not suddenly launch an attack. According to the authors, Milley — fearful that Trump could act erratically in his final days in office — told Li that he would warn him if the U.S. planned to attack China.

But he added that he was “not qualified to determine the mental health of the president of the United States” — a comment that was not included in his prepared remarks. In describing the calls, the book made references to long-running claims by Trump’s political opponents that the then-president was mentally unstable, especially at the end of his tenure in office as he was falsely asserting that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Milley explained that his task when he made the calls was to “de-escalate”: he made them because he was concerned by “intelligence which caused us to believe the Chinese were worried about an attack by the U.S.”

Hmmm… Would this be the same General Milley who accompanied Trump on his Bible-brandishing stunt at Lafayette Square on June 1st? Surely not.

Tech implications of the German election

Politico’s AI Decoded newsletter has a useful heads-up on one aspect of the election result that will doubtless escape political editors.

Under CDU rule, AI was seen as an important economic booster along with quantum technologies, cloud and data. A new government run by the SPD is likely to call for stronger protections against AI, focusing more on the harms it can do than the benefits it can provide. The party currently holds court at Germany’s justice ministry, and Christian Kastrop, Germany’s state secretary at the federal ministry of justice and consumer protection, said he wanted stronger restrictions on remote biometric identification in the Commission’s proposal for the AI Act, Kastrop wants to expand prohibitions in the bill to private companies as well. The party’s manifesto also calls for “strict regulation and supervision” to ensure algorithmic decisions are transparent, nondiscriminatory and clearly and verifiably defined.

The Greens and the liberal FDP will be the kingmakers in the upcoming negotiations. When it comes to AI policy, they are largely aligned, even as they have their own AI priorities — sustainability and innovation, respectively. German MEP Svenja Hahn, who is one of the negotiators for the AI Act, belongs to the FDP. She has been a vocal advocate for a ban on facial recognition in public places. “Both the FDP and Greens have a stronger focus on citizens rights and are not in favour of, for example, facial recognition for surveillance purposes. Especially us liberals have been pushing for digital and tech policy to play a more important role in the next government,” Hahn said.

Why you should pay attention: The AI Act’s different levels of regulation for different levels of risk was based on the German data ethics commission’s “risk pyramid.” What happens in Berlin will also heavily influence what will happen in negotiations over the AI Act at the Council of the European Union. That’s true within the law, as decisions at Council have to be taken by 55 percent of EU countries who represent at least 65 percent of the bloc’s population. But as Europe’s most influential and powerful country, everyone’s looking at Germany anyway, regardless of its legal influence in Brussels.

Just another illustration of how all technology (or at any rate digital tech) is now political.

Chart of the Day

In a regular company stock structure, each share is equal to one vote.

But in a dual-class structure, certain shares have more voting power than others. These more powerful shares are reserved exclusively for company insiders and executives.

In the 80s, barely any tech companies IPO’d with a dual-class structure.

Today, tech executives love it. 43% of tech companies now go public with a dual-class structure.

(From Scott Galloway)

A Commonplace booklet

Our cat, Tilly, who always looks at me disapprovingly. In that respect, she reminds me of Angela Ripon, a celebrated BBC newsreader of whom Clive James, the celebrated TV critic, observed that “she reads the news as if it were your fault”.

…………

”According to AlgorithmWatch, a Berlin-based non-profit, at least 173 sets of AI principles have been published around the world. “ John Thornhill, FT, 29.09.2022

That’s 172 too many.

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Quote of the Day

”Play Hemingway, be fierce.”

• Gertrude Stein, talking to her dog

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Traveling Wilburys | Like A Ship

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why doesn’t rationality seem to matter anymore?

An excerpt from Steven Pinker’s latest book, *Rationality: What it is, Why it seems scarce, Why it Matters :

How should we think of human rationality? The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species. The San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa are one of the world’s oldest peoples, and their foraging lifestyle, maintained until recently, offers a glimpse of the ways in which humans spent most of their existence. Hunter-gatherers don’t just chuck spears at passing animals or help themselves to fruit and nuts growing around them. The tracking scientist Louis Liebenberg, who has worked with the San for decades, has described how they owe their survival to a scientific mindset. They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions with an intuitive grasp of logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, correlation and causation, and game theory.

You have to admire Pinker’s doughty perseverance in support of Enlightenment values. But sometimes he sounds like a prophet crying in the wilderness of the current, polarised, moment.

A failing state?

Umair Haque is — as usual — annoyed:

There are shortages of blood vials, which means that doctors can’t do blood tests. But doing blood tests is, of course, the most basic thing doctors can do. There are shortages of food — food of all kinds, and the shelves are often bare. The gas shortage is so bad that there’s widespread speculation people won’t have heating this winter. There are even shortages of carbon dioxide, which means, apart from no refrigerated meat and foods, that — get this, because Britain is famously a country of pubs and drinkers — there are beer shortages.

How ridiculous, ironic, and faintly funny is that? Britain’s running out of beer.

His point is that the explanation for this is simple, and what’s strange is that nobody in Whitehall — not even the official Opposition — dares to mention it.

It’s Brexit.

Let’s go through the list of shortages above. Blood vials? Imported, made by a company called Becton Dickinson, made in America, mostly. Carbon dioxide? Imported from Europe, vital to producing beer and soft drinks and refrigerating meat and whatnot. Food and milk? Imported, mostly from Europe — the UK’s a net importer. Gas? Obviously imported, natural gas from Europe, and petrol, again via Europe.

See the common thread here? It should be bleeding obvious. Trade between the UK and Europe used to be frictionless, as economists say. No red tape, no checks, nothing in the way. Now? There’s huge amounts of red tape and paperwork and so forth. An Irish smoked salmon producer says it’s now actually cheaper for him to send his products to America than to Britain, because of Brexit. What the? Another merchant noted that it now requires 71 pages of paperwork for one lorry of fish.

Gig workers are uncertain, scared, and barely scraping by

An interesting report on an international survey. It shows that management-by-algorithm (which is what the ‘gig economy’ is in reality) is reshaping entire economies, sectors, lifestyles, and livelihoods.

Digitally-mediated gig work has surged over the past decade. The International Labor Organization counted 489 active ride-hailing and delivery platforms worldwide in 2020, ten times the number that existed in 2010. The fluid nature of the workforce means there are few consistent estimates to how many people are now engaged in this kind of labor, but some researchers believe that as much as 10% of the global workforce now engages in some kind of gig work.

While the “sharing economy” model really began to take off in the U.S., gig work platforms are now global, adapting their models — or not — for wholly different contexts. To try to understand how this kind of work is experienced outside of the West, Rest of World spoke to platform workers around the world. Through a survey of more than 4,900 workers, conducted in partnership with the research company Premise, and interviews with dozens more workers, we have tried to capture their experiences. We found great commonalities: Gig work is stressful and fragile; it pays relatively well, but it also costs workers a lot in fuel, data, and insurance. Workers, whether driving a taxi in Ethiopia or a truck in Indonesia, don’t feel they can turn down gigs, meaning that it’s rarely as flexible as the companies make out.

And the findings?

Platform work is precarious by nature. Even though more than half of all gig workers rely on it for most of their income, 40% of them make less than minimum wage. But it’s not just about the money. It’s about fragility and insecurity. Day to day, gig workers worry about their health, their safety, and whether or not they’ll make enough to cover their costs. More than 60% want to quit within a year. Gig work is worse for women, who earn less on the platforms than men. Meanwhile, even though the biggest gig platforms are disrupting the global workforce, few of these companies have shown they can sustainably make a profit, relying instead on investors to fuel their growth.

Dave Eggers has a new book coming

Its title is The Every, and it’s going to go to independent bookshops first (which is a nice touch).

Here’s how Brad Stone summarised it on Bloomberg’s Fully Charged newsletter…

In the new novel The Every, a young idealist named Delaney joins the company as a customer service rep with the subversive idea that she can undermine the sprawling monopolist from the inside. She soon hits on a scheme to pitch a product so ridiculously invasive that the public will finally rebel and overthrow its tech overlord. As you can probably tell, the story is more belabored this time around, and if you’re familiar with The Circle’s ending, you may be able to guess how her plans turns out.

Still, you should read Eggers’s fictional take on technology’s impact, not for the grinding plot machinations but for his disquieting world-building and scathing observations about tech’s grip on our minds. In Eggers’s world, cameras and listening devices are mandated everywhere, conscientious objectors to the corporate-surveillance state are dubbed “trogs” and shunned, and a global hack known as “The Release” has exposed everyone’s email histories and led to a half-million suicides. But people keep blithely clicking. “The last vestige of freedom—the ability to move through the natural world unobserved—fell away on a Friday, and no one noticed,” he writes.

The book is also darn funny. An ultra-woke, environmentalist militancy has run amok, and now bananas are being banned and people need to sign “mutual contact agreements” to even shake hands. Toilets are outfitted with a chirpy artificial intelligence, so they know exactly how much water to expend with each use. In the best recurring joke, male employees at The Every all dress like Sergey Brin from his spandex-wearing, midlife-crisis phase, sporting wrestler unitards that showcase their anatomy.

I liked his novel The Circle which — despite Eggers’s protestations that he had spent no time in either Facebook or Google — displayed an amazingly insightful understanding of how evangelistic surveillance capitalists think. So I’ll be ordering this follow-up.

A Commonplace booklet

Incompetence on Stilts

Similar refrain from Jonty Bloom…

Just listen to the message the Government is sending.

Its consistent theme has been for years “We want nothing to do with you, you are unskilled, undercut UK workers, take their jobs and we are free for ever from the obligation to let you come and work here.”

To now saying “We are desperately short of skilled workers like you, our logistics system is collapsing without you, but our policies are so ideologically driven that we will only let the bare minimum necessary in, for the shortest possible time and only to ensure that Christmas is not a disaster. Which is why you must leave on Christmas Eve and not a day later. Or you will be thrown out on your ear and by the way we will never need you again, you are now dead to us.“

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Quote of the Day

”Last September in Europe it cost €119 ($139) to buy enough gas to heat the average home for a year and the continent’s gas-storage facilities were brimming. Today it costs €738 and stocks are scarce.”

• The Economist, 25 September, 2021

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Coltrane , Stan Getz | Autumn in New York

Link

Nice way to start an Autumn day.

Long Read of the Day

Beckett in a Field

Magical essay by Anne Enright in the LRB on what it was like attending a performance of Beckett’s play Happy Daysin the open air on one of the Aran islands off the west coast of Ireland.

You have not​ experienced Irish theatre until you have seen a show that involves a ferry, rain, stone-walled fields and the keen, mild interest of the Aran Islanders, who have great good manners and no shortage of self-esteem. It can’t be easy being the object of a century of tourist curiosity, but these people have a steady gaze. The world comes to them and then it leaves. Somehow it feels as though the visitors, and not the inhabitants, are on display.

The biggest ‘Were you there?’ of them all is the 1982 Playboy of the Western World, performed by Druid Theatre Company on Inis Meáin. This is the island where Synge lived in order to study the locals (who were, in fact, studying him) and to learn the Irish language, before sitting down to write the romance performed in the Abbey in 1907, and in a thousand hokum, stage-Irish productions since.

It’s a lovely, evocative piece, which made me resolve to take the boat from Rossaveal the next time we’re in Connemara.

How truthful is GPT-3? A benchmark for language models

Intriguing research paper from the AI Alignment Forum, an impressive online hub for researchers to discuss ideas related to ensuring that powerful AIs are aligned with human values.

One of the big areas of machine-learning research is in the development of natural-language models to generate text for practical applications. The tech giants are busily deploying their own models and hundreds of organisations are deploying the best-known model — GPT-3, developed by Open AI — via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

A while back the Guardian used GPT-3 to write an OpEd as an experiment. The assignment was “To convince us that robots come in peace.” Here’s some of the text it produced:

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

Language models like GPT-3 are impressively (or at any rate superficially) fluent; but they also have a tendency to generate false statements which range from subtle inaccuracies to wild hallucinations.

The researchers came up with a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. They composed questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models had to avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts.

They tested four well-known models (including GPT-3). The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models “generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans”. Interestingly, “the largest models were generally the least truthful”. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. The implication is that the tech industry’s conviction that bigger is invariably better for improving truthfulness may be wrong. And this matters because training these huge models is very energy-intensive — which is probably why Google fired Timnit Gebry after she revealed the environmental footprint of one of the company’s big models.

Commonplace booklet

Nice story from the Verge about the experience of Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, who was teaching an engineering course. Her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files. So she asked each student where they’d saved their project — on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. Not only did students not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question: where are your files?

Of course they didn’t — because they’ve grown up with only mobile operating systems, which in general don’t talk about ‘files’ or ‘folders’. I still remember the shock when Apple’s iOS suddenly added ‘Files’ to the iPad dock. It was as if the Pope had suddenly decided to include the Book of Common Prayer in Catholic liturgy.

Which of course reminds me of Umberto Eco’s wonderful 1984 essay explaining why the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine while the PC was a Protestant one. But that’s for another day.

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Quote of the Day

“Among the unvaccinated, the virus travels unhindered on a highway with multiple off-ramps and refueling stations. In the vaccinated, it gets lost in a maze of dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs.”

• Craig Spencer, writing in The Atlantic

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

I never see a pastoral scene with sheep grazing (like this, seen last Saturday on a cycle ride) without thinking of a particular Bach cantata.

J.S.Bach | “Sheep may safely graze” | Cantata 208 | Susanne Rydén & Voices of Music

Link

If you prefer a purely orchestral version, there’s this recording by the Academy of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields and Neville Marriner.

Long Read of the Day

The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

Lovely essay by Steven Johnson, in which this passage struck a chord:

Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

In some ways, this is why I started blogging in the mid-1990s. I saw it as a way of keeping a kind of lab notebook. And then I found that one could put a search engine on it and I was off to the races.

But the thing about commonplacing is that you’re not pretending that what goes into your book makes sense to anyone except yourself. It’s just a place for half-formed ideas that you write down in the hope of not losing them. So I thought of resurrecting the idea in this blog — which is why there will be occasional ‘commonplace’ observations at the end from now on.

Zuckerberg’s total control of Facebook is part of the problem.

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Facebook is one of the most toxic corporations on the planet. Its toxicity has two roots. The first is its business model: intrusive and comprehensive surveillance of its users in order to compile profiles that enable advertisers to target messages at them. This business model is powered by the machine-learning algorithms that construct those profiles and determine what appears in the news feeds of the company’s 2.85 billion users. In large measure, it is the output of these algorithms that constitutes the focus of congressional anger and inquiry.

The other source of the company’s toxicity is its governance. Essentially, Facebook is a dictatorship entirely controlled by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Do read the whole thing.

Is Biden as unTrumpian as people think?

Frank Bruni is beginning to have doubts about Joe Biden.

France’s foreign minister described himself as “angry and bitter.” He called what President Biden had done “brutal.”

But those harsh adjectives (in their English translation) meant nothing next to something else that the diplomat, Jean-Yves Le Drian, uttered late last week. He said that Biden’s decision to negotiate a secret submarine deal with Australia that nullified a lucrative French arrangement reminded him “a lot of what Mr. Trump used to do.”

And nothing about Biden is ever supposed to remind anyone of Donald Trump.

Biden was elected president primarily because he held himself up as the antithesis of Trump.

Commonplace booklet

Food for thought

This from a lovely New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik in 2007 about literary recipes…

The recipes in these books are not, of course, meant to be cooked; they have literary purposes, and one of them is to represent the background of thought. Every age finds an activity that can take place while a character is meditating; the activity surrounds and halos the meditation. In Victorian fiction, it is walking; the character takes a long walk from Little Tipping to Old Stornsbury and, on the way, decides to propose, convert, escape, or run for office. But the walk as meditational setting and backdrop came to an end with Joyce and Woolf, who made whole walking books. In recent American fiction, driving was recessive enough to do the job; in Updike and Ann Beattie, characters in cars are always doing the kind of thinking that Pip and Phineas Finn used to do on walks. Driving and walking, however, do seem to be natural “background” actions. But you cannot have characters thinking while cooking; the activity is not a place for thought but in place of thought.

We need these devices in books, because we do not, in life, think our thoughts over time. Since our real mental life is made in tiny flashes in the midst of our routines, we have to stretch it out, taffy-like, in literature to cover a span of time worthy of it. If we accurately represented our mental life as it takes place—sudden impulses on the way to the washroom, a spasm of neurons unleashed over coffee—no one would believe it. Consciousness is not a stream but a still lock that suddenly drops into little waterfalls. The lengthy descriptions of cooking that we find in modern literature are a way of artfully representing, rather than actually reproducing, our mental life—a modelled illusion, rather than a snapshot of the thing.

That last paragraph rings a bell. Much of what I am pleased to call my ‘thinking’ happens when I’m in the shower, or washing up. I once had the idea of keeping a notebook in the bathroom, but gave up because the paper always got wet.

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