In the UK as elsewhere, we’ve recently seen the far right orchestrate a campaign against refugees, presenting them as dangerous to women and girls and the vanguard of an invasion aimed at destroying Britain. Asylum seekers, forced by the goverment into hotels pending the examination of their claims, have found themselves surrounded by angry mobs, demanding their removal from the neigbourhood. In one wave of riots, a hotel was set on fire, and the occupants feared for their lives. Recently in Northern Ireland there was a violent pogrom against anyone with dark skin, where people were burnt out of their homes. Calls for violence against refugees spread on social media and the perpetrators, when punished for incitement, have been lauded as free-speech heroes. I’ve heard from black friends that verbal abuse and physical assaults have become more common.
A big part of the far-right narrative which is often picked up and repeated by mainstream journalists and politicians concerns the demographic character of those who arrive on small boats, the purported “invaders”, who are described as being overwhelmingly (even “all”) young men, and sometimes as being of “fighting age” or “military age”. Part of this story is a belief that “genuine” refugees would be overwhelmingly women and children, the most vulnerable, and that these are the kind of people who warrant humanitarian concern, if anyone does. There is a presumption, then, that young men are somehow illegitimate refugees, who do not deserve sanctuary but should be removed from the country as soon as possible.
This prejudice against young male refugees is directly contrary to what even a short period of reflection and an examination of the facts would produce. In conflict after conflict, the story is the same. When a town or a city is conquered by one side or another, the first thing they do is to separate the young men (those of “fighting age”) and kill them. It is what happened in Srebrenica in 1995 where around 8000 men and boys were murdered. In the current conflict in Sudan, from whence many refugees arrive in the UK, militias have been rounding up all the males over the age of ten and killing them (before raping the women), as Nicholas Kristof reports.
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As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out
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Academic publishing has long been dominated by commercial players. That fact is well-known, as are many of the problems. But there is a growing movement towards new models, under the labels of “open access” and “open science.” Until two weeks ago, I’ve held a role as co-editor of an interdisciplinary journal, which allowed me to see some of the problems from close. But I’ve also learned more and more about solutions.* What follows are some personal reflections on these issues – if you’re familiar with the problems, you might want to jump directly to the solutions part below.
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Here’s another episode in my memoirs of being an activist. You can read it at substack, or here!:
Between school and college I decided to take a ‘year off’ (what they now call a ‘gap year’). I didn’t have much of a plan, except that I wanted to travel, but not really to earn money (a difficult combination to pull off, frankly, and not one I would recommend). My dad had a brilliant idea, resisting which is something about which I have lifelong regrets, which was to go and live with Harry Ree for a few weeks/months and be his factotum. [1]
But, I did go and work for CND helping prepare for the big October 24th demonstration in 1981. I had two duties that autumn.
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It’s hard not to feel glum as I write this post on the 250th anniversary of my country. I remember celebrating the 200th as a teenager. As I recall it, it felt like the country was ready forward to better times. The Vietnam War and Watergate were over. Americans celebrated the 200th with exuberance. Today, the stagnant, possibly toxic state of the Reflecting Pool, along with Trump’s hijacking of Congress’s America250 funds for his personal Freedom250 group to create an empty and lifeless Great American State Fair on the National Mall, perfectly symbolize Trump’s enshittification of America.
However fitting it may be to be glum, a country cannot move forward if it has no hope. So I offer the following hopeful thoughts about the U.S., starting with a speech made some years ago.
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There was a renewed burst of enthusiasm for nuclear power a few years ago. In Australia, where I live it was confined to the political right and didn’t last long, but elsewhere support was broader. Most notable was the 2023 commitment by more than 20 countries, led by the US, UK and France, to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. In the three countries mentioned, that would imply building 330 GW of new capacity as well as replacing retiring capacity.
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I start with characterizing a term, ‘Humphreys opacity’ (or, if you prefer, ‘epistemic opacity’):1 this involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent. (For more on the origin and nature of this characterization, recall this post.) In what follows, I set aside to what extent such Humphreys opacity is the effect of features of physical reality or is merely the result of a pragmatic cost-benefit analysis.
Humphreys opacity is in the news because the ideal to generate a so-called ‘glassbox’ AI — in which AI systems and machine learning models where the internal processes are fully visible, transparent, and interpretable to humans — seems so hard to achieve. In fact, Humphreys opacity is a design feature of contemporary LLMs that are rapidly being deployed in all kinds of organizations. At the moment neither end-users nor engineers can survey the steps that lead to an LLMs output in real time. It is by no means obvious that they could do so even after the fact in all salient contexts. Interestingly enough, at the moment such Humphreys opacity also seems a feature of any (say) Opus 4.8 token (in the sense of the token/type distinction) one may be interacting with as an end-user. Such tokens lack luminosity about the inner workings of ‘their own’ underlying machinery, too. This much is familiar enough in public debate and also the scholarly secondary literature.
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For the first time in history, the country in which I live – the Netherlands – has issued a Code Red alert due to the heat. Code red is only issued when the environmental circumstances are such that there is a significant risk of “destabilising of society”. I can only remember that we’ve had this for very severe storms in the past. Today, we have it for heat. In Utrecht, it’s right now 37 degrees Celsius, but due to high humidity levels, it feels like 40. In the South-East of the Netherlands, temperatures are around 39 degrees, hence feel-like temperatures well over 40. And the reporting we saw from London and Paris looked even worse.
The weather presenters here have done a good job in explaining the relation to climate change. Some right-wing politicians keep downplaying these explanations, saying we should enjoy the lovely weather with a cool beer by the pool, but I think reality is hitting too hard for that kind of ideological nonsense to have much influence very longer.
One friend sent me a message saying that he has started to suffer from climate anxiety; if this is the beginning [for us!], where will it end? [click to continue…]
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There’s long been a disconnect between concerns about the massive impact of AI data centres on electricity demand and claims by Sam Altman and others that the impact is really modest. Ed Zitron recently posted a summary of OpenAI’s 2025 accounts which helps to clarify things a bit.
In short, if you look at actual electricity demand needed for current AI use, it’s small. And that doesn’t change if demand grows at high but plausible rates. On the other hand, if you look at what is needed to justify the current valuations of AI and its competitors, the implied growth is staggering.
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One Spring Monday in 1852 around thirty gold buyers gathered for the evening at Mrs Black’s Royal Hotel in Bathurst, which was (and is) just on the other side of the Blue Mountains from Sydney.
Probably not ordinarily the most collegiate of petty capitalists, the gold buyers gathered to debate the role of the local branch of the Union Bank of Australia in undercutting their business.
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