I didn’t publish very much this month, thanks to having a newborn baby, but I did finish my books post for the year:
Other than that, here’s some of what I’ve been thinking about and reading.
European foreign policy
The thing I read this month that has probably stayed with me the most is this weirdly compelling and very scary description of a French current affairs show about Russia-Europe relations. There’s quite a bit of editorialising from Claire Berlinski, the Substack author (the transcript itself, with English translation, is paywalled); but if you control for that, the piece is worth reading for the account of what Western European militaries are thinking about.
I am pessimistic about the prospects for Western Europe to turn things around, because I don’t know who has both the skills and the priorities to do it. Anonymous right-wing blog In the Sight of the Unwise this month wrote a viciously critical attack on the ‘foreign policy people’ in British policy. Much of it was entirely fair and accurate, and much of Britain’s current predicament can be laid at the feet of British policy. But the ‘foreign policy people’ are the only people taking the Russian threat to European power seriously: if we get rid of them, on one side we have ~isolationists, and on the other we have people like the current crop of Labour MPs who just don’t think about foreign policy at all.1 The author of In the Sight himself dismisses foreign policy people who ‘apparently believe we should pursue … a perpetual proxy war with the local gas station’. But it’s not European elites who have chosen to push themselves into a proxy conflict with Russia (indeed, they were entirely complacent right up to February 2022); it’s Russia, which has perceived an opportunity to sideline Western Europe from great power politics.2
The big point from Berlinski’s post that stood out to me was this:
[T]he program treats Trump as a foreign actor. This is enormously important: There’s no expectation of American solidarity. Trump’s delegation is treated as a business cartel, a family franchise, a group of men unfamiliar with statecraft who don’t even pretend to represent NATO. No one invokes ‘the United States.’ Everyone speaks of ‘the Americans,’ the way you’d speak of ‘the Saudis’ or ‘the Qataris’—a third party, a powerful but capricious actor beyond European control.
This perception, of course, was more than reinforced by the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy this month. Henry Farrell’s piece on the NSS was my favourite, in no small part because of this blunt line: ‘This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe’.
A corollary, given that I’ve been thinking about AI recently. People—all people, but especially certain Europeans—who talk about the importance to ‘democracy’ or ‘the free world’ that the US keeps a strategic advantage in AI, are absolutely kidding themselves. The United States has no intention of helping ‘the free world’ or of using AI to reinforce liberal democracy.3 If a US frontier lab achieves AGI under a Republican administration, I see no reason to think that’s any better for the interests and values of Western Europeans than a Chinese lab achieving it. There are many good reasons to plan for a US-led AI future, but that kind of realism is very different from claims that Chinese AI, but not American, is an ‘authoritarian peril’.
The Scaling Era
On that note, I read Dwarkesh Patel and Gavin Leech’s The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025. It’s mostly a series of transcriptions from interviews Patel has done with AI experts and strategic thinkers on his podcast (which many of you will already regularly listen to).
Leech declares: ‘Immodestly, I … think this is the best introduction to the thing.’ On the strength of this declaration I had considered buying the book as a Christmas gift for a family member; having now read it myself, I am glad I didn’t, it is absolutely not an ‘introduction’. TSE was a ~90th–95th percentile difficulty book for me, requiring a lot of note-taking and pausing for thought and re-reading, and I don’t think it would have made any sense if I didn’t already have introductory knowledge about AI.4
But because I did already have introductory knowledge, the book was actually really helpful at taking me to intermediate (or maybe sub-intermediate). The fact that you have to slow down and work through the book carefully makes it super educational: you notice little unwanted implications or suppressed premises etc. that would fly past you in podcast format. If you’re roughly where I am in terms of understanding AI, and want to know more, The Scaling Era is a good shout.
Ultimately, my main takeaway was how little anyone in AI knows what the fuck they’re doing. Much of the AI experts’ talk amounts to elevated technobabble: they use lots of pseudo-mathematical and pseudo-technical language supposedly to explain what is happening in AI, but the purported ‘explanation’ is usually so thin and so fitted to the data that it is no more than maths-flavoured paradiastole.5 The only interviewee who comes out of this book looking good is Dario Amodei, who has the grace to regularly preface his technobabble with stuff like ‘we don’t know’ and ‘we still don’t know’ and ‘I’m just waving my hands’.6 Patel knows how to ask good questions and elicit the best available answers, even if those answers just expose the ignorance / shallowness or the bombast / overconfidence of the interviewee. Mark Zuckerberg and Leopold Aschenbrenner come out of it looking the worst, for different reasons;7 Ilya Sutskever avoids looking bad only by saying nothing of substance at all. Patel and/or Leech also have a subtle sense of humour and of dramatic irony about how they arrange the extracts in the book, which is appreciated.
If ‘knowing what the fuck you’re doing’ were a prerequisite to ‘changing the world’, we could just write the whole field off. Alas, it is not. Scaling is happening whether we can understand it or not—it’s actually much more serious, much scarier, that we can’t. That’s another part of why the book is difficult: it’s a serious attempt to understand something that is not understood.
Wet wipes, technological diffusion, and policy timing
YouTuber Chris Spargo made a great video about wet wipes. (I know it sounds boring, trust me!) It’s an excellent case study in technology policy and political salience.
I remember hearing, quite a few years ago now, that when a packet of wet wipes said ‘flushable’ or ‘fine to flush’ on it, that was not to be taken seriously: wet wipes should never be flushed, they do serious damage to the sewer system. Spargo reveals, however, that we actually have the technological know-how to make wet wipes that will dissolve harmlessly when flushed; wet wipe companies figured this out a few years ago. And this technology has not been banned, nor regulated out of existence. Sorted, right?
Well, no: it’s a great example of how technological solutions always presuppose some sort of coordination around the use of the technology. Only a few brands made flushable wet wipes, but many who didn’t were still labelling their wipes ‘flushable’. The government and regulator could have come in to standardise terminology, but they faffed around with half measures for a long time. And the water industry discovered that, in the absence of proper coordination, its campaign promoting ‘Fine to Flush’ wipes was just making people more confident in flushing wipes that said they were flushable. So they withdrew their endorsement and changed tack entirely:
Hence why I, and presumably many others, were under the misconception that wipes can never be flushed.
Spargo’s pretty sure a few brands are still making wipes that actually are ok to flush, but he doesn’t say which ones, because—as he points out—they could change tomorrow and there’d be no way to know. We’re actually in the farcical situation where wipes can’t be labelled ‘Fine to Flush’ (the term formerly defined by the water industry, rooted in a real standard) but can still be labelled ‘flushable’ (the fake term that means almost nothing). Wet wipe companies and the water industry are back on an antagonistic footing, and people are still flushing wet wipes that will clog the sewer system.
The government had window of opportunity to act ‘gently’, by standardising terminology and promoting the ‘Fine to Flush’ campaign. But now things have regressed and public trust in ‘Fine to Flush’ has been undermined by the new water industry campaign. Mixed messaging and time lags mean that coordinating public behaviour ‘gently’ is off the table. If the government wants to actually utilise this new and extremely useful technological development, probably its only option now is the much harsher and politically-costlier one of entirely banning wet wipes that don’t dissolve.
I don’t necessarily blame the government that wet wipes weren’t their top policy priority.8 But I take two lessons: (a) technological solutions, no matter how slam-dunk and simple, always require coordination over use of the technology; (b) achieving coordination without being dictatorial about it requires policymakers to get their act together quickly. Wet wipes might not be the most important example, but you can probably think of a few others.
My dinosaur-themed child experiment
One of the projects I have decided to undertake with my son, Ernie, is this: I want him to grow up using the word ‘dinosaur’ in such a way that the category includes birds as the central example. ‘Dad, can we go to the park to see the dinosaurs?’ ‘My favourite dinosaurs are pigeons!’ ‘What do you mean the dinosaurs all died? Are you crazy? There’s one in that tree!’ You get the gist.
For a long time we mistakenly thought the dinosaurs were all lizard-y things, and mistakenly thought they had all died. Palaeontologists now know better, have begun to stop projecting human stories about dragons and sea serpents onto dinosaur fossils, and have seen them for closer to what they really were—really are. We now know that a diverse class of dinosaurs survived the asteroid impact, and are still alive today: in English we call them ‘birds’.9
Sadly, our stagnant culture continues to load the word ‘dinosaur’ with misleading associations, teaching children to believe that ‘the dinosaurs are extinct’ is a true statement—or at most, a statement that is false only on a technicality. Even experts often compromise with their audience’s misconceptions and say things like ‘dinosaurs and birds are X’ (suggesting these are two distinct, if related, categories) or ‘after the dinosaurs died…’
I will do what I can to push against this, and allow Ernie to share in the fruits of our advancing knowledge, to fully internalise the fact that a whole group of dinosaurs survived all the way to the present day. No doubt when he gets to school he’ll get made fun of and stop speaking like this; but all I can do is my best. And so, I am doing things like dressing him in a vest with swans on it, and a hat with T. rexes, and then complimenting him on his matching dinosaur outfit; or asking him if he wants a dummy with a dino on it, and then giving him the one with the cute robin or with the goose. Hopefully by the time he starts picking up language I’ll be well in the habit.
‘Three sisters’ companion planting
Over to ancient farmers on the other side of the Atlantic. I learned this month about the historical American companion planting technique that modern writers call the ‘three sisters’. You plant corn and (climbing) beans together in mounds, and then plant squash on either side of the mounds.
Climbing beans need something to climb on, some sort of trellis: and the thick and powerful stalk of corn does the job naturally. In turn, corn needs nitrogen in the soil, which can require you to plant nitrogen-fixing plants in the field for part of the year; but with this technique, you have planted nitrogen-fixing beans at the same time as your staple grain, with no need for an extra round of planting and harvest at a different time of the year. Of course, growing plants in mounds leaves empty space between the mounds: squash can grow there. And squash has huge leaves, which shades the ground, stopping weeds from growing that might compete with the corn and beans!
Many other types of companion planting have existed throughout history, but this is by far the coolest I’ve heard of: extremely clever. Whoever dreamed it up must have been very chuffed with themselves.10 It was so clever that it spread incredibly far, being present all across North and Central America by the time Europeans arrived.
Hiding assets during a divorce
I watched the first series of The Split, a soap-y BBC drama about divorce lawyers. Didn’t enjoy it, not recommended, it goes absolutely nowhere with the interesting questions it raises. One such question: can you hide money in divorce any more?
People definitely try to hide money and assets from the court and from their spouse: your wife can’t get the car if she doesn’t know the car exists. But obviously you only hear about cases where people get caught. With know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering rules meaning that almost every financial transaction is tracked, is it even really possible any more to hide money?
Possibility one: the law is stupidly designed, such that a financial institution telling a court about an attempt to hide assets from that very same court might sometimes count as tipping off, which is illegal. Possibility two: financial institutions are illegible to the courts, so they don’t know how to impose their authority on them; thus even if there is a KYC paper trail for your assets, the court won’t see it unless you’re very stupid. I am not a lawyer, but I know enough to be aware that both of these are very real and depressing possibilities. But let’s be optimistic and assume that they don’t apply.
Maybe if you were already engaged in some sort of tax evasion scheme, with all the relevant infrastructure (cash-only business, accounts done by hand, etc.) already in place before the start of divorce proceedings, then you could do it: just extend the scheme to hide income from the courts as well as hiding it from HMRC. (Assuming your spouse doesn’t know about the tax evasion!) But you couldn’t get a new tax evasion scheme started from a standing start in time for a divorce, if you didn’t have one already beforehand. So how else to do it?
For what it’s worth, the /r/Divorce_Men subreddit mostly converged on one broad type of recommendation:
[deleted]
Take a trip to Las Vegas, cash out all your money, pretend to gamble ALL your money away and spend it on strippers—the emotional trauma was just too much and you lost control over yourself and had a meltdown.
In reality—do gamble some, do spend time [a]t strip clubs but take the cash and drive home—leave it at a trustworthy friend or relative[‘]s house until the dust settles. If it was all spent in cash there wouldn’t be any paper trail—all they can do is speculate and send you to [counselling] or something. Get the money when the [coast] is clear again.
Obviously this only applies to Americans. But even then, would this work? Don’t casinos track people’s spending, in order to figure out who the biggest losers are and try to retain them? Or is the idea just that, while a bank would provide information to a divorce court, a casino or strip club wouldn’t? I’m not sure, but it’s interesting.
I obviously am not asking this for practical purposes (!), and indeed my moral sense is that the commenters on the /r/Divorce_Men thread are scum who deserve to lose everything; but it’s intellectually interesting. Anyone who has more insight into how common it is to successfully hide assets during divorce, please comment.
‘Primitive Baptists’: so Protestant fundamentalist that they loop around and become religious pluralists
I discovered the American Christian denomination called the ‘Primitive Baptists’ this month, via the very excellent YouTube channel Ready to Harvest, which is all about the diversity of Christian denomination. I think the Primitive Baptists are exceptionally interesting.
All Christians believe that people are saved by God’s ‘grace’, which is the theological term for a certain kind of saving gift that God gives to (some) humans. Catholics believe that we must cooperate with God’s grace via our own good works, but Protestants insist that this undermines God’s grace. We are not saved by our own merit—as depraved sinners, human beings cannot merit salvation—but are saved by ‘faith alone’.
The Primitive Baptists, however, observe that the decision to have faith in God’s grace is itself a human act, a ‘work’! And so, going much farther than any other type of Protestant, they say that having faith is not a cause of salvation any more than any other kind of good work. They take fully seriously the Protestant injunction that human works cannot contribute to salvation—and, in particular, they take fully seriously the Calvinist version of this injunction that God chose whether to save or damn you before you were even born, without any reference to deservingness or merit. But they conclude on the basis of this that having faith in Jesus is not a prerequisite to being saved, and that (indeed) there are people in every religion tradition that God has chosen to save! They have taken a very different route to end up in roughly the same place as liberal religious pluralists.
I am not a Christian, but … this makes a lot of sense? Having faith, professing a belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection, is a human action just as much as any other. And so, if human actions cannot contribute to salvation, then why would having faith be any different? Of course, other Protestants say that having faith is not merely any other human action, that Christians profess a belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection because they have received God’s grace through the Holy Spirit. But then, isn’t this exactly what Catholics say about good works? Catholics say that God’s grace saves, good works come about as a result of grace, and doing good works is a requirement to properly cooperate with God’s grace and be saved. Protestants say that God’s grace saves, faith comes about as a result of grace, and faith is a requirement to properly cooperate with God’s grace and be saved. What’s the difference?11
If you are going to be a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist, insisting on the complete inability of sinful humans to contribute to their own salvation, then it seems to me that you might as well go all in; and it turns out that this leads you to a remarkably pluralist place! The Primitive Baptists are not ‘theologically liberal’ in the usual sense of the term. But just by taking Protestant doctrine entirely seriously, they have ended up with an idea of salvation that’s not so far off from the theological liberals’: there are good people in every religious tradition, no church has a monopoly on salvation, going to heaven is not linked to Christian dogma.
Make Clement a Saint Again
On the topic of weird forms of Christianity, I’ve enjoyed this month learning more about Clement of Alexandria, the second-century theologian who has the dubious distinction of being an ex-saint. He was widely celebrated by orthodox Christianity for over a millennium, even after his Greek-language works stopped being read in western Europe. But then, during the Renaissance, western theologians learned Greek, started reading his works again, and discovered that he was a little … weird. So in 1586, Pope Sixtus V took his name off the list.
Maybe the most interesting example of what made the early modern church so unhappy with Clement is that he said early Christianity had a hierarchy of doctrines. As well as the normal doctrines taught to the ordinary Christian believers, there were some doctrines that could only be taught to those who were initiated into the inner echelons of the faith. Usually, it’s hard for the historian to learn about such secrets, because they’re secret! but Clement thought he had a way to convey the secret to some readers while keeping it from others. His book Patchworks was, as the title suggests, written in an extremely difficult jumbled-up manner—deliberately, to keep its most difficult teachings only for the most attentive students. (Leo Strauss famously argued that this style of esoteric writing was widespread in antiquity; but Patchworks is maybe the only book where we are certain that it’s Straussian, because Clement admits that this is what he’s doing.)
You would be right to be sceptical of claims about secret initiatory doctrines; it’s a long-standing trope in Western culture going back to ancient mystery cults, and it always makes for an exciting story, so you get stuff like The Da Vinci Code. But Clement is a very convincing source. His description of the Alexandrian church is historically plausible, and he himself would have been high up the church and therefore in a position to know. And we don’t have much record of other Christians criticising him for this until much later; indeed, important orthodox writers like Eusebius were fans of Clement. (Eusebius’ pro-Clement stance was probably the reason Clement ended up on the list of saints in the first place.)
Other sources help us understand why early Christianity might have developed esoteric teachings. An early Christian document supposedly written by Saint Peter (though almost certainly forged by someone else) argues that, in the Christian scriptures, there are ideas that are ‘hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction’, and that this is the reason why disagreements proliferate within Christianity. Then, the so-called ‘Pseudo-Clementine’ story (no relation to Clement of Alexandria), we see develops this tradition about Peter: the story says that Peter decided to keep the hardest-to-understand doctrines a secret, revealed only to those who can be trusted to understand them. Obviously, a forgery and a work of fiction are not the most reliable sources! But we have Clement’s (more reliable) writings as a source for the existence of esoteric teaching, so these less reliable writings can maybe give us some indication as to its purpose: maybe it was an attempt, following the proliferation of new sects in the second century, to try to stop further schisms. (Note that this would mean that this practice does not go all the way back to the historical Peter, who would have died earlier than all this proliferation of doctrine—never mind the historical Jesus.)12
OK, for all of that, what exactly were the secret doctrines that Clement taught in Patchworks? For one, universal salvation: all souls, even the worst unbelievers and sinners, will eventually be saved. As it happens, the idea that this was a real secret doctrine seems plausible to me: it makes sense that the idea of universal salvation probably had some role in early Christianity, because the elements are all there in Romans 11, but it clearly didn’t play a public role.
Another doctrine is that there is a principle of ascent up the chain of being: salvation and wisdom allow you to transform into a being of a higher level. Clement discusses how humans can become angels, and angels can become ‘protoctists’ (an even higher type of supernatural being). The principles of his theology imply that protoctists should be able to ascend to the next level, but Clement never explicitly mentions this, because the next level up is the Logos—that is, Jesus.
Again, while none of this is mainstream Christian dogma, it’s all been a perennial presence in Christianity. Still today the average believer is extremely likely to believe the heretical idea that dead people (especially dead children) become angels in heaven.13 And the full-fat version of the doctrine, that even Clement wouldn’t speak out loud, would bounce around in the background of Christianity until it eventually emerged publicly in Mormonism: ‘as man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.’
And none of this is to mention the ‘Mar Saba letter’, which may be a letter where Clement reveals that the Alexandrian church believed it had a secret extra Gospel shown only to initiates, or may be a modern forgery. As I say, it’s all remarkably Da Vinci Code-y! but actually grounded in real history.
Cars kill play
You may have already read Eli Stark-Elster’s ‘Where do the children play?’, since it contributed to the hot-button debate topic of ‘are phones bad?’ But I think it’s much subtler than it was subsequently represented, so if you’ve not actually read it, I’d do so.
My strong belief is that peer effects dominate child development, and are far more important than influence from parents (except in extreme cases of parental abuse or neglect). Your kids’ friends will make them into who they become, much more than you will. Stark-Elster backs this up with the observation that ‘[i]n most human societies, children have spent much of their time exploring and playing within independent peer cultures’—the company of other kids with minimal-to-no adult supervision. Such an environment provides kids with healthy peer effects.
There’s always a trade-off in letting your kid run free with other kids: maybe they’ll get eaten by a lion! Parents trade off the physical risks against the benefits from peer socialisation, and in most places and most times the benefits obviously outweigh the costs. But in modern cities in countries like the UK, the physical risks to unsupervised children are simply much higher, because modern cities are full of cars. Parents are probably making the rational choice not to let their kids explore unsupervised, at least until they’re old enough not to run into the road;14 but by that point the kids have already missed a lot of benefits from peer socialisation.
Stark-Elster hypothesises that kids are drawn to things like Roblox and Minecraft as a replacement for exploring the physical environment with other kids. This can’t be a full explanation for why kids are on their phones too much (many of them are alone, scrolling YouTube shorts), but it’s definitely part of it. My wife recently told her about her niece being on Roblox, chatting to a huge number of people, and being asked by an adult which ones were her friends from school: about three or four were. It’s easy to describe this in concerned tones, but actually it makes perfect sense and is entirely natural that she wanted to hang out with kids, beyond the small circle that the adults in her life have placed her in contact with.
The issue, of course, is that Roblox is fucking full of paedophiles.
Rock-paper-scissors and the limits of game theory
Linch writes a fascinating post about the quixotic task of trying to beat rock-paper-scissors. He is right to say that rock-paper-scissors ‘is a near perfect microcosm of adversarial reasoning’.
Unpredictability is vital. Consider: My wife literally always plays rock. (This is not a joke, I am not exaggerating, she has not once played paper or scissors in the decade I have known her.) Since I can perfectly predict her move, I can guarantee victory for myself.
But the issue is that, by responding to the other player, I myself am no longer unpredictable: I open myself up to bluffs and countermeasures. If my wife ever played scissors, she’d fucking devastate me. (I retain a sneaking suspicion that she’s playing the long game.) Any attempt you make to take advantage of your opponents’ predictability will itself make you predictable.
An undergraduate who’s learned some game theory looks at this and see that the game only has one ‘Nash equilibrium’, one stable state—namely, purely random play. Any deviation from randomness can be taken advantage of, so neither player will do it. Random play is the only unexploitable strategy.
But, while it is an unexploitable strategy, it’s also shit! If I play randomly against someone who is also playing randomly, I win a third of the time. If I play randomly against my wife, I … still only win a third of the time. If I try a different strategy (like playing paper against my wife), I open myself up to potential exploitation, but I also will be able to exploit other players; depending on who I’m playing against, that trade-off might be worth it.
The ideal strategy is to find a way to predict the moves of opponents who are ‘dumber’ than you, while returning to random play against those who are ‘smarter’ than you. In theory, this is impossible: any regularity in your play, any deviation from randomness, is exploitable in principle; someone just needs to figure out how you distinguish ‘smart’ from ‘dumb’, and play dumb while actually being smart. But in practice, it takes time for other players to figure out your strategy, and figure out a way to exploit you. This time lag means that you can win in the interim, and gives you time to try to find an even better strategy in order to stay ahead. Linch describes the different strategies and ‘meta-strategies’ that have been tried in the escalating online rock-paper-scissors arm race.
The existence of this time lag, and other practical barriers like computation, means that the system never goes to equilibrium. A Nash equilibrium is a situation that is stable in the sense that nobody has any incentive to change their strategy. But in competitive rock-paper-scissors, the system never settles down to a stable state: everybody is constantly changing their strategy to try to keep at the frontier.
It strikes me that this is a better model of at least some adversarial / strategic situations than Nash equilibrium. For example: in international politics, leaders can change every few years, and strategies change accordingly: you might try to analyse this in game-theoretic terms, by saying that states are learning the structure of the game so they can converge to Nash equilibrium; but it seems like it might be better to understand this in different terms, by saying that practical constraints keep the game out of equilibrium entirely. Game theorists might argue that all systems will eventually tend to equilibrium over the long term; but even if this is true, to paraphrase Keynes, ‘the game can stay out of equilibrium longer than you can stay in power’.15
Why people want jobs
Matt Beard writes that your goal in pursuing a good career ‘isn’t really to get a job’. Rather, your emphasis should be on doing good work and being known for it. Particularly, he emphasises doing potentially-boring work that develops your skills in the right direction, akin to pianists doing scales, that makes you better. You should do this work in a context where it can be seen and appreciated by others, and you should build a network to do it.
I spoke to Matt last year and he gave me a version of this advice. At the time I couldn’t quite put my finger what I felt was wrong with it, but I think reading it on the page I think I can now pinpoint it.
Suppose I’m converted, and I want to follow through Matt’s advice practically. I wouldn’t want to have to stuff my skill-building work into a stolen half-hour here or there; what I really want is some arrangement whereby I am given the opportunity to do this kind of work during the main bulk of the day—let’s say, roughly, from 9 to 5. I would then be able to spend much more time doing the boring work that makes me better skilled and more knowledgeable. (Ideally, there would even be a specific location where I commute to in order to do the work, so I can really get into the zone of doing potentially boring work, rather than being distracted by all the fun stuff around my house.) Maybe I’d be able to do this work together with other people, who would then become intimately familiar with my abilities and knowledge, building out my network. And of course, I’d have to get some sort of stipend or salary, to support myself and my family as I did this.
You may be aware that English has a word for this sort of arrangement: it’s called a ‘job’.
Some people are in a situation where they have sufficient free time to devote a large bulk of their time to building career skills, and are in a social position that allows them to build useful connections in their spare time, while still having enough free time left over to not go full-on ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. (Uni students are the most obvious example.) But most people have to work most of the time. They can either try to squeeze in skill-building work into half an hour free time here and there; or they can sacrifice their personal time, going to the pub less / reading less / having less sex, in order to find time for deliberate practice and skill-building. Neither of these sounds good for your productivity or mental health, and even if we assume that your productivity or mental health don’t take a hit, they only solve half the problem anyway (they don’t help you make other people aware of the work you’re doing). But if you manage to get the kind of job where you will be doing skill-building work anyway, as part of your normal work responsibilities, then you’re sorted.
To my ears, Matt saying ‘don’t worry about getting a good job, worry about doing good work and being known for it’ sounds a bit like saying ‘don’t worry about breathing, worry about taking in oxygen and using it in respiration’—breathing is the way you do that!
As far as I can tell, this kind of advice is rooted in the advice given to software engineers, who spend a lot of time on ‘side projects’ which they hope will get noticed and help them get better jobs. Can anyone tell me if this means (a) software engineers have very few actual responsibilities in their jobs and so can spend a lot of their working day fucking around, or (b) software engineers don’t socialise? I know (b) is the stereotype but it seems unlikely.
That is to say, foreign policy other than the Israel/Palestine issue. Obviously many Labour MPs place a significant weight on that one way or the other.
And, for this same reason, Euroscepticism isn’t really an option here: Russia has set the terms of engagement, and Russia clearly perceives British power to be closely connected with European power, so there’s little room to wiggle out of this by trying to separate Britain from Europe.
They may indeed support a certain conception of democracy, but it’s a Caesarist New Right vision of democracy that (to European liberals) seems little better than Chinese communism.
Part of this difficulty is the book’s orality. These are mostly-unaltered transcripts of interviews, and transcribed speech is always kind of weird. It’s interesting how often an argument is completely missing because it was carried entirely by tone in the original interview. At least twice an interviewee was making a contrast between A and B, but the fact that it was a contrast was completely lost on me on first read through; they said stuff like ‘you can have A, you can have B’, and in real life hand gestures and tone would make it clear that A and B are contrasted, but on the page there’s no ‘but’ or ‘in contrast’ or ‘on the other hand’ to make that obvious. Likewise, in a number of cases interviewees will hedge a point before they make it: something like ‘what I think is—of course X—but Y’. In real life this is fine because when they are talking about X their tone will be tentative to convey ‘I’m still waiting to get to the point’. But in written format these turn into quasi–garden path sentences where you think X is their main point the whole way through, until you get to the end and they hit you with Y out of nowhere.
The concept of a ‘data manifold’, mentioned by a number of contributors as a potential explanation for scaling laws but especially Jared Kaplan (pp. 24–26), fits this to a t. If you have a power law, and try to explain it by saying ‘this phenomenon is the result of successive piecewise linear approximations to a high-dimensional manifold’, but there is no manifold made out of actual objects that fits the bill, if you don’t have the first clue what manifold the system is trying to approximate, then you have not explained the power law. You have merely redescribed it, you haven’t added any additional information or understanding, because you can’t say anything about the manifold except ‘it has precisely those features that are required to fit the observed phenomena’. I was pleased to see Cosma Shalizi’s ‘So you think you have a power law?’ in Patel and Leech’s bibliography, but I didn’t actually catch where or if it was cited in the main text; if you spotted it, comment or email me.
These are direct quotes.
Note: I don’t think Patel would agree with my evaluation here, given he thanks Aschenbrenner pretty profusely in the acknowledgments.
Though it’s notable that the government is now prioritising wet-wipe policy, but in a stupid way that won’t actually solve the problem (they’re banning plastic wipes, but non-plastic wipes can still block the pipes). See Spargo’s video for more.
As Yeats said in a different context:
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds. [W. B. Yeats, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’.]
Yes yes yes, probably it evolved gradually over many iterations.
Many Protestants, especially those who would insist on the doctrine of ‘irresistible grace’, would challenge my use of the word ‘cooperate’ here. That’s maybe fair enough. My point is that—while Protestants believe that other good human actions play no role in salvation, that they may result from being saved but cannot contribute anything—they do believe that having faith is not merely epiphenomenal, that it is different from other good human actions in playing a role in salvation. The Primitive Baptists simply observe that this still means that human action (namely, the action of having faith) has a role in salvation; and from the Protestant point of view, ‘this is the one thing we didn’t want to happen’.
Note that I’m not saying ‘the Catholics are consistent, the Primitive Baptists are consistent, anything in the middle is a confused muddle’; that would be too kind to the Catholics, whose confused muddle over grace was what led to the Protestant Reformation in the first place.
Although, obviously, Jesus did have secret teachings of his own.
You can see the origins of this view in Mark 12:25.
This isn’t to say that rational trade-offs are all that’s going on: certainly many parents are irrationally risk-averse.
An alternative approach game theorists use to model this situation is ‘quantal response equilibrium’: the idea is to model people’s deviation from ideal Nash equilibrium as follows: each player tries to act according to normal game-theoretic reasoning, but each has some probability of ‘fucking up’ and picking the wrong thing at random, and each knows that everyone else has some probability of fucking up. The issue is that this way of modelling the situation throws out a load of information: Linch’s post shows that people aren’t just ‘fucking up’ randomly, there are patterns in the choices that people make that causes them to deviate from optimal play; but this information is projected onto a much lower-dimensional space in the QRE model, represented as pure randomness.
Poor Ernie, the J.S. Mill of dinosaurs*
* the flightless ones went extinct (mostly)
While I'm here: I don't understood the appeal of the "birds are dinosaurs" thing. Sure, birds are dinosauria, just like they're reptilia, (uh) sarcopterygii, etc. But the salient thing about dinosaurs is that they're *giant monstrous beasts*, blessedly extinct. "Birds are dinosaurs" just leaves a vacancy.