BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-23 Sa
Pre (and post-!) fax machine technology transfer is really hard!; SubStack’s bosses see an opportunity in boosting the reach of Nazis; Henry Farrell dia-gnoses Jonathan Chait as trading intellect for reach; I shuda bought a bigger computer; Emi Nakamura on the flat Phillips Curve; very briefly noted; & the Fed deserves a lot more respect, scribes have cushy jobs, the Fed is now behind the curve on loosening, Jay Powell’s actions (probably) contained inflation, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-12-20 We…
SubStack NOTES:
Economic History: I think this from Jelf and Leslie gets the question of whether there were Jamaican origins to the puddling process for making wrought iron gets it right. There do not seem to have been.
The general rule is that technology transfer is overwhelmingly difficult without and even with extensive written documentation, and usually requires skilled and knowledgeable people with a deep understanding of the processes being adopted. The Soviet government before WWII could not set up its machine tools that it had bought from the U.S. auto industry without the comprehensive and hands-on direction and help from American engineers.
I should not have to say that this is how history is supposed to work: people find things and advance hypotheses, and other people then assess them:
Ian Leslie: Stories are bad for your intelligence <ian-leslie.com/p/stories-are-bad-for-yo…>: ‘How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid…. Bulstrode…. My guess is that she came across a few suggestive fragments… and wanted so badly to make them into a story which fitted her ideologically determined prior—that the British stole ideas from those they enslaved—that she got carried away, fabricating causes and effects where none existed. It’s one thing for a young and passionate academic to make mistakes; it’s quite another for a series of experienced academics to let her make them…
Oliver Jelf: The origin of Henry Cort’s iron-rolling process: assessing the evidence <osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rp5ae>: ‘The principal primary sources… do not support the contention that Cort acquired the process from… [the] foundry in Jamaica; nor that the foundry was dismantled and shipped to Portsmouth for Cort’s benefit. The sources instead suggest that… no innovation occurred there; that the chain of events by which Cort is supposed to have heard of the foundry’s activities certainly did not occur… and that no part of the foundry was removed from the immediate vicinity of the island, let alone taken to Portsmouth…
Jenny Bulstrode: Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution tandfonline.com/author/Bulstrode%2C+Jen…>: ‘Metallurgy is the art and science of working metals, separating them from other substances and removing impurities. This paper is concerned with the Black metallurgists on whose art and science the intensive industries; military bases; and maritime networks of British enslaver colonialism in eighteenth-century Jamaica depended. To engage with these metallurgists on their own terms, the paper brings together oral histories and material culture with archives, newspapers, and published works. By focusing on the practices and priorities of Jamaica’s Black metallurgists, the significance and reach of their work begins to be uncovered. Between 1783 and 1784 financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron. For this ‘discovery’, economic and industrial histories have lauded him as one of the revolutionary makers of the modern world. This paper shows how the myth of Henry Cort must be revised with the practices and purposes of Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed one of the most important innovations of the industrial revolution for their own reasons…
Neofascism: In my view, SubStack gets into real trouble when—as it does—it shifts from giving neofascists a platform to promoting neofascists: Look at all the neofascists you can read on SubStack! Let me recommend some more of them to you! It’s an ethos, or at least a business model:
Ken White: Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity <https://substack.com/home/post/p-139893879>: ‘Dealing With Nazis, Or Not, Can Be A Brand. Substack’s Monetizing It…. I [do not] have to accept Substack’s attempt to convince me that its branding is about the good of humanity. It’s about money…. Substack is engaging in transparent puffery when it brands itself as permitting offensive speech because the best way to handle offensive speech is to put it all out there to discuss. It’s simply not true. Substack has made a series of value judgments about which speech to permit and which speech not to permit…. The suggestion that Hanania was not an overt racist before his pseudonymous background was published is an argument, but a very bad one…. I dislike McKenzie’s apologia for Substack’s policy and for Richard Hanania because it has a sort of detached, sociopathic philosophy popular with techbrahs that all differences of opinion are equal — that a dispute over whether black people are human is like a dispute over the best programming language or whether Rocky Road is the best ice cream. This, too, is a value judgment. It’s not one I share…
Public Reason: Is someone bringing information or analysis of the situation to the table? Or is someone just trying to make somebody else clickthrough so they can sell their eyeballs to advertisers? Read the first! Ignore the second!
As for the substantive points at issue, it seems to me simply stupid that Trump did not conspire to engage in an insurrection—more than a riot and less than a war—to overturn the proper functioning of the government, and simply stupid to argue that the President is not an officer of the United States when the Constitution requires that he swear to “faithfully execute the Office of the President”.
As for the procedural points at issue, the ironic thing is that in slagging Jonathan Chait Henry Farrell is, of course, reinforcing what he sees as the malign tendencies pushing Chait to become ChaitGPT—and thus becoming part of the problem. Which is why Farrell wants to shift the conversation to personal intellectual hygiene, in some sense:
Henry Farrell: Why Jonathan Chait says outrageous things <programmablemutter.com/p/why-jonathan-c…>: ‘The political economy of ChaitGPT…. We live in an attention economy… forces the successful… to become a crude approximation of themselves if they aren’t possessed of exceptional self-control…. Large Language Models were creating a reverse Turing Test, where it would be increasingly difficult to distinguish certain prominent op-ed columnists from the vectorized clouds of statistical associations between text-tokens that might be used to model them…. My objection to most professional contrarians isn’t that they outrage my core beliefs, but that they don’t do so in particularly interesting ways. It’s much harder to distinguish Chait from ChaitGPT than it ought be…. But much more importantly, I wouldn’t particularly fancy the chances of many of the rest of us…. We still live in a world that’s… condensing our opinions and beliefs into crude summaries and simplifications. Fixing that—rather than bagging on any one individual opinionator, however annoying—seems to me the bigger problem…
ONE IMAGE: I Shoulda Bought a Computer with an M3Max Rather than an M3Pro Chip:
Normal operation is filling up a lot of the GPU capacity as a matter of course—and then when I runn MacWhisper the GPU flatlines at full.
ONE VIDEO: Emi Nakamura: Is the Phillips Curve Getting Flatter?:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Henry Farrell: Coaseian, Schmoaseian <https://crookedtimber.org/2023/12/10/coasean-schmoasean/>: ‘“Bargains” in much the same sense as as an unfortunate traveler is bargaining with a highwayman… their money or their life. There is a possible win-win… the highwayman and the victim will be happier if the highwayman gets the money, and the victim keeps their life. But… [the] situation… is structured by a grossly asymmetric… relationship…. Politics usually involves asymmetric power… one actor… has far more bargaining power… and is able to push for outcomes that provide it with the lion’s share…
Justin Wolfers: ‘Are we there yet? <https://www.threads.net/@justinwolfers/post/C1KMvE3OsyD> Yes…. The inflation measure the Fed targets (core PCE) has run at an annualized rate of 1.9% over the past six months, below the Fed’s two percent target. This isn’t a one-off blip; it’s six months of sustained low inflation…
Alison Nathan & al.: Top of Mind: 2023: 3 Themes <https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/top-of-mind/2023-3-themes-in-charts/report.pdf>: ‘In this very special Top of Mind year-end edition/Charting the story of this year is our mission./2023 wasn’t just about Taylor’s wildest dreams,/But also three important themes…
Dan Drezner: ‘With the exception of automobile theft, every national crime statistic is trending in the right direction…. Real GDP… surpasses pre-pandemic trendlines… soft landing…. Consumer confidence… yawning gap between the… real economy and public perceptions…. However, the “vibecession” might be coming to an end…. The technological keys… [of] solar, wind, and batteries—are following the same pattern of cost and efficiency improvement as semiconductors…. 2023 was a banner year. I just wish that was common knowledge…
Economic History: Alex Tolley: ‘I am always <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/teaching-note-ep-thompson-and-the/comment/45188740>… suspicious of… diverse peoples… placed in a monolithic group. Yes, Britain was (and remains)… very class conscious…. However, Britain was/is a very culturally diverse place… especially the North-South divide…. 1960s Britain changed… attitudes… greater acceptance of cultural differences…. Working class whites and, say Jamaicans, in post WWII Britain were very different, and I doubt had that much in common, especiially with the explicit racism… arguably maintained to this day…. I do wonder if the whole premise of a “British (English?) working class” (as a group) should even be a thing to be taught, especially in the US…
Alex Vanneman: ‘I read Thompson in my late twenties <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/teaching-note-ep-thompson-and-the/comment/45816618?r=d0v>…. Thompson is searching for, trying to invent, a working class that he can like, rather than the one that existed, one where a simple honest fellow can, after a hard day’s work, settle down to Cobbett’s Register rather than a racing form or look at page 3 girls…
Neofascism: Eric Rauchway: ‘Guy-tapping-temple meme: David M. Perry: If we don’t <https://bsky.app/profile/rauchway.bsky.social/post/3kgyuzi5ddu24> let people who staged a violent insurrection get away with staging a violent insurrection they might stage a violent insurrection…
Public Reason: Dan Davies: productised rage and its discontents: ‘The audience at a comedy club… are happy [because] … modern society is working for them…. But… they’re laughing… [because] a guy at the front of the room [is] telling them jokes…. Fox News…. A lot of people enjoy being angry (or at least, behave as if they do, which is all you need from a commercial point of view)…. The development of productised rage is a big part of the story of the last twenty years…. [How] a system can get out of control when it becomes unregulated…. [In] the Fox News / Dominion court case, you can see the gradual realisation on the part of the media executives that they weren’t actually in the driving seat. They had created a feedback loop between rage and money, and the POSIWD (purpose of a system is what it does) principle had taken over…
GPT-LLM-ML: John Quiggin: Training my replacement?: ‘I asked ChatGPT to “Write a critique of SMRs in the style of John Quiggin”…. What I got… [was] very good. Overall, I’d say at least as good as the average op-ed piece on this topic, which typically contains at least one factual error or logical fallacy, and is often less well-written…. The style isn’t exactly mine, but it’s closer than what sometimes results when an interventionist editor decides to rewrite my work…. It is a bit ponderous…. The only critical thing the piece lacks is originality. If I were writing a piece for publication, I’d want to make at least one new point…
Science Fiction: Cat Valente: Hitting That Work/Life Balance Beam Nose-First: Books, Children, and Time: ‘I publish fiction…. Interview questions…. Do you write every day? What’s your writing space look like? What inspires you?… I had a baby…. Those questions… now…have a friend… How do you balance your writing with being a parent? I’m here to tell you the actual answer, which is: “YOU JUST F***ING DON’T EVER AND EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE ALL THE TIME, LITERALLY IT’S ALL ON FIRE RIGHT NOW, AS WE’RE TALKING, THAT’S WHY I HAVE A ZOOM BACKGROUND ON FOR THIS INTERVIEW YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON BEHIND THAT ALGORITHMICALLY BREEZY BEACH IT’S A WHOLE HIERONYMUS BOSCH SITUATION IN MY HOUSE, BIRDHEADS EATING BUTTS AND PLAYING TESTICLE-FLUTES IN A PILE OF SCAFFOLDING, BROKEN DISHES, AND UNFINISHED WORK AND IT NEVER STOPS EVEN FOR A SECOND…”
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