Links

An extensive and compelling review of two new works on the history of science that challenge the traditional Eurocentric view and the tendency to reduce the path of modern science to a story about a few Great Men. These books cut through the complex relationships of global knowledge creation in the age of European colonialism, on the one hand, and the role of indigenous peoples and common people constructing knowledge through craft and experience, on the other. A nice summary question from the article, attributed to Peter Dear, is the question “what is the history of science the history of?”

Reviewed are the books Horizons: the Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett, and From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World by Pamela H Smith.

A refreshingly thoughful discussion of the historical path of our thinking about and the cultural manifestation of racism. Helpful in broadening one’s perspective beyond the overly simplistic political context of the moment.

Interviewed by Claudia Dreifus, Naomi Oreskes talks about the role of “market fundamentalism” in subverting education, culture, science, and public knowledge on critical issues for policy, from banking to climate change. She describes the agenda of Chicago School economists and neo-liberal conservatives to promote anti-government sentiment and ultimately undermine public mechanisms for representing reality.

This is a really good introduction to a whole cluster of urgent problems covered in her books, written with Erik Conway, The Merchants of Doubt and, more recently, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

There is so much writing on ChatatGPT and LLMs that it is hard to keep a list — something I started to do in a desultory kind of way but quickly got overwhelmed. This example is one I like. It is provocative without falling for casual anthropomorphism, end-of-the-worldism, or goofy enthusiasm. It does, however, go in for some goofy testing of ChatGPT with literary device experimentation and some conceptual guidance by way of Claude Lévi-Strauss. This is a good one to include for open-minded fun and education.

Nice update from Kevin Kelly — turns out, unsurprisingly, that Noah is a fan. Good interview, covers a broad range of topics of interest to Kelly.

A delightful story about the author’s obsession with slime molds. An unlikey subject revealed to be more fascinating than one might imagine. Poetic and compelling writing, fantastic and beautiful photographs.

Not like any interpretation of Satin Doll you’ve heard but it is strangley gripping. Great video, too. Via Ted Gioia.

What is it? Is it usefull? I don’t know but it is cool and worth playing with…

Engaging reminder of the perpetually fresh realism of Chaucer, this one presenting his Wife of Bath as the first ordinary woman in english literature — a plain-talking feminist from the 14th century.

Don’t really inow what to do with this but I find it pleasing. A dead-pan intro about plant evolution concludes with the assertion that flowers appeared and invented love, and then led to everything we care about. The article is really an introduction to a work of musical and collage-animation art based on Emily Dickenson’s poem Bloom — the song is beautiful and Joan as Police Woman has a great voice.

A great cautionary essay on the critic’s reactions to first performances of music we now consider classic or great or revolutionary, from Jazz to the Beatles to Beethoven. The upshot: when something is different and innovative it usually gets a bad first review. The Beatle’s albums were all different from each other, each one a fresh, innovative experiment; therefore, most of their first reviews were bad. Amazing reflection on the folly of history.

Although The Structure of Scientific Revolutinos, his most popular work, was published in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s ideas still permeate a lot of talk about scientific knowledge and history. It always seemed to me that a lot of representations of his idea of a ‘paradigm shift’ couldn’t possibly be accurate as they often sounded too simple and metaphysically naive — this review goes some way toward addressing that sense and seems mostly to agree with it.

A good overview of the intellectual and political life of French philosopher-sociologist Bruno Latour, who died late in 2022.

His work covers so much ground even this wide ranging review can’t really cover it. From work on the sociology of science to his later focus on environmentalism, it is a remarkable career remembered. A quote from his book Pasteruization captures the character of his thinking that most aligns with my own: “nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.”

A guest-post on Noah’s substack, mainly about jobs in the age of AI and speculating that the job of secretary may have a revival as an important human role in the AI future. What most struck me was the description of the origins of the secretarial job that is far different from our typical, gendered, vaguely dismissive assumptions suggesting a trivial task based in low-skill servitude. Robbins starts by reminding us (of something I didn’t know in the first place, to make the point) of the original meaning of secretary: “The ‘secretary’ literally means ‘person entrusted with secrets,’ from the medieval Latin secretarius, the trusted officer who writes the letters and keeps the records.”

Robbins’ brief history of the job’s descent toward its current status is surprising and refreshing.

The authors intro summary: “a journey deep into the cavern of dungeons & dragons, a utopian, profoundly dorky and influential game that, lacking clear winners or an end, may not be a game at all”.

A helpful, short introduction to a way of thinking about consciousness that seems to be growing in popularity. Short video composed of clips from interviews with scientists and philosophers.

Strange, wandering, often horrific reconstriction of stories from the history of Russia; a kind of poetic reflection on/of cultural identity. Reminds me of Curzio Malaparte’s Kaput in its (successful) attempt to capture a sense of reality by telling reality-adjacent stories more effective than mere description. Beautiful and remarkable writing, as usual.

Beautiful performance of a beautiful aria, made somehow more pleasing by being a studio performance rather than on stage; brings home the talent involved in doing the job of the artist when the infrastructure of performance is removed.

Bill Buford is a great writer and a great food writer. This is his story of dragging his family to Lyon where he wants to go to cooking school and how he started out working in a bakery. About life, death, love, family, and taking chances as much as it is about bread.

From before the LLM furore, this is one of the sanest considerations of what AI means, what it doesn’t, and how we should be thinking about it.

Can’t resist including this gem of an image from the article: