It’s Sunday. It’s quiet. I’ll just clear the decks of my philosophy faux-infographics jokes. It’s not just trolleys. Some months back I considered it seriously:

“Nietzsche’s key design insight: complex, esoteric ideas, appreciable only by the few — perhaps only by the One! — can be conveyed via simple, conventionalised iconography, suitable for delivering simple, readily understandable ideas to the many.

Naturally, as this insight made no sense, no one had any notion what Nietzsche was on about …”

But that’s no reason why it didn’t happen! [click to continue…]

More AI madness! Couple of months ago there was a weird Daily Beast piece. It’s bad, but in a goofy way, causing me to say at the time ‘not today, Hal!’

But now I’m collecting op-ed-ish short writings about AI for use as models of good and bad and just plain weird writing and thinking, to teach undergrads how hard it is to write and think, so they can do better. And this one stands out as distinctively bad-weird. First the headline is goofy: “ChatGPT May Be Able to Convince You Killing a Person Is OK.” Think about that. But it’s unfair to blame the author, maybe. But read the rest. Go ahead. I’ll wait. What do you think? It’s funny that the author just assumes you should NEVER let yourself be influenced by output from Chat-GPT. Like: if Chat-GPT told you to not jump off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge? There is this failure to allow as we can, like, check claims as to whether they make sense? A bit mysterious how we do this yet we do. And ethics is a super common area in which to do this thing: so it only makes sense that you could get Chat-GPT to generate ethical claims and then people could read them and, if they make sense, you can believe them due to that. Never mind that the thing generating the prospective sensible claims is just a statistics-based mindless shoggoth.

If a shoggoth is talking trolley sense about OK killing, believe it!

Anyway, I thought it was funny. [click to continue…]

Over the fold, a piece I wrote for The Conversation. It’s focused on Australia, but includes a swipe at European advocates of a “nuclear renaissance”, the most notable of whom are Macron and (at least until his defenstration) Boris Johnson
[click to continue…]

Let me try to focus my thoughts from the previous post.

Do is as do does.

Agent-like entities are equivalent to real agents. If GPT-4 can trick people into thinking it’s a trickster, it’s a trickster. If you can mimic a chess master, you’re a chess master. It’s fun to wonder whether there will be anything it’s ‘like’ to be superintelligent AI, ending us, if it does, but that’s by the by.

Is this right? [click to continue…]

To celebrate my new-found determination to do the right thing and blog I’m going to blog.

Specifically, I’m going to blog about something I’m dumb about and don’t understand – because that should be possible, among friends. We’re all friends here on the internet? That’s kind of the point.

This semester I am going to talk to students about all this new-fangled AI – LLM’s. And I don’t understand it. It’s somewhat consoling that everyone who understands it doesn’t understand it either. That is, they may know HOW to work it (which I sure don’t) but they don’t understand WHY what works works. They don’t really grok HOW what works works, or why what works works as well as it does – oddly well and badly by obscure turns. That’s kind of creepy and scifi. [click to continue…]

What’s wrong with the world wide web today?

I am. (To adapt a Chesterton line of uncertain authenticity.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great! – it’s hopeful! – we are gathered here today to celebrate 20 years of Crooked Timber; meanwhile Twitter seems to be splintering. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, we agree.

Microblogging killed blogging. Sadly, there’s no way to put blogging back together by lashing together several microblogging platforms.

To repeat, it’s my fault, not Elon’s. Nobody forced me to stop blogging and start tweeting. It was the wrong choice, overall, morally, intellectually, culturally, politically. It wasn’t even a choice, of course. A drift.

If folks were less liable to make poor choices at the margins, Silicon Valley social media Masters of the Universe wouldn’t stand a chance.

So I stand before you today resolved to do better – be better. Get back in shape. Back to the land. Back to blogging.

I’m hoping none of the new Twitter clones achieves dominance. We’ll lose efficiency – but win back autonomy, alleviation of temptation, retardation of enshittification. One may hope.

Let’s recall what was great and good about blogging in its heyday. Let’s revisit a few good ones. (And, of course, no need to exaggerate OG quality of the medium. I could start a Substack.) [click to continue…]

Wow. Twenty years. I’ve recently (perhaps not so recently) aged into the demographic who recall events from twenty years back, even though those events occurred in an already reasonably established professional life. That still seems wild to me. I learnt quickly that saying things to the youth like ‘Well, I’m old’ doesn’t yield reassuring denials. The states you think of as temporary and contingent turn out to be long phases of life or even permanent conditions. And it’s good. It’s all good, really. Given the alternative. Mostly I feel guilty about Crooked Timber, about not writing often enough and not figuring a way to be less essay-ish and highstrung about it. Also about giving so much of my time and thoughts away to billionaire trashfire content-farms. But a twenty-year anniversary is a moment to go, wow, this thing lasted, and what a bunch of people to have seen out those years alongside, both fellow writers and commenters. I’m perennially grateful to my fellow bloggers who keep CT going, especially Chris, whose Sunday photo is occasionally the only post all week. And I feel bad for not getting to know our new bloggers well. I hope time will fix that! But especially, I really, really, really miss our friends who don’t blog here any more. Reading their pieces made me feel part of a gorgeous collective, a joint endeavour. Also, they’re great humans with interesting things to say. But change is inevitable and we’re incredibly lucky to have found people who want to keep doing this thing going. [click to continue…]

As Chris suggests, one of the most memorable disasters at Crooked Timber was the seminar on David Graeber’s book, Debt. Timothy Burke described it at the time as conveying:

that feeling of grad school as Hobbesean nightmare, of small arguments quickly and casually intensified into thermonuclear exchanges, losing all potentially meaningful disagreements along the way.

[click to continue…]

Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences.

First I asked him what a blog was.
[click to continue…]

I did something both awesome and ill-timed. Well, first I should back up and remind you of something I told you before at some nebulous time in the past, and that is that I am an immersive daydreamer. I said that I was a maladaptive daydreamer but I didn’t even think that was right, because I was just having a great time. I have spent countless hours—wait, no, first I should back up further and say, remember the Belle Waring Unified Theory of American Political Life: Fuck You, It’s Racism Again? Looking pretty prescient now, hmm, isn’t it?

Plain People of Crooked Timber: Lovely to see you and everything, Belle, but haranguing us about racism with ever-more-extravagant uses of profanity is not actually the thing we miss about you.
Me: That’s hard cheese, brother.

Getting back to the plot, I have spent my life making up thrilling stories for an audience of one, usually; of two, for my brother starting when I was six and he three, and going up until I was thirteen and called it off, to his agony; of three, when I played “talking games” with the girls, the last round played when my elder was nineteen. My brother and I just called it “talking,” but with a significant accent, and it may have saved my life. We lived in Georgetown in D.C., in a narrow brick house. I was upstairs in my brother’s room having a sleepover so we could “talk,” for what would be the very last time, when someone broke in through the basement door into the room where I would have been sleeping. The fact that the man [makes unfair sexist generalization about burglary] was an idiot who only stole a lot of Indian-head nickels and was then scared away by the cockatiel is not evidence that he might not have hurt me, because people who commit that crime are desperate, violent morons.
[click to continue…]

Not quite 20 years ago, I got an invitation to spend a week as a visiting blogger at an exciting new group blog called Crooked Timber. In the manner of the most catastrophic house guests, I managed to turn that into permanent residence.
[click to continue…]

Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the Grateful Dead: what a long, strange trip it’s been.

We started the blog shortly after the Iraq war started and in a world that was still shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A bunch of people who had blogs of their own came together to form our collective after a period of email back-and-forth. It might have been quite a different blog: Norman Geras a strong supporter of the war, had been involved in the emailing, but it became clear that we couldn’t have both him and Dan Davies, so we settled for Dan, and what a good choice that was. Matt Yglesias was invited, but never replied, and has gone on to a rather successful online career.

The initial crew was Chris Bertram, Harry Brighouse, Daniel Davies, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy, Jon Mandle and Brian Weatherson. Four out of nine survivors isn’t bad, but I miss the contributions of those who have moved on, who wrote some of the great posts of the early years. Within a few months we had added Ted Barlow, Eszter Hargittai, John Holbo, John Quiggin, Tom Runnacles, Micah Schwartzman and Belle Waring, and then Ingrid Robeyns and Scott McLemee joined us a couple of years later, followed soon after by Michael Bérubé. By 2008, the Guardian was listing us in its top 50 most powerful blogs, but I think we missed the moment to cash in and become tech zillionaires. Niamh Hardiman became a member around 2011, followed later by Tedra Osell, Eric Rauchway and Corey Robin, then Rich Yeselson. In 2018 we were joined by Serene Khader, Miriam Ronzoni, Gina Schouten and Astra Taylor and then this past year by Chris Armstrong, Elizabeth Anderson, Eric Schliesser, Kevin Munger, Macarena Marey, Paul Segal and Speranta Dumitru. Throughout we tried to keep a mix of people of different experiences, backgrounds, genders and locations, though I’m sure we could have done better. One person, who sadly has left us, deserves special thanks: Kieran Healy was not only an intellectual force behind Crooked Timber, but also, long after he ceased posting, kept us on the road with his technical expertise. The site would have long since fallen over without him.

[click to continue…]