Human beings are creatures who can describe their actions at various levels. Elizabeth Anscombe has famously introduced the example of a man who moves his arm, to pump water, to poison the inhabitants of a house, to overthrow a regime, to bring peace.* You can play with this case, or others, to create all kinds of variations: which of these descriptions does a person know of? Which elements could be outsourced to others, who might not know other descriptions? This is the stuff of comedies, tragedies, and detective stories. And arguably, it matters immensely when it comes to the introduction of AI and other digital technologies into our work.

I was reminded of this basic insight from the philosophy of action, about the multiple descriptions under which our actions can fall, when, the other day, I had to do the proofs for a paper. In the past, I had seen proofing as an act of care – a loving gaze that spots the last mistakes and makes the last improvements before a text goes out into the world. Not the most exciting part of academic work – the arguments have been made, after all – but a meaningful closure of the sometimes bumpy road to publication. I’m the generation who always got pdfs; generations before me did it on paper.

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A book review from Inside Story: After The Spike by Spears and Geruso

The most striking observation in Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s new book, After the Spike, is summed up by the cover illustration, which shows a world population rising rapidly to its current eight billion before declining to pre-modern levels and eventually to zero. As the authors observe, this is the inevitable implication of the hypothesis that fertility levels will remain below replacement level indefinitely into the future.

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The Economist, having surveyed the current state of European higher education, has decided that the most significant problem is that the specialized graduate school where I work is insufficiently “relevant.”

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One evening last week, having woken up earlier and, as usual, turned on the Jeremy Vine show (with guest host), I turned, again, to BBC Sounds to find… nothing. They’ve been threatening to turn it off for non-UK listeners for months, pretty much without explanation, and telling users that there is an exciting new and utterly inferior service in which you can just stream Radio 4 and the World Service live. I texted my friend to say it had finally happened, and she said “I know. I immediately deleted the app in anger. Rude”. In fact, it turns out that Radio 2 is available to stream, but this not communicated, let’s say, clearly.

Now to be clear: neither she nor I believe we are entitled to listen for free to radio funded by the UK taxpayer. Being able to listen to pretty much everything whenever I want to has been a huge benefit, for which I would pay a quite large subscription – I’d welcome the ability to do that. But: why have they chosen to withdraw the service rather than to introduce a subscription model? And, for that matter, why don’t they explain why they have withdrawn it and that streaming is still available?

The second question turns out to have an answer. I’ll include a long quote from James Cridland explaining this in detail below the fold. But here’s the short version: the reason they are turning it off is that they are afraid of having to pay worldwide music rights, and they are worried that explaining what they are doing will trigger them having to pay those rights in arrears. And because, in fact, they are continuing to stream the music stations they fear that telling people too clearly how to find them will count as marketing, and thus will trigger having to pay music rights for those streams.

But this leaves me with the first question. The music shows are great but they are essentially ephemeral — I wouldn’t pay a sub for them. By contrast the BBC has a massive archive of spoken word radio that, while intended to be ephemeral is in fact literature that will last forever. It broadcasts this archive on a station called Radio 4 Extra, and most of Radio 4 Extra is (in the UK — it used to be abroad as well) available on demand for a month or so afterwards. As Cridland explains, Radio 4 Extra will still be streamed, but with no catch up, and is not one of the two stations that the BBC makes available through its new (pretty terrible) app. That’s what I, and my friend, would pay our subscription for. And there can’t, surely, be rights issues for 95% of that produce – the BBC (in one of its two forms, see Cridland below) must have worldwide rights forever to obscure thrillers written by Francis Durbridge wannabes in August 1954, no? That output is not affected by the music rights problem (I assume), and could safely be put on catch up (Evidence: good news is that apparently catch up for Radio 4 will be re-introduced in a few weeks).

If anyone with insider knowledge can answer my first question please do, anonymously if necessary. And, any other comments welcome!

Here’s Cridland in full:

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The latest podcast produced by the Center for Ethics and Education focuses on political disclosure in the classroom. I think a lot of CTers will find it interesting. Several students were interviewed, and they are quite insightful. For what it is worth, my view is that, in general, when teaching about controversial politically and morally-valenced issues it is usually pedagogically better for most of us not to disclose our substantive views about the issues we are trying to get the students to investigate (I can think of examples of people who do disclose where I think what they are doing is pedagogically superior to withholding in the way I do — Jerry Cohen springs to mind — but I think they are the exceptions). In the podcast my co-director Tony Laden expresses sensible disagreement. Well worth listening to, if I say so myself.

(By the way although I suggested the topic after discussing it with a couple of the students who are featured, as with all our podcasts I take no credit for its excellent quality (both in terms of production values and intellectual content), except in that I suggested to our program manager that she might make podcasts, having no idea quite how good she would turn out to be at doing it. A leading podcaster told me how excellent she thought one of them was, and then was horrified to find out just how much of a shoestring we have been operating on!)).

At the Sydney Gleebooks launch of Graeme Turner’s new book Broken, an audience member said:

I raised the microphone to my mouth to say ‘that is because of moral deskilling’. But it was not my gig, so I didn’t. It would have been very inappropriate. Look at how I’ve grown. Well. Sometimes.

Before I explain, let us go back a few years.

It was one of those Covid lockdowns. Like many others, we built nice rituals. Checking on the garden. De-slugging, by hand in the evenings (ok that was less nice). Bushwalks with such silence that the swishing of the trees seemed very loud. A drink while watching the sunset after a day of zoom meetings – sometimes from the empty outdoor cafe at the eerily abandoned theme park called Scenic World1.

And I was writing Virtue Capitalists.

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Tech regulation raises some of the thorniest questions of our time — about free speech versus hate speech, copyright versus fair use, truth versus manipulation. Yet these debates are increasingly irrelevant unless states can first establish digital sovereignty. Without the will to enforce laws on multinational corporations, “tech regulation” is a dead letter.

Both the EU and the Commonwealth countries have been trying to use regulation to chart a third path between the “laissez faire” of the US and the explicit state control of authoritarian regimes like China. But the shakedowns occasioned by Trump’s unilateral “reciprocal” tariffs demonstrates the pointlessness of these laws without the will to enforce them.

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… as long as they are healthy, well fed and well educated

Much of the panic about falling birth rates can be dispelled once we realise that (barring catastrophe) there will almost certainly be more people alive in 2100 than there were in 2000. But what about the distant future? Dean Spears, co-author of After the Spike has kindly provided me with projections showing that with likely declines in fertility the world population will decline by half each century after 2100, reaching one billion around 2400. Would that be too few to sustain a modern civilisation ?

We can answer this pretty easily from past experience. In the second half of 20th century, the modern economy consisted of the member countries of the Organization For Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). Originally including the countries of Western Europe and North America, and soon extended to include Australia and Japan, the OECD countries were responsible for the great majority of the global industrial economy, including manufacturing, modern services, and technological innovation.

Except for some purchases of raw materials from the “Global South”, produced by a relatively small part of the labour force, the OECD, taken as a whole, was self-sufficient in nearly everything required for a modern economy. So, the population of the OECD in the second half of last century provides an upper bound to the number of humans needed to sustain such an economy. That number did not reach one billion until 1980.

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The New York Times recently published a letter from me responding to a guest essay (op-ed) by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, with whom I’ve been engaging on the question of pro-natalism. As a colleague who had such a letter published a few years ago observed, this will probably get more readers than any journal article I’ve ever written. The text is over the fold

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A cursory glance at the Jeffrey Epstein’s biography (1953 – 2019) shows it can be treated as a modern adaptation (and so adjustment) of Horatio Alger Jr.’s framework: Epstein’s life moves from (lower) middle-class respectability to incredible wealth and luxury (and associated criminal sordidness). Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn’t just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position himself into the role of Macher in politics and (unusually) in science, including non-trivial associations with (inter alia) MIT’s Media Lab, Harvard University’s evolutionary dynamics programs, and the Santa-Fe institute.*

The latter is especially notable because while as a kid Epstein skipped two grades, he was de facto an academic drop-out. Yet, back in 2002 already, an incredibly instructive New York Magazine profile by Landon Thomas Jr. reports:

But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president [Clinton].

Investing in people doesn’t mean providing them with an education. Rather, Epstein brought people together from business, science, and politics which allowed them access to funds, prestige, political decision-makers, Hollywood stars, media moguls, and young girls. While Epstein donated money, his real gift to others was that he facilitated other people’s plans by brokering one of the most scarce commodities in science and politics, attention. His perceived success at this kind of brokerage is my main interest below. (Here I use ‘brokerage’ and its cognates in order to refer to his role as enabler.)

But it would be remiss of me to fail to mention that in return for facilitating attention and funds Epstein got investment opportunities — including investment in scientific projects he cared about not the least ones associated with eugenics and transhumanism — and sexual access to children. He was, in fact, convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. And there is very little doubt that the plea bargain only covered a small number of his life of sex crimes before and after the conviction.

Of course, part of the interest in documentation pertaining to Epstein’s life is to what degree and to whom he also brokered or trafficked in sexual access to children to people in his circle, and whether that allowed for opportunities for further financial gain (through payoffs or blackmail, etc.) I assume my readers are familiar with these sordid facts. They matter a great deal for the continued public interest in the handling of the case, but I will only emphasize them intermittently below.

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