BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-07-28 Fr
…unsustainable businesses, & Maximum Canada’s bright future…
MUST-READ: Reading Practice in Tomorrow’s Infotech World:
Today’s food for thought:
Josh Bernoff: Why books work: A rebuttal to Andy Matuschak: ‘Think about what non-fiction books are made out of. They include overarching principles. Matuschak and I agree, if those are any good, people retain them. There are the arguments that support those principles. Sometimes people retain those arguments, sometimes they don’t. But you don’t have to see the framing to understand how the building stays up. I’d argue that retaining the arguments is less important. There are subsidiary ideas. A good book has lots of those. And a reader is going to recall those subsidiary ideas only to the extent that they are relevant for her. If there are 15 subsidiary ideas and three are relevant for you, those three may be sufficient. If a book is really useful, you may retain more. There are also, in any given book, hundreds of bits of knowledge. There are facts, statistics, diagrams, and, crucially, stories. There are long case-study stories and short “for example” stories. When the author chooses these bits and delivers them well, the reader retains them…. [So] write directly to the reader, using the words I and you…. Tell stories…. Ask rhetorical questions…. Include graphics…. Vary presentation…. Introduce and sum up…
And:
Elizabeth Minkel: Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books: ‘Every new technology from the internet to virtual reality has tried to upend book culture. There’s a reason they’ve all failed—and always will…. One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken…. The “10X MORE engaging” crowd has come in waves… promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy…. Interactive books could have sound effects or music…. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books… eschew… “static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world…. Right now, plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while…. “In the meantime, tech bros will still find VCs to wine and dine and spend more money on bullshit,” [Maris] Kreizman predicts. But for the rest of us? We’ll just keep on reading.
As I say: A good reader takes the black marks on the pages of a book, spins up a sub-Turing instantiation of the mind of the author from those black marks, runs that instantiation on a sandboxed partition in their own wetware, and then argues with that instantiation.
The end result of this process? Niccolo Machiavelli puts it very well in his “Letter to Vettori”:
And as the evening comes on, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them…
Machiavelli is, as people call it these days, an “active reader”: someone who when reading a book induces in themself a kind of multiple personality order that allows them to derive all—or nearly all—of the benefits of active dialogue with another mind from mere black marks on a page. In so doing, Machiavelli short-circuits Socrates’s objection, in Phædrus, to books. In Socrates’s story, the God Theuth [Thoth, ] shows King Thamus his invention of writing, and Thamus responds that it will:
create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality…
And Socrates analogizes writing to:
unfortunately… painting… creations… [that] have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence…. When they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves…
Thus Socrates’s very strong preference for interactive oral dialogue over written text as a way of pursuing philosophy—living and dynamic form of discourse that could adapt to the needs and abilities of each interlocutor, and that could stimulate the soul to discover the truth. Socrates’s critique of writing was, of course, ironic, since we only know his thoughts and arguments through the books written by Plato. Plato accepted (or originated? Plato’s character “Socrates” has a fraught relationship to the real Socrates) by dialogues, myths, allegories, metaphors, and so on. It was only Aristotle who went all-in on books, trusting that they would find the right kind of, or enough of the right kind of readers.
Bernoff is strongly on Machiavelli’s side, but in his Writing Without Bullshit and elsewhere he recognizes that most (all?) readers need a good deal of help to start the spin-up of the sub-Turing instantiation:
Write directly to the reader, using the words I and you…. Tell stories…. Ask rhetorical questions…. Include graphics…. Vary presentation…. Introduce and sum up…
Motivated and curious readers can and do read like Machiavelli.
But one problem is that people these days are reading less and especially reading less in the way of long form extended arguments. Thus detailed multi hour engagement via a book with another mind (or with the self-created illusion of another mind) is becoming much less common, and that will make us much less good at it. This is a problem for books.
Minkel does not believe this is a problem. She argues that, historically, books have resisted disruption by technology because they offer this distinctive mode of engagement—this spin-up of a sub-Turing instantiation—that appeals to many.
But in the modern world of the internet and ChatBots, will we lose our ability to so-easily submit to the power of words to create immersive and imaginative worlds that readers can explore at their own pace and in their own way?
Quite possibly.
Modern technologies may well destroy, via their parcelization of our attention and thus our building-up of our reading neuronal patterns, much of our collective ability to make the use of books that we have made of them for the past 2500 years. It will be interesting to see what happens…
ONE IMAGE: Unemployment Is No Longer a Good Thermometer for Labor-Market State, But Quits Still Are:
ONE VIDEO: Bob Reich’s “Wealth & Poverty” Lectures:
<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuoeaIPzKQibBDbx2m_Rfsit>
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Mike Konczal: ‘With the new GDP number, private (nonresidential) investment is now above the CBO’s pre-pandemic forecast.
The manufacturing boom we are experiencing isn’t just shifting around a given level of investment. It’s crowding-in more investment than forecasters thought there could be…
Tim Duy: Fed Watch 7/24/23: ‘Powell will not rule out a September rate hike….Based on Governor Christopher Waller’s stringent conditions, a rate hike in September appears very unlikely…. The Fed has not made clear its reaction function in a disinflationary environment…
Doyce: ‘This line from The New York Times this morning kind of blew my mind: “The game industry now accounts for significant chunks of the economy. It is larger than music, U.S. book publishing and North American sports COMBINED. Microsoft’s game division and Activision Blizzard each make more money annually than all U.S. movie theaters…
Gillian Tett: How American consumers lost their optimism: ‘It is possible that the lived experience is worse than official employment and inflation data imply…. 75 per cent of consumers think we will be in recession soon — and 44 per cent think we are already in one…. Yet, even amid this gloom, the US economy continues to grow at a strong(ish) pace…. The Michigan survey shows that consumers are more cheerful about their personal finances than the macroeconomy. Another is that Republicans are dramatically more pessimistic than Democrats…
Sam Ro: Three massive forces have fueled the economic expansion for the past two years: ‘One of the most clicked and shared TKer newsletters ever has been the March 4, 2022 issue: Three massive economic tailwinds…. The unprecedented trillions of dollars worth of excess savings accumulated by consumers, the eye-poppingly high number of job openings, and the record-high levels of core capex orders. These metrics are notable because they’re leading indicators…
Finance: Frederik Gieschen: Filtering The Idea Funnel: ‘I am working on a short post exploring how the Pritzker family created much of the blueprint Buffett used for Berkshire Hathaway. But first I wanted to figure out why Zell thought so highly of Jay Pritzker. Zell admired him for his ability to “look at deals and focus on what would either make them or break them”…
Building Human Capital: Cecilia Elena Rouse: America’s Higher-Education Financing Challenge: ‘While even a well-designed IDR [Income-Driven Repayment] would not solve all the problems in the financing of higher education in the US, making IDR the default repayment plan for student loans would be a huge improvement…
Economic History: Max Roser: Mortality in the past: every second child died:
‘The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally. This article asks how we know about the mortality of children in the past and what we can learn from it for our future…
Techtopia: Cory Doctorow: When the Town Square Shatters: ‘Once again, science fiction fandom shows us…. The most successful successor to GEnie SFRT is Archive of Our Own (AO3)…. AO3 is living in the Fediverse’s future…. We should be looking to AO3 and fandom to see what’s coming next, and what will and won’t succeed…
Sukbae Lee & al.: The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor…
¶s:
Usually when good economic news is portrait as bad it is because the stock market is uneasy, and because a solid majority of the business press is really keying off of the stock market as the arbiter of all things.
What makes this particular lemminglike episode of downbeat thumbs-on-the-scales is that this time the stock market is not unhappy at all.
Is this simply “to have a lead, we must make something bleed”? Or is it something else?
Drezner is, rightly, quite puzzled:
Daniel W. Drezner: The U.S. economy is humming along pretty well… or is it?: ‘A short commentary on mainstream media coverage of the U.S. economy…. Voters fear a downturn because that it what experts in the media are telling them…. Economics reporters are covering the Biden economy the same way Politico is covering the Biden foreign policy: stressing the dark cloud… .Consider two stories… framed by mainstream media outlets in ways that vastly inflated the “to be sure” angle…. Reuters… U.S. consumer confidence just reached a two-year high….. The subhed added, “The economy is not out of the woods, with the survey from the Conference Board offering mixed signals.”… It is entirely fair for Reuters to include a “to be sure” graf in their coverage, but it’s weird that they put such a strong caveat in their headline and their lede…. That’s nothing compared to a Politico story by Tanya Snyder that way, way worse. This story is about UPS and the Teamsters reaching a deal and thereby avoiding a labor strike…. But Politico covered it with a headline blaring, “UPS strike averted, sparing Biden another economic disaster.” Here’s the opening paragraph: “Package delivery giant UPS and the Teamsters union Tuesday agreed on a new tentative contract, likely heading off a supply chain meltdown that could have affected virtually every American household—and saving the Biden administration from another rash of bad economic news….” The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World read the entire story to learn about the “rash of bad economic news” that Snyder was talking about—and readers, there was none…. To be sure…
I find this to be very wise. A sustainable business cannot be just profitable now. A sustainable business has to have an operating framework that will keep it profitable even after the world has changed as all of the unsustainable businesses have crashed off their respective runways:
Economics: Bryne Hobart: Don’t Get Addicted to Fantasy Economics: ‘(This approach is one reason Amazon, which does now own some high-incremental-margin straightforward-growth kinds of properties, does not succumb to the usual bad habits such categories lead to. Their corporate culture jelled when they were mostly in retail, the Salusa Secundus of industries.) Paul Graham has written about how good founders need to “live in the future” a bit, and to use and build the kinds of products people will come to expect eventually… The strategic version…. The tactical version is to live in an immediate future where the counterparties who were giving you free money have either gotten what they wanted from that approach or gone bankrupt because they didn’t. Habituating to this is annoying, but most kinds of realism are. A business can’t survive in a steady-state indefinitely based on some third party’s irrational behavior…
Increasing chances that Montréal, Toronto, Banff, or Vancouver will be the place to be in North America in 2040 or so:
Economics: Noah Smith: Maximum Canada is happening: ‘Canada has a nation-building population strategy. Does America?… I wish Americans could tell themselves a positive narrative like Canada’s — of immigration as the way to build a multicultural nation. Many of us have tried to tell that narrative, and have foundered on the rocks of America’s age of division. As John Higham wrote, when America is underconfident — when we start to doubt who we are as a people and a nation — we instinctively think about closing the door. Right now, America definitely doesn’t know who we are, as a people and as a nation. Maybe next decade we’ll remember. Canada, however, does know who they are. And good for them. Now all they have to do is build a bunch of housing, and they’ll be golden…