Last September, Abe Newman, Jeremy Wallace and I had a piece in Foreign Affairs’ 100th anniversary issue. I can’t speak for my co-authors’ motivations, but my own reason for writing was vexation that someone on the Internet was wrong. In this case, it was Yuval Harari. His piece has been warping debate since 2018, and I have been grumpy about it for nearly as long. But also in fairness to Harari, he was usefully wrong – I’ve assigned this piece regularly to students, because it wraps up a bunch of common misperceptions in a neatly bundled package, ready to be untied and dissected. [click to continue…]

As is usual with trends of all kinds, some recent electoral successes for far-right parties in Europe have been extrapolated into a narrative in which the rise of the far-right is just about unstoppable.

That narrative took a blow with the recent Spanish elections in which the far-right Vox party performed poorly and its coalition with the traditional conservative Popular Party failed to secure a majority. Possibly as a result, the leader of the German CDU backed away from a suggestion that his party might go into a similar coalition with the AfD. And a similar coalition government in Finland appears to be on the verge of collapse.

From the other side of the world, it’s hard to know what to make of all this, but important to try to understand it. So, I’ll toss out some thoughts and invite readers closer to the action to set me straight.

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I was looking at this picture of people (mostly tourists, it appears) fleeing massive fires in Rhodes, feeling despair about the future of the world

when I was struck by an even more despairing thought.
Almost certainly, a lot of the people in the picture are climate denialists. And even more certainly, they will mostly remain so despite this experience.
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Alright, I used to perpetrate some literary criticism around this place. [Slaps wall.] Seems like I could still. This is going to be very flimsy because I’m just banging it out, because I might want some of it later, more worked out.

Over at the dying bird, Jeet Heer asks a good question: “Has anyone written about the genre of the “hippy noir”? Altman’s Long Goodbye, Big Lebowski, Inherent Vice, The Nice Guys. Are there others? An interesting little niche.”

He got good responses. Me: Philip K. Dick, Scanner Darkly, not just because it fits the bill but because of Dick himself, writing those weird letters to the FBI. He was a sad, harassed hippy noir detective. He lived the nightmare. That’s gotta count. Once you’ve got Dick, you add in others like Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music.

I’ve got further thoughts about the likes of Lethem but, first, flip it. Just as hippy noir is often good, the reason G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories are invariably bad is that they are ‘hippy puncher noir’, so to speak. [click to continue…]

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
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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…]