Links

Long historico-biographical article on the career and habits of Tom Waits at the time of the release of the Frank’s Wild Years trilogy for its 40th anniversary reissue. Good summary of Waits’ work and influence and a timely reminder of these startlingly original and compelling recordings.

The article gets at something in Waits’ sound that reminds me of an interview with Keith Jarrett published by Ted Gioia where Jarrett talks about the essence of music he is grasping after, something unstructured and organic… Something intimated in the Waits article, in passages like this:

Ribot remembers how Waits would often be writing the lyrics moments before he sang them. “The groove was the main thing, which he would keep trying to communicate with the way he was moving his body and guitar.” As Richards recently said in an interview with Uncut: “[Tom] had a lot of rhythms going on in his head and in his body… the groove is another word for the grail. People search for it everywhere, and when you find it you hang on to it.”

A re-publication of a 1986 interview from Keyboard Magazine. A rambling philosophical engagement with the role of music and the responsibility of the musician, the essence of music and its relation to the essence of experience. Beyond my capacity to summarize but there are several passages that are strikingly similar to things said in a recent article about Tom Waits — worth reading these together.

Entertaining and informative lecture on math and geometry using paper to demonstrate ideas.

A dense tour through Hugh Kenner’s ideas on action and intention as revealed primarily in his work on T.S. Eliot. Featuring comparative remarks by Stanley Cavell, G.E.M. Anscombe, and others. A winding literary path into practical reason and moral theory.

Reflections on the idea of nature as something other than human; something in which humans intervene. The thesis is that we can’t make sense of nature by removing ourselves from it, nor make sense of ourselves by removing nature from us. Pleasing anecdotes and a refreshing engagement with the problem of our moral interpretations of animal behaviour beside instances of animal behaviour that seem to make no sense without a moral interpretation.

Striking summary of science/western culture’s prioritizing of vision, therefore light, over hearing and sound and the consequences of that priority for our ways of thinking about things. In contrast, the article presents some interesting stories about sonification in science as a way of revealing patterns in data ‘overlooked’ by standard visual methods of interpretation.

Great overview of his book Debt: the First 5000 Years. Very unusual talk in its informality, almost as if he was asked at a party what he was working on. In consequence it is a bit like watching someone with enormous intellectual resources, and great humility, work through an idea — probably due to this being hosted by Google Talks rather than an academic institution.

Justice for all is composed of the ugliest compromises…
Ben Caplan, Truth Doesn’t Live in a Book

Another outstanding entry in the ACX 2023 Book Review contest. This one a review of the medieval Icelandic classic Njal’s Saga. A hilarious and entertaining reflection on a very strange work as commentary on liberty, justice, and civilization, and the ancient Norwegian example of how we have tried to negotiate them.

Short history of the Vilnius Jazz Trio and their place in the history of both modern jazz and the last decades of the Soviet Union.

ACX’s 2023 book review contest offers another winner. A nicely balanced, only partly skeptical review of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World by Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith. The book argues against AGI on the grounds that math-based, deterministic computing systems can’t replicate fundamentally non-linear, complex systems that produce biological intelligence.

Captain of Team Human realizes the clamour from the tech-bros about AI risk and for AI regulation is just another play for legislative aid in capturing another market…

A good read but interesting mainly for a lot of time spent covering the problems encountered by Carrère, and others, in casting characters based on real people close to the author. The claims generally rest on complaints by those represented that they are not represented, in some sense, truly, and that the author, therefore, has transgressed on the subject’s autonomy in a morally significant way. Carrère himself seems to agree with this claim and likens himself to the torturer. I find the whole thing very odd but it is an interesting starting point for thinking about representation, interpretation, identity, and reality; though perhaps not moral claims…

Entertaining and useful summary mapping the relative locations of internet Rationalists (Scott Alexander, Yudkowsky, Thiel/Musk…) and Post-Rationalists (Venkatesh Rao, David Chapman, Jordan Peterson…) and how the tribes and metatribes got where they are. Amusing and occasionally surprising.

Thoughtful and provocative response to claims of implicit gender bias in GPT-4. The critical and refreshing claims:

1. researchers are too prone to anthropomorphizing LLMs in interactions and interpretations, and
2. LLMs are not as good at language disambiguation as we think.

The lesson we need to keep in mind: language is full of ambiguity that we don’t appreciate because we can negotiate it without much effort, but computers, no matter how impressive, can’t yet.

An entry in the Astral Codex Ten 2023 book reviews competition, by a not-yet-disclosed poster. A deep and coherent summary of Jacob’s philosophy of economics presented in Cities and the Wealth of Nations, an extension of her earlier work on cities with greater focus on their economic significance and how typical, nation-level economic metrics miss their importance — and resulting policy often harms cities, with the further effect of harming the nation.

Excellent and enjoyable writing.

“Any story of madness has a good witch in it, a good witch who is not so good.”

This is a delighfully hallucinatory, poetic summary of The Wizard of Oz as if from the perpective of a psycho-therapist helping unpack Dorothy’s traumatic journey.

Another provocative essay by Ted Gioia, in this one he argues that the roots of modern rational philosophy and STEM culture are to be found in shamanic or Orphic musical traditions in Greece (and elsewhere). As always, good reading, lively engagement with knowledge and history, with broad ranging subject matter and unusual connections.

Consider in relation to J E H Smith’s Philosopher on Drugs

This is a 3 part exploration of connections between quantum indeterminacy and Gödel’s incompletenes theorem (and Turing’s uncomputable number theorem…). Engaging and interesting but important for getting at the way branches of thought are uncomfortable with relationships they can’t control. The third installment has a gripping refutation of Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis on the grounds of quantum state randomness and world state incomputability via Cantor’s diagonal method… Provocative and fun.

Part 2 and part 3

A really good essay reviewing two new books on climate change and looming catastrophe, along with some helpful history and context.

The first part of the essay is a very good summary of the seminal book, Limits to Growth: A Report on the Predicament of Mankind, which, along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, stands at the origin our current conception of climate crisis, its future, and what we should be doing about it. Limits to Growth was the first important product of The Club of Rome, was a best-seller in 1972 when published, and inspired the first round of pro-capitalist/pro-growth climate denial. The book was produced by a team of people at MIT doing the first work in computer modeling of complex systems to make predictions about the living world and human activity. It was prescient, so far accurate, and alarming in its predictions.

The central focus of the essay is a critique of the Club of Rome’s 40th anniversary follow-up, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. Venzke argues the book is disappointing and fails to respect its debt to Limits to Growth, characterizing it as a sad attempt to present a case for optimism that fails to challenge the political and economic levers that continue to exacerbate the problem as predicted.

In the second book reviewed, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change, and Pandemics, Venzke finds what one should have hoped to find in Earth for All: respect for its origin in Limits to Growth and a clear identification of the critical challenge to altering the course of catastrophe in capitalism and the economic commitment to growth.

This is quite a long essay with real depth of thinking on a range of issues, and perspective on the problems of optimism, pessimism, action, and paralysis associated with the debate. An excellent basis from which to organize thinking on the big problem and sources to look at for deeper thinking.

Having heard many times that the right side of the brain connects to the left side of the body and vice versa, I had never really thought to ask why, and I had no idea it was ubuquitous throughout the brain-possessing animal population. This article provides an intuitive explanation, though for those of us with spatial dyslexia the illustrations can be a bit bewildering.