Links

Useful summary of Noam Chomsky’s political writing in 10 points. Obviously a very long story made very short but a helpful reminder of the scope and humanity of his intellectual fight for reason and justice.

Interesting consideration of Rick Beato’s recent video arguing, in part, why music is getting worse. DeLong compares Beato’s argument to the complaint of John Philip Sousa in 1908 that the infernal talking machines were stealing music from the people. Beato and Ted Gioia have been working on this theme lately and, while I’m a big fan of both Beato and Gioia and I think they have legitamate grounds for concern, I can’t help feeling that their arguments aren’t quite fully considered. The rescue of music from the ease and mediocrity of AI as propssed has the whiff of precisely the kind of control and professionalization that Sousa was arguing against, and suggesting to young people that they should just do it the way we used to sounds guaranteed to provoke eye-rolls…

The inclusion of Sousa in the article reminds me of a quite different use of the same argument of Sousa by Lawrence Lessig in his TED talk of 2007 arguing for freedom of the commons with respect to music — Laws that choke creativity.

I suspect, and hope, that this conversation goes on and sees some refinement.

Rambling attempt to pin down the abstract characteristics and differences between creativity and imagination. I’m not sure what to make of it but, like a lot of Rao’s writing, its principal value is in provoking ideas on the subject.

Thoroughly entertaining review of The Family that Couldn’t Sleep, a work of epidemiological history focusing on the history and science of prion diseases — from Kuru to Mad Cow Disease. Disturbing problem in science with some intriguing proposed correlations to other diseases; good read.

Detailed history of the dark influence of Jack Welch on capitalism and its domination by market fundamentalism. A grotesque pageant of gleeful destruction and harm perpetrated by the masters of growth-driven but non-productive companies leading economic ideology.

This is a long essay that will make you angry early and if you aren’t apoplectically furious by the end you either don’t care or drank the kool-aid. Ends with an excellent summary of the reality of the current state of generative “AI”.

Very useful and coherent argument that our standard conception of intelligence, and our many attempts to define it, is deeply anthropocentric and misguided in its tendency to look for intelligence as a thing present in entities we want to call intelligent, or as a property or product of some part of anatomy — like the brain.

Excellent antidote to the usual discussions and assumptions of intelligence and refreshingly free of firm conclusions.

Amazing story about the giant fungi library at Kew Gardens and research on the relationship between fungi and soil carbon sequestration.

Not cheerful but a helpful, dispassionate account of where we are: in a global socio-economic transition. The suggestion is that in such times shared conceptions of purpose, organization, identity, and trust break down — leaving us with only uncertainty about the future and unable to form collective objectives, and therefore, predictions about what might happen next.

I found this a useful analytic framing of present experience; the sense that the future has disappeared in uncertainty seems like a fair description of what I hear expressed by others and experience myself lately. Also many useful proposed connections relating to the rapid evolution of liberal vs conservative worldviews; the collapse of the relationship between them as points on a common spectrum; the growing reduction of ideological options into exremes of progressivism and authoritarianism…

Review of A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay, the book and the review stand among the many recent attempts to capture the disruptive strangeness of what the internet is doing to us. This one, as is becoming the norm with such investigations, mostly concerns the internet on the phone, or the effects of the convergence of the two. Very nicely written with rather captivating reflections on depth of psychological change (for those of us old enough to remember a time before all this…) the convergence has wrought.

Strange, dark reflections on the strange, dark state of modern culture. Nice, rambling essay connecting Vico, Kafka, AI, rationalists, and the rise of cheerful end-times techno-optimists and state-pessimists. Conclusion: the metaphors that drive the techno-culture of the moment have gone wrong; we need better metaphors.

Nicely written very personal engagement with several recent-ish works on the remarkable activities of and relationships between funghi and trees.

Article describing research done on mice that sees them consistently breaking trained patterns of behaviour in a way the researchers come to see as strategic. “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks” — as usual, the question is: why is this surprising? Why isn’t it the initial assumption to test in the hypotheses relating to animal cognition? Good read.

Another amazing essay by Maria Popova, this one on Johannes Kepler and his remarkable, tragic story. Great description of his contributions to modern cosmology but most interesting in organizing the story around his work of fiction, The Dream, intended to help show common readers the intuitions supporting Copernican cosmology, but which inadvertantly lead to his mother’s trial for witchcraft.

A reprint of an article first published in 1995 in which Denby describes a university literature class engage with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Denby’s worry the forces of moral correction may remove it from memory. The article is mainly hopeful but a reflection published almost 30 years after observes the progress of forgetting has advanced. In any case, a lovely essay.

Helpful review of attitudes and studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder that shows how poorly understood it is, how persistent and pervasive discrimination against NDs is and on what poor grounds, how diverse and intetesting NDs typically are, and how complex the issue is despite casual reduction to a mere disorder. Makes you wonder what is so great about NTs.

More stories from the edges of biology demonstrating something clearly like cognition in ‘primitive’ organisms, plants, even just cells; memory and decision making without brains or evolution. Excellent review of work and ideas across a range of fields and experiments.

Excellent and highly readable review of the rise of remarkable and controversial challenges to the standard model of evolution.

Short, slightly reductive, but useful summary of basic positions in philosophy of science on what science is doing.

The essay is actually, kind of claiming this. More charitably, it argues that historians, specifically, are prone to letting the emotional and moral tension of a story corrupt their commitment to reason and evidence. This is a story (I know, right?) well told, and the cautionary tale is apt, but it kind of skips over the challenge we find in making a distinction between the kind of story that ‘makes us stupid’ and the kind of story that connects the metaphysical foundations of the commitment to rational process of scientific discipline — see Bruno Latour, eg.

Meditation on the making, sharpening, and using of cooking knives. The most pleasing element is its fine distinction between sharpness as a property of an object vs sharpness as a relation of the knife edge to the practice of cutting — the aesthetics of the object against the aesthetics of process. This wouldn’t have made proper sense to me before I started using a really good Japanese knife…