BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-03-01 Fr
The funeral of Navalny; Asimov's laws of robotics on Mystery Hype AI Theater 3000; Very Briefly Noted; & Fear of a Black Pope!; Quick Takes on Acemoglu & Johnson's "Power & Progress"; Affirmative Action Primer & Finger Exercise; A Note on Management; Should I Be Running an Email Answers Column?; Were We Expelled from Eden by the Ox & the Plough?; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-02-25 Su…
ONE IMAGE: The Funeral of Navalny:
ONE AUDIO: Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000:
Science fiction authors and all-around tech thinkers Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders join [Emily Bender and Alex Hanna] this week to talk about Isaac Asimov's oft-cited and equally often misunderstood laws of robotics, as debuted in his short story collection, 'I, Robot.' Meanwhile, both global and US military institutions are declaring interest in 'ethical' frameworks for autonomous weaponry.
Plus, in AI Hell, a ballsy scientific diagram heard 'round the world -- and a proposal for the end of books as we know it, from someone who clearly hates reading.
Charlie Jane Anders is a science fiction author. Her recent and forthcoming books include Promises Stronger Than Darkness in the ‘Unstoppable’ trilogy, the graphic novel New Mutants: Lethal Legion, and the forthcoming adult novel Prodigal Mother.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who also writes science fiction. Their most recent novel is The Terraformers, and in June you can look forward to their nonfiction book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.They both co-host the podcast, 'Our Opinions Are Correct', which explores how science fiction is relevant to real life and our present society.
Also, some fun news: Emily and Alex are writing a book! Look forward (in spring 2025) to The AI Con, a narrative takedown of the AI bubble and its megaphone-wielding boosters that exposes how tech’s greedy prophets aim to reap windfall profits from the promise of replacing workers with machines.
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Sam Ro: Warren Buffett’s Greatest Trade: ‘How a new investment philosophy changed Berkshire forever: ‘Munger… “in 1965, promptly advised me: ‘Warren, forget about ever buying another company like Berkshire. But now that you control Berkshire, add to it wonderful businesses purchased at fair prices and give up buying fair businesses at wonderful prices…. Abandon everything you learned from… Ben Graham. It works but only when practiced at small scale.’ With much back-sliding I subsequently followed his instructions…. Buffett [had] mastered the idea of “buying fair businesses at wonderful prices”…. [But] there aren’t many opportunities, and the opportunities tend to be small… Munger’s suggestion to flip the script and add “wonderful businesses purchased at fair prices” expanded the range of opportunities…. It’s this kind of thinking that justified Berkshire amassing shares of Apple starting in 2016 at a time when many questioned how much further the stock could run… <https://finance.yahoo.com/news/revisiting-warren-buffetts-greatest-trade--switching-philosophies-141506007.html>
Lex Populi: Merits and demerits of stock pundits: ‘Brad Barber and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, for example, found that in 2000 and 2001 analysts’ darling stocks underperformed the market by 7 per cent while their least-favoured picks generated average annualised market-adjusted returns of 13.4 per cent…. A bloated consensus coalescing around the most popularly held view is already firmly baked into the share price…. Decades of eliminating conflicts of interest, broker consolidation and the inexorable rise of index trading have ravaged the quality and quantity of research. Small and mid-capitalisation stocks have predictably fared worse, casualties of consolidation…. Investment time horizons have shrunk…. Shorter-term oriented hedge funds are the dominant paying clients… <https://www.ft.com/content/eee00b21-84d4-443d-ac82-13b22fadb7c0>
Lex Populi: Merits and demerits of stock pundits: ‘Two US utilities in the west, PG&E and Hawaiian Electric, have faced steep financial distress from wildfire liabilities in recent years. PG&E filed for bankruptcy and HE may eventually have to do the same to settle claims efficiently. It would be extraordinary if Berkshire Hathaway Energy was forced into a similar gambit. Buffett warned that the costs of climate change for utilities like his may be so vast and uncertain that governments, rather than merely regulating private sector firms, could be forced into becoming operators themselves in order to fill the void. The Nebraskan has always had a sunny outlook for the US and, by extension, his powerhouse. Despite the contradictions, his worry about climate’s storm clouds should be treated as a marker… <https://www.ft.com/content/eee00b21-84d4-443d-ac82-13b22fadb7c0>
Dan Davies: when and why what works won’t: ‘Sparrow’s work on problem-oriented regulation is meant to tackle what he sees as the big conundrum; that the amount of regulation in society keeps expanding, but the increase in the perceived burden doesn’t seem to deliver any [in]crease in the perceived useful results. The reasons why this is the case are quite complex and get into politics, but my favourite part of “The Regulatory Craft” is the bit where he explains why his solutions don’t work either…. Ot is very difficult to be the kind of organisation that can regularly and systematically take a problem-oriented approach… respect the problem… respecting the fact that once it’s identified, the rest of the sequence will probably require an organisational form which doesn’t respect your own current systems and ways of working. Consequently, it’s a model which requires constant regular reorganisations. And reorganisations are difficult…
Global Warming: Matt Yglesias: Politics is hard: ‘“This legislation WILL NOT GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION unless you make COMPLEMENTARY POLICY CHANGES TO ADDRESS TRANSMISSION” and “this legislation WILL GENERATE STEEP DECARBONIZATION as long as you also make complementary policy changes to address transmission” have the exact same truth conditions. But they deliver different messages to the public and to congress. There was a critical moment at which delivering a positive framing about the benefits of the IRA was important to getting progressives on board with a compromise heavily shaped by Joe Manchin, and I don’t have a problem with people running with an effective political message. And there’s a reason that both Manchin and the White House immediately turned around to work on permitting legislation. The key actors did get what was going on. That said, I am not sure that backbench safe seat Democrats or the environmental advocacy groups whose approval they crave get this…
Public Reason: Jonathan Rée: Like a Top Hat: ‘One might have expected the account of morality in After Virtue to lead to a turn towards politics… emphasis on community, tradition and social change seems to point in that direction… so does… the idea that, as he put it, ‘it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are.’ From here it would be a short step to ‘ democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty…. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist individualism…. Democracy… is always commandeered by elites… [who] ensure that ‘the most fundamental issues are excluded.’… [Never] liberal democracy, only ‘oligarchies disguised as liberal democracies’…. The bogus rationality of bureaucratic management…. Laying down your life for your country is… ‘like being asked to die for a telephone company’. Politics is optional in a way that morality is not, and in its modern manifestations it is best avoided… <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/jonathan-ree/like-a-top-hat>
History: William Stubbs (1895): Select Charters & Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History: From the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First: ‘The following short treatise is a somewhat ideal description of the constitution of parliament in the middle of the 14th century…. Its authenticity has been bitterly assailed, and it is of course absurd to regard it as a relic of the times of the Conqueror. But it is not therefore a modern forgery. It is… a theoretical view for which the writer was anxious to find a warrant in immemorial antiquity…. “Here is described the manner in which the parliament of the king of England and of his English was held in the time of king Edward, son of king Ethelred. Which manner, indeed, was expounded by the more discreet men of the kingdom in the presence of William, duke of Normandy, and Conqueror and king of England, the Conqueror himself commanding this; and was approved by him, and was customary in his times and also in the times of his successors, the kings of England… <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/manner.asp> <https://archive.org/details/selectchartersot00unse/page/502/mode/1up?view=theater>
Vladimir Lenin: The Proletarian Revolution & the Renegade Kautsky: ‘Here is Marx’s “little word”: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation… in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”… Kautsky…cannot hide… that dictatorship presupposes and implies a “condition”… of revolutionary violence of one class against another…. Monarchy and republic… are but varieties of the bourgeois state, that is, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie…. Under bourgeois democracy the capitalists, by thousands of tricks—which are the more artful and effective the more "pure" democracy is developed—push the masses away from the work of administration, from freedom of the press, the right of assembly, etc. The Soviet government is the first… to enlist the… exploited masses, in the work of administration. The toiling masses are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments… important questions… are decided by the stock exchange…. Bourgeois parliaments are institutions alien to them, instruments for the oppression of the proletarians by the bourgeoisie, institutions of a hostile class, of the exploiting minority. The Soviets are the direct organization of the toiling and exploited masses themselves, which helps them to organize and administer their own state in every possible way…<https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/>
Neofascism: Radley Balko: The retconning of George Floyd, part three: the great flattening: ‘The revisionist campaign to exonerate Derek Chauvin is about one thing: preserving police impunity…. I often see white people ask why we don’t see mass protest after white people are unjustly killed by police. This is why. Polling after George Floyd’s death found that 70 percent of black respondents had at least one bad experience with police. Nearly half feared for their lives. The corresponding figures for white people were just 23 and 16 percent. White people look at the killing of, say, Daniel Shaver, Duncan Lemp, or David Hooks and think it’s a terrible thing that happened to someone else. But many black people look at the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Elijah McClain and think, “That could have been me” — or a brother, sister, daughter, or son.… The unassailability of that footage is also why so many white people joined the protests…. Something about Chauvin’s callous body language as a man died beneath him lit a fire even in people who rarely experience police profiling, harassment, or brutality…. This is a big reason why it’s so important for police advocates like the people behind The Fall of Minneapolis to discredit the state’s case against Chauvin…
Handmaid Society: Ruxandra Teslo: Female neediness is real, but it's not a tragedy: ‘In which I discuss the greater female need for commitment, the absurdity of anti-freedom "solutions" to it (coming from reactionary feminists) & argue the only thing that can help is a better Culture…. Reactionary feminists want to take the choice from love too…. They… call themselves “feminists”… [because] they think such a return would fundamentally benefit women the most…. I find their arguments and solutions as detached from reality as those coming from the Patriarchy-Miasma people, but it’s worth addressing them…. Mary Harrington… [says] Post-Enlightenment developments… societal, moral and technological… have been much worse for women than commonly accepted. One of her biggest obsessions (after boners) is the contraceptive pill…. “Uncoupling sex from reproduction opened the door to the privatisation of bodies.”… “The Pill” has somehow commoditised women. Before this, they were valued as people; now they are merely numbers in the long list of casual liaisons of soulless fuckboys. The problem with her analysis is that it’s… ahistorical and ignorant…. For as long as humans have organised themselves into societies, there has been a “commodification” aspect to human interactions…. That people might want to get something from you that might not always be in your interest (in this case, casual sex) is not a feature of modern feminism: it’s a fundamental aspect of human nature. And women in particular have been treated as property… particularly because sex was tied to reproduction…. Female “neediness” is… not simply the desire to be tied to someone that cannot get rid of you because of a Law. It’s a yearning for love, actual love, something that cannot be merely be imposed from the outside through rules…. While grossly overrating the benefits of strict norms around casual sex and marriage, reactionary feminists seem to completely underrate the upside of freedom when it comes to love. There’s something most tragic female characters of 19th century literature share: they chose their husbands badly, often at young ages, before they knew better. And the spectre of this decision would haunt their lives forever, tied as they were legally and sexually to that man they made the mistake of saying Yes to…. If there is anything at all we could do, then it’s at the level of rhetoric and public discourse; some might even say: Culture…
