To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

We are going around the table on new year's eve, rating our past year on a scale of 1 to 10. The guests: artists, fashion designers, jewelers, and one or two people with real jobs sprinkled in for diversity. Two immaculately groomed poodles run around and entertain the visitors. Before us, an exactingly curated procession of morsels: blini with salmon and caviar, black brioche with cured egg yolk and parmigiano foam, ravioli with pumpkin and cod with browned butter and crispy sage. The apartment, naturally, is luxurious without being gauche (that would be unforgivable) every piece selected with impeccable taste and just the right amount of personal touch. And so we rate our years, the numbers start coming out, and it is a parade of 2s and 3s, each delivered with a sort of practiced weltschmerz. One of the guests plans to commit suicide soon. The only 10 in the room: me. Is it because I've been perfectly happy, carefree? No—not quite.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, about my relationship with suffering. All this pain in the past few months, I think most people would recoil from it. Instead, I'm drawn towards it. Is it psychological masochism? The intensity of emotion—it makes me feel alive, present, it gives me a heightened awareness of everything, inside and out.

I compulsively play with the pain in my mind: my thoughts trace its edges like fingers mapping an unknown shape in the dark; I run my mind over its surface to feel its texture, sometimes sharpcutting, sometimes soft and dull; I press against it, and see how it reacts; I savor it, let it melt in my mouth and glory in its bitterness; I feel the heat radiating from it like the dying embers of a fire late at night, and other times like x-rays blasting out of a black hole; I spin it around examining it from each and every angle one by one, appreciating its style from every point of view; I push it far away and look at it with a telescope to admire its entire structure, and then bring it right up to me and inspect every microscopic little element on its surface, and then sometimes I dive in and give myself over to it and let it envelop me and permeate my whole being until I feel and perceive nothing else and time stops completely.

(And sometimes I will take a good look at myself as though I were a case study: "Subject displays strong tendencies toward self-dramatization, perpetually overthinking and rationalizing their emotions through baroque metaphors.")

I am even amused and entertained by it. I laugh at my life and these surprising and delightful and wretchedly dark alleyways it's leading me down. A dull psychiatrist would say it's nothing more than a defense mechanism. I don't believe that at all. This is not about protecting myself or "processing". It's "saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems"—not to be liberated from terror and pity, but "in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming". There is a kind of distance there, but it's not a detachment, it is rather a doubling of perception. It's a way of transmuting things. It's not that the pain becomes less real or less painful—it becomes more real, more vibrant, more itself—but it also becomes something else simultaneously.

To treat reality as a medium, to live life with the texture of a novel—this is part of the bargain of being me: simultaneously the author and his character. The paradox: rather than dulling your emotions, this splitting of consciousness instead makes everything more vivid. Like adding a mirror to a mirror and creating—infinity. When you view yourself from the third person, as someone whose life you are sketching out, every powerful emotion is a delight. And it's not just pain that works this way—joy, too, takes on this double character, I'm swept up in it while also watching myself being swept up, and somehow the watching makes the feeling more intense rather than less. I am both the alchemist and his quicksilver, the sculptor and the clay, creature and creator.

I love my life — aesthetically.

It's not a mechanical collecting of experiences to dissect on a couch or on the page. Baudelaire writes of the artist-dandy as "a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted." Not "making meaning" after the fact, but in the experience of every moment. A perpetual state of creative tension, of becoming and self-overcoming.

That is―Anti-Buddhism. Self-examination not to feel less, but to feel more. Not to avoid suffering, but to glory in life. Not to detach but to overcome. Not to escape, but to revel in life! Not to transcend, but to heighten. Cultivating not detachment, but intensity and sensitivity, with a poet's intentionality, making the self into an artist in the joy of its own eternal becoming. Creating a layer of aesthetic appreciation that runs parallel to the raw experience, and shapes it. Saying No! to the inhuman, life-denying ascetic nihilism of seeking "liberation" from attachment and suffering, No! to the naiveties about pleasure and pain that constitute this intellectual morass that surrounds us.

Everywhere people seek to smooth life's edges. Instead of riding its violent waves, they seek to transform them into a tepid swimming pool suitable for gentle laps without the least chance of drowning. They cling desperately onto old religions when they talk about enlightenment but mean only quietude, when they preach transcendence but mean only escape. What petty bargains with existence! This is not wisdom, but cowardice masquerading as enlightenment. They seek to tame, diminish, and bridle everything that should be wild! What is this if not a rejection of life itself? Life, which knows nothing of balance but only of tension, nothing of peace but only of creative strife! What sickness entices you to paddle in the shallows instead of making infinite demands on life and always finding yourself in some new wilderness? For "life consists with wildness, and the most alive is the wildest."

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

I used to view the tortured artist with both envy and skepticism. It was a Romantic idea that I thought I wanted, while at the same time dismissing it as an affectation, a trope, a false source of inspiration, or perhaps just a tool to seduce women with. Sour grapes, I suppose. Now I have become him (inadvertently? or by design?) and the view from the inside is not quite what I was expecting...it is both more silly and more real than I thought it'd be. There is certainly an absurd theater to it all. But the authenticity lies precisely in embracing the sublime and the ridiculous, in realizing that the real thing is both more serious and more playful than the cliché suggests. But it's not about turning pain into art, it's this splitting of consciousness that makes the darkest moments shimmer with beauty. Pain is not raw material to be processed later—it's already art in the moment of perception, if you've developed the right kind of vision. "Art from pain" is shallow, I am talking about a methodology of life and consciousness: Amor fati!

The great sickness of our age: the belief that life is something to be managed rather than a drama to be enacted.

Anyway, this is all a bit melodramatic if not pretentious...

—A wonderful piece.

The Best

Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

A mix of fiction, history, and autobiography as a failed author and high school teacher navigates 80s Bucharest. Cărtărescu is a great stylist. Filled with surreal episodes in the liminal space between the droll ordinary life of late communist Romania and an incredible psychedelic fantasy world. People protest against death and have sex while levitating in the air, abandoned factories hide fantastical secrets. About writing, literature, art, humanity, dreams, death, life, love, bureaucracy. Nihilism and its defeat. Very wide array of influences, including H. P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, all the Latin American magical realists as well as Bulgakov, Bolano, Pynchon, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, even Cronenberg.

We search like idiots, we look in places where there is nothing to find, like spiders that weave webs in the corner of a bathroom where flies don’t come, where not even mosquitos can reach. We shrivel in our webs by the thousands, but what doesn’t die is our need for truth. We are like people drawn inside of a square on a piece of paper. We cannot get out of the black lines, we exhaust ourselves by examining, dozens and hundreds of times, every part of the square, hoping to find a fissure. Until one of us suddenly understands, because he was predestined to understand, that within the plane of the paper escape is impossible. That the exit, simple and open wide, is perpendicular to the paper, in a third dimension that up until that moment was inconceivable. Such that, to the amazement of those still inside the four ink lines, the chosen one breaks out of his chrysalis, spreads his enormous wings, and rises gently, leaving his shadow below in his former world.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Not quite as strong as Civilization & Capitalism, but it's a brilliant work, the result of decades of painstaking research. The Braudelian world-view is felt on every page, the interlocking systems of trade, production, geography, crops, animals and people. Mountains shape trade routes, climate patterns determine harvests, sea currents guide merchants - everything connects to everything else in Braudel's Mediterranean. Written in a Nazi POW camp, it brought a fresh perspective on how to think about history: not kings and battles, but the slow dance of geography and climate, the rhythms of peasant life, the endless circulation of ships and goods. Immensely ambitious and beautifully written.

But we cannot hope for precise measurements; at most we shall discover an order of magnitude. In this respect the Mediterranean was still broadly speaking the same size in the sixteenth century as it had been in Roman times, that is, over a thousand years earlier. Or to put it another way, the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century was comparable, mutatis mutandis, to the entire globe in 1939. It was vast, immeasurable, and its reputation as a 'human' area was earned only by contrast with those other monsters which sixteenth-century man was just beginning to tackle - the Atlantic Ocean, not to mention the Pacific. These were truly monsters, alongside which the Mediterranean was more like a domestic animal, but certainly not the 'lake' it has become in the twentieth century, the sunny resort of tourists and yachts where one can always reach land within a few hours and along whose length the traveller could be transported in the Orient Express. To understand what it was like in the sixteenth century, one must mentally magnify its area to a maximum and draw on remembered images from travellers' tales of the days when months, years, even a whole lifetime, could be spent on a voyage.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Basically nothing happens in this book, and it is absolutely spectacular. Non-stop linguistic fireworks. A masterpiece. Outcasts, drifters, hobos, and various other miscreants in 1950s Knoxville. Among its many virtues: the best ever passage about someone fucking a watermelon. Funny and human, no Judges or cosmic pain here.

Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC

The book is split in two portions: first, a semi-fictionalized biography of von Neumann, with each chapter being told from the perspective of the people who knew him (his mother, brother, wife, scientific collaborators, etc). It doesn't focus strongly on the science, more on the person and his relations, and the recurring theme is one of petty resentment and inability to understand von Neumann because he was simply so far above and ahead of everyone else around him. The resentment often manifests as a kind of petty moralism, and Labatut basically makes everyone in von Neumann's life look rather pathetic. I don't know how factual that is, but it certainly works as a literary device.

The second part concerns Lee Sedol and AlphaGo. It's a bit drawn out, but it's an exciting story that's well-told. The point is essentially to underscore just how much von Neumann could see 60+ years ago, when everyone around him was essentially blind. AlphaGo is to the greatest humans as von Neumann is to normal ones -- we should expect the relations to play out in a similar way in both cases.

I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake.

Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems

Deceptively simple, philosophical, dark, ecstatic. Autistic at times. Incredibly dense. Loneliness, death, beauty, nature. I keep returning to her poems.

I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Frankfort Berries
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

A short story of an incredibly intense and mostly one-sided love affair. Raw, intimate, with complete lack of dignity, it felt like an invasion of her privacy. Living life novelistically. How lovers really only exist in our minds. I think the essential, unique part of the story is that there is no attempt at justification, explanation, etc. She accepts and presents the bare facts about herself, and almost nothing about her lover. In a way this is a portrayal of incredibly deep passion, on the other hand her approach also makes it feel really shallow: he's handsome, drives a fast car, career-minded. We have absolutely no clue what her passion is for exactly, but that's exactly the point, that the reason of the passion is irrelevant or unknowable or inexplicable or not worth explaining, what really matters is her own experience and what she takes from it ("I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it." and "Whether or not he was “worth it” is of no consequence.") She considers herself luckier than him because she has the obsession and he does not, that really stood out as the cornerstone of the whole thing.

When he rang to arrange a meeting, his long-awaited call had no effect on me and I remained locked in the same state of anxiety as before. My condition was such that not even the sound of his voice could make me happy. It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain. I longed to end the affair, so as not to be at the mercy of a phone call, so as not to suffer, realizing at once what this would entail, seconds after the separation: a series of days with nothing to wait for. I preferred to carry on at any cost—let him have another woman, or even several. (In other words, accepting a torment far greater than the one that made me want to leave him.) Compared to such emptiness, my present situation seemed enviable and my jealousy a sort of frail privilege which I would have been mad to want to end since one day it would end anyway, outside my control, when he would leave the country or would decide to stop seeing me.

Ctrlcreep, Fragnemt

A collection of tweets and very short stories from @ctrlcreep. "Why would I want to own a collection of tweets", you might think, but these are brilliantly etched little gems: dense, fantastical, inventive, awe-inspiring and terrifying.

The forest's immortal animals are weary of life. Stags rest in the shade for years, antlers growing, intertwining with ivy and brick

Tiny bots build nanoliths, defining sacred spaces on the underside of leaves, between scales of bark, in the grooves of your fingerprints

My brain is a temple, my body is the crowd of money-lenders and market stalls desecrating its courtyard

Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

Man being pulled apart between his civilized and the wild nature. Intellectual and spiritual crisis; despair; isolation in bourgeois society. Both the protagonist (Henry Haller) and the manic pixie dream girl Hermine are essentially Hesse self-inserts. Sex, drugs, jazz, liberation from the shackles of over-thinking, transcendence. Written in the 1920s, but parts of it feel straight out of 60s psychedelic culture (especially the hallucinatory magic theater section). A perennial favorite with intellectual misfits for a reason.

But, when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was man the wolf did just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.

Camille Pagile, Sexual Personae

Paglia said this book "was intended to please no one and to offend everyone." It's not quite as offensive today, 35 years after its original publication, but it still manages to maintain a sharp edge. Paglia brings sex into art history in an incredibly entertaining style. Everything is rapid and extreme, grand pronouncements jump at you from every page, and Paglia's erudition will dazzle you. Sex, decadence, Apollo vs Dionysus. Bombastic and aphoristic. It's a bit too long, and the energy of the first few hundred pages isn't maintained to the end, but well worth experiencing. You'll never look at art the same way again.

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Paul Cronin, Herzog on Herzog

Few people have led more interesting lives in the 20th century than Werner Herzog. The drive, the vision, the creative power, the collaborations, and the endless series of insane situations he put and found himself in make the whole thing feel fictional. Provocative thoughts on art, life, and everything in between. "Inspirational" is generally a dirty word when it comes to book reviews, but this is truly inspirational in the best way possible.

Months before, I had hired local Indians who had captured the hundreds of savage little monkeys, the ones who overrun the raft with Kinski. I paid only half the money for them because I knew if I paid full price, the guy organizing everything would run off with the cash. The monkeys had been sitting in Iquitos for weeks, but when it came to actually having to use them for the scene it turned out they had all been sold to an American businessman and were already on a plane waiting to go to the US. We ran to the airport and insisted we were veterinarians and that we had to see the vac- cination papers for the animals. We shouted so loudly that they admitted they had no papers, and they embarrassedly unloaded the animals from the plane. We just put them into our truck and left. When it actually came to shooting the sequence, the monkeys had some kind of a panic attack and bit me all over. I could not cry out because we were shooting live sound at that point.

Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony

Kafka's best short work. In the Penal Colony starts as meticulous horror: a bureaucrat proudly explaining an elaborate torture device, and ends as transcendent horror with an almost religious ecstasy. Kafka pulls off a perspective shift that transforms everything that came before. The Officer's devotion to the old system, his obsession with procedure and machinery, and the Traveler's polite detachment capture the essence of instituional horror, yes, but the story evolves into something completely different.

Can you now appreciate the work of the harrow and the entire apparatus? Just look!” He bounded up the ladder, turned a wheel, called down, “Watch out, step aside!” and everything started moving. If the cog hadn’t screaked, it would have been wonderful.

Richard Zenith, Pessoa: A Biography

Pessoa is one of my favorite writers and this biography is fantastic, very well-written, almost consistently captivating over nearly 1100 pages. Reveals a lot of hidden and surprising aspects of Pessoa's life, and made me want to be part of the Lisbon literary scene of the early 20th century...Astrology, magic, weird politics, a series of lost literary movements, and at the center of it all: a bizarre life. Would have been interesting to dedicate more space on his posthumous reception though, it ends kind of awkwardly in a place where he has only published a single book and is not well-known in Portugal and completely unknown in the rest of the world.

For Pessoa as for Campos, who in this case served as his creator’s faithful spokesman, the self’s true emotions cannot be intelligibly known, much less expressed, and the self is unreliable, its reality forever fluid, contingent on its changing relations with the surrounding environment. Self-knowledge, or individuality, is therefore a matter of attitude, of acting. The great artist, or great anything, is a great pretender. In the coming years, the editors of Presença would repeatedly invoke sincerity of expression and trueness to one’s self as hallmarks of superior art, while Pessoa would repeatedly question whether words such as sincerity and trueness can signify anything useful for a creative artist.

The Worst

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century

Utterly irredeemable garbage.

This was sold to me as a kind of sequel to Braudel's Civilization & Capitalism, one of my favorite books. I was really disappointed to find something completely different; Arrighi has none of Braudel's strengths, but is happy to copy his weaknesses. He displays none of the curiosity, none of the interest in data (while Braudel's work is filled with numbers, it would not surprise me if Arrighi was innumerate). But he does share Braudel's attitude towards growth (which is to say that he ignores it). To ignore productivity growth in a study of the 15-18th centuries is bad enough; to ignore it in a study of the "long twentieth century" is downright deranged. Not to mention ignoring demographics...

Arrighi writes about economic history but does not seem to have opened even a 101 econ book in his life. He frequently uses terms of art like "comparative advantage" incorrectly. Wild causal claims are made without any basis in data whatsoever.

While Braudel famously approached history in a highly quantitative manner, for Arrighi economics seem to be a kind of language game rather than something that can be measured and analyzed. It's all "as X has argued..", "as Y has suggested..."! Evidence? What's that? He likes to quote Robert Reich! His predictions about the US's decline have of course not been borne out. And it's terribly written on top of everything.

Indeed, to be the Venice of the nineteenth century was still the objective advocated for Britain by leading members of its business community at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. And the same analogy was evoked again – albeit with negative connotations – when the nineteenth-century expansion of British wealth and power began reaching its limits.

Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.

A pleb filter is a piece of art which, by virtue of its impenetrability, "filters out" people with bad taste. What makes the pleb filter such an entertaining addition to online Discourse is that it's a ready-made kafkatrap, a perfect concept for trolls and shitposters to weaponize: once an artwork has been declared a "pleb filter"—no matter how absurd the claim—any disagreement instantly labels you an unsophisticated rube, a pleb who has been filtered.

Thus one may find oneself in futile internet conversations trying desperately to explain that, no, Ishtar really is quite bad, that Ringo is not the best Beatle, and that Joel Schumacher's nipple-Batman is not actually a sublime work of misunderstood cinematic genius. The troll choices are virtually infinite, but work best when applied to creations that are universally agreed to be terrible: the prequels, St. Anger, or the oeuvre of 6ix9ine.

There are fake filters, like Tarr's Werckmeister Hamornies—art which tries to be challenging and hints at great depths while actually being quite shallow. A picture of a pool drawn on a piece of paper, and often frustrating because they are a pleb's idea of a pleb filter. Still, some (like The Magus or The Recognitions) have their charms.

Finally we have the actual pleb filters, works which are both brilliant and inaccessible. Trout Mask Replica, Michael Mann's Miami Vice, Faust Part Two, Enter the Void, the Paradiso, Season 2 of True Detective, Fanged Noumena, the Iliad's catalogue of ships.

The IQ of Shitposters

To proclaim the genius of Hamlet is commonplace; to successfully defend The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Shakespeare's greatest play takes some serious intellectual firepower. Defending the indefensible is a great signal of brainpower: a recent study finds that "bullshit ability is associated with an individual’s intelligence and individuals capable of producing more satisfying bullshit are judged by second-hand observers to be more intelligent". The pleb filter is not just a fun tool for trolling, it also offers a great opportunity to show off one's smarts.

It is genuinely challenging to truly appreciate the talent and artistry that goes into bullshit—Armond White (perhaps the greatest bullshitter of our time) is himself a pleb filter, perhaps the ultimate one. Some are liable to react with horror, but I think it's a game worth indulging in.

At the same time, there's a countersignaling game being played. On the barber pole of intellectual status, the highbrow will adopt lowbrow tastes in order to signal that they're not midwits. Thus we get fancy restaurants serving mac and cheese, and big-brained shitposters defending Showgirls. It is no coincidence that the very idea of the pleb filter was invented on a website whose users are famous for being very smart and pretending to be very stupid.

Sometimes isolated communities spiral local status markers into overdrive, creating unintentional bad pleb filters, with wild signaling and counter-signaling battles cascading downwards, leaving outside onlookers utterly bewildered. The famously unintelligible world of high fashion offers a memorable, and sometimes beautiful, instance of this phenomenon.

Criticism and the Anxiety of the Filter

The pleb filter is also a formidable force in the realm of art criticism: the critic must always maintain a position of superiority over his audience, for it is this stance which gives him the authority to dictate what is good or bad. He must therefore never be filtered, and even more importantly never appear to be filtered. Thus he will praise formulaic "high culture" garbage, lest he be mistaken for someone who doesn't get it.

When a critic encounters a work that eludes his understanding, something that may surpass his grasp, the anxiety of being filtered becomes palpable—and he often reacts to such works in an extreme way by denigrating them. This is why so many of the great classics were initially met with unfavorable reviews: The Thing, Moby-Dick, Lolita, half of Kubrick's movies. Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles's best film, was savaged when it came out and barely got distribution due to the terrible advance reviews. The anxiety of the filter is to the critic what the anxiety of influence is to the artist.

The Case of Michael Thomas Green

The most interesting pleb filters are those that lie exactly on the line between being a troll pleb filter and a real pleb filter: Speed Racer, Love Exposure, the Book of Numbers, the Metal Gear Solid series, perhaps Dhalgren—works where powerful arguments can be made in both directions, works stuck in the limbo between stupidity and genius. Who can forget the iconic image of Sean Connery in the red trunks from Zardoz? There's a particular form of failure that is borne of great ambition. Take Southland Tales, for example, an utterly bizarre work of deranged grandeur. It is bad beyond belief. And yet there's something there, something alluring, something that pulls you in and props you up and keeps you watching.

In 2001, Tom Green wrote, directed, and starred in Freddy Got Fingered, a stupid yet brilliantly fearless comedy about a failed cartoonist and his relationship with his family. The critics hated it, filling their reviews with adjectives like "embarrassing", "witless", "vile", and "sad", but the film maintains a dedicated following to this day. Some have described it as a surrealist masterpiece, others as a $14 million dollar prank on a movie studio, others as a film before its time. Nathan Rabin writes that "studios exist precisely to keep films this audacious, original, and transgressive from ever hitting theaters", while Lindsay Ellis calls Green "the Orson Welles of our time" and describes Freddy as a film of pure insight into the soul of its creator and a "dadaist masterpiece".

Freddy offers a perfect example of the anxiety of the filter: Ebert gave it zero stars, but in his infamous review he compares Tom Green to Buñuel, and declares that "the day may come when "Freddy Got Fingered" is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism." 16 months after his initial review, Ebert was still thinking about the inscrutable genius of Freddy, writing in his review of Stealing Harvard:

Seeing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fingered, which was so poorly received by the film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it—let's see—zero stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord. But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

Ἐγὼ δ ̓οἶδα μὲν ὡς αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραί

Longinus, in his essay On the Sublime, observes that mediocre artists don't make mistakes: their works are faultless because they stay within convention and take no risks. Perfection is merely an artifact of insufficient ambition. Errour is the purview of the Great!

Is it not by risking nothing, by never aiming high, that a writer of low or middling powers keeps generally clear of faults and secure of blame? Whereas the loftier walks of literature are by their very loftiness perilous? [...] Though I have myself noted not a few faulty passages in Homer and in other authors of the highest rank, and though I am far from being partial to their failings, nevertheless I would call them not so much wilful blunders as oversights which were allowed to pass unregarded through that contempt of little things, that “brave disorder,” which is natural to an exalted genius; and I still think that the greater excellences, though not everywhere equally sustained, ought always to be voted to the first place in literature, if for no other reason, for the mere grandeur of soul they reveal. [...] Would you rather be a Homer or an Apollonius?

Bolaño plays with this notion in the famous passage on the bookish pharmacist, but I find the most striking echo of this idea is found in Flaubert's final novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. He spent nearly a decade working on it, but did not manage to complete it before his death. It is a strange, repetitive work teetering on the brink between comedy and tragedy; ostensibly a work of social criticism, it is really about Flaubert looking inwardly. And it was a radical departure from anything that he (or anyone else) had written before. He writes in a letter:

At times, the immense scope of this book stuns me. What will come of it? I only hope I’m not deceiving myself into writing something goofy rather than sublime. No, I think not! Something tells me I’m on the right path! But it will be one or the other.

He even places some self-relferential meta-commentary on just this topic within the book—

He was assailed by doubts. For if mediocre minds (as Longinus observed) are incapable of faults, then faults are committed by the masters—and we should admire them? That’s too much!

And for critics, it is exactly this ability to appreciate something great and flawed, as opposed to something small-souled and perfect, that separates the plebeian from the noble taste.

...We Yearn, Nonetheless...

What unites these works in the interstice between the goofy and the sublime is a reckless ambition that goes against all standards of good taste, no not even against but beyond, powered by some unprincipled eruption of creative élan, and not due to some misguided contrarianism but because the old standards are simply incapable of containing the artist's vision which, pushing out against its own limits, bursts like a star. They are a dive off the edge, a rejection of any interpolation between known points, a heroic leap beyond the confines of the billion-dimensional latent space of ideas, riding exotic vectors into unknown territories, vectors invisible to to all but their discoverer—what Bolaño had in mind when he was writing about those "great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown".

Perhaps this ought to be our attitude not just toward our artistic creations, but also the sculpting of our life and character and even our beliefs.

Great philosophers and artists have always endeavored to chart their own path, to avoid recapitulating the shackles of their social conditioning, to find new vantage points that will allow them to see farther and more clearly. Is this not what Plato was after when he sought out the Pythagoreans in Italy? Is this not what Herodotus was looking for when he was interviewing the sages of Egypt and the Scythians of the Don? Is this not what Nick Land was reaching for when he was "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic while Mackay played jungle records in the background"? It doesn't always work. But one must at least try.

"There are two kinds of scientific progress," declares my old pal Prokhor, "the methodical experimentation and categorization which gradually extend the boundaries of knowledge, and the revolutionary leap of genius which redefines and transcends those boundaries. Acknowledging our debt to the former, we yearn, nonetheless, for the latter." We yearn indeed, but what dear old Prokhor has omitted is that the leap is risky, and the risk usually fails to pay off. Make no mistake—this is a perilous path. Tradition is Smarter Than You Are, so striking out in your own direction is almost always doomed to fail. Rapid change is almost always for the worse. Human beings are almost constitutionally incapable of taking ideas seriously. Virtually every gene in our body militates against it. "The more people have epistemic learned helplessness and less they trust extreme ideas, the more they'll just default to playing Civilized American." But the Romantically low odds of that heroic action have a bewitching appeal, and our social epistemology works only to the extent that brilliant people are able to ignore it.

This all converges on liberalism, which postulates that ideas are not to be taken seriously.² All true masterpieces bear within them an implication of extremism, a deep conviction in the importance of some new, radical idea, an implication that this singular point of view really does matter, and has the strength to overcome all others. Every great artwork is a fascist revolt—a form of revolt that, alas, does not fit very well into our æra.

Freddy Got Fingered can be streamed on Amazon. Why not check it out tonight? Perhaps you will catch a glimpse of the sublime in the scene where Tom Green jerks off an elephant and sprays his father with a pachyderm-penis firehose of sperm. You're not a...pleb, are you?

Over the last decade there's been virtually endless discussion about the effects of austerity on the UK economy. The Guardian: The lost decade: the hidden story of how austerity broke Britain. FT: Years of austerity are now writ large on the UK state. NYT: What Is Austerity and How Has It Affected British Society?. And just a few days ago David Wallace-Wells, discussing the country's growth problems, wrote that "the country’s obvious struggles have a very obvious central cause: austerity".

There's just a little problem with all of this: there was never any austerity in the UK. It's a pure media fabrication that persists only because nobody cares to look at the data.

So, let us bring out the charts! First of all, the UK has been running deficits for more than 20 years now. The deficits were huge even right in the middle of the supposedly austere period. Living beyond your means is not austerity, it's profligacy.

What does Wallace-Wells say to justify his claims about "austerity"?

In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, and in the name of rebalancing budgets, the Tory-led government set about cutting annual public spending, as a proportion of G.D.P., to 39 percent from 46 percent.

This is technically true, but stupid. The 46% figure comes from the middle of the Global Financial Crisis, when GDP dropped by more than 15% and the government was trying to stimulate the economy. A decade later, spending as % of GDP had simply returned to its pre-recession level. This isn't "austerity", it's just good old regular Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy. In fact, the UK had already escaped from recession in 2010, and it continued to run huge deficits anyway.¹

And to emphasize just how unsustainable this profligacy has been, the UK's debt-to-GDP ratio has gone from ~35% to ~100% during this period of "austerity"!

Did spending ever actually go down? Nope:

"But Alvaro, there were cuts to this one particular thing I care about, therefore there was austerity." Sure, spending has been moved around a bit; some areas have gotten more money and others less. As you'd expect from an aging society,² the UK spends a lot more on healthcare these days than it did 20 years ago; this is just a natural shift in priorities, not austerity. Here's inflation-adjusted spending broken down by category, straight from His Majesty's Treasury:³

I would also add that despite the huge increase in healthcare spending, this is the one area that Wallace-Wells chooses to highlight in his article blaming austerity!

On average, English ambulances were taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls, compared with a target time of 18 minutes; nationwide, 10 times as many patients spent more than four hours waiting in emergency rooms as did in 2011. The waiting list for scheduled treatments recently passed seven million — more than 10 percent of the country — prompting nurses to strike. The National Health Service has been in crisis for years, but over the holidays, as wait times spiked, the crisis moved to the very center of a narrative of national decline.

Despite this incredible profligacy, the effects of deficit spending on growth have clearly not been very successful—why then does Wallace-Wells expect that yet more profligacy would somehow avert national decline? The UK government and economy obviously have many problems; austerity is not one of them.

The Best

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger/Stella Maris

A salvage diver (Bobby Western) is sent to investigate a plane at the bottom of the ocean. Somehow the plane is intact and one of the passengers is missing. When he gets back, shadowy government agents are after him. Western is also a genius mathematician and a racing car driver. This is a potboiler!

On the other hand we have the deranged visions of his sister, in a Pynchonian absurdist mode. The thriller plotline is quickly abandoned, and the rest of the novel plays out mostly in a series of conversations. Mathematics, physics, the atomic bomb, JFK assassination conspiracy theories, the role of the unconscious: this is a novel of ideas in many ways. At the same time it's deeply romantic, filled to the brim with longing, regret, loss, and love. It's an incredibly sad book.

Overall this is a novel that strikes out in many directions, many times in unsatisfying and imprecise and undisciplined ways, but it somehow achieves an effect. "Blaze paths into the unknown" etc. To the usual McCarthyan mix of Hemingway and Captain Ahab, he now adds heavy doses of Pynchon and DeLillo.

Perhaps the passenger is the conscious, or the unconscious, or they're both passengers (probably all of the above).

The second novel is a series of conversations between Bobby's sister Alicia and her psychiatrist, a short time before she commits suicide. It's mostly a companion piece, and many times it feels like Alicia is McCarthy's mouthpiece. It's about mathematics and giving up mathematics and the foundation of mathematics, about language, about meaning in a godless world, about the inability to experience the world directly and the effects of various intermediation mechanisms (including language), about love and longing, about the burden of knowledge, about intelligence, evolution and evolutionary psychology, physics and the bomb and the sins of the father. Both books try their damnest to tackle Gnosticism.

One of the best works in many years, I can't wait to go back to it.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

Cantor, Gauss, Riemann, Euler. Hilbert. Poincaré. Noether. Hypatia. Klein, Minkowski, Turing, von Neumann. Hardly even a partial list. Cauchy, Lie, Dedekind, Brouwer. Boole. Peano. Church is still alive. Hamilton, Laplace, Lagrange. The ancients of course. You look at these names and the work they represent and you realize that the annals of latterday literature and philosophy by comparison are barren beyond description.

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

Slightly uneven but the best stories are really great: in particular I loved Feather Tigers, Death of Dr. Island, Toy Theater, and Seven American Nights. Loads of classic Wolfeian mindfuckery. Many of the stories are in that classic Wolfe style where you have to piece together what's going on from tiny hints left in the text, and it's all a bit ambiguous in the end and so on. There's a lot of focus on religion (often explicitly Christian) and death. Two stories, The Hero as Werwolf and The Doctor of Death Island, being fairly explicitly death-ist. Technology and its social effects, the problem of evil, mastery of art versus human relations, the hollowness of immortality, how people would react to a messianic figure, and more!

An exaggerated and solemn respect always indicates a loss of faith.

François, Baron de Tott, The Memoirs of the Baron De Tott, on the Turks and the Tartars

A look into the past, from the past. Filled with fascinating little observations (I found the book through an anecdote about forks which Braudel mentions in C&C). Roughly at the time the American revolution was happening, the same time when Johnson and Boswell were drinking too much claret at the Mitre, de Tott was joining the Crimean Tatars on a slave raid into Southern Russia. He spent many years in the Ottoman empire over two stints, and finally also traveled around the middle east. Most fascinating for its observations of Ottoman society, and the role de Tott played in the Russo-Turkish war of '68-'74. Somewhat niche, but definitely worth a read if this is your kind of thing.

What causes the fall of empires? Culture, Tott says: all decay ultimately comes from within. He's particular critical of the effects of despotism in government: everyone's place is precarious and there is no room for prosocial ambition. Simultaneously totally lawless but also extremely despotic—anarcho-tyranny at its finest, made worse by abitrary and capricious system of punishments.

Oh, and the introduction by the translator is absolutely hilarious (unintentionally).

How can so Sovereign a contempt for human nature amongst the Turks consist with that whimsical beneficence they display towards certain animals the most useless to fociety? Barbarity itself, no doubt, stands in need of some relaxation, whilst it crushes mankind under the weight of its iron secptre, it condescends to smile on objects whole insignificance give no occasion for alarm; and the pride of the despot blending all beings together in one common Contempt, selects its favourites from amongst the weakelt.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

A review of a fictional philosophical tome on clothing, with various notes on the life of its author, the also fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. Imagine a mix between Borges, Laurence Sterne, and Fichte. And it's got Carlyle's ridiculous style (which was extreme even in his own time) to top things off. And you can almost never tell when it's serious and when it's not. This book caused Emerson to start corresponding with Carlyle, and even inspired Borges to learn German!

In Sartor Resartus, only a lifelong quest for knowledge can lead one to the truth that knowledge is unattainable (or perhaps the other way around?). Carlyle hates the limiting effect of the standard philosophical approaches of his time, so he instead opts for this extreme type of illegible, non-linear anti-discourse in which everything is both deadly serious and potentially an ironic joke. What I'm saying is that Carlyle was the first zoomer.

The age of Curiosity, like that of Chivalry, is indeed, properly speaking, gone. Yet perhaps only gone to sleep: for here arises the Clothes-Philosophy to resuscitate, strangely enough, both the one and the other! Should sound views of this Science come to prevail, the essential nature of the British Dandy, and the mystic significance that lies in him, cannot always remain hidden under laughable and lamentable hallucination. The following long Extract from Professor Teufelsdröckh may set the matter, if not in its true light, yet in the way towards such. It is to be regretted however that, here as so often elsewhere, the Professor’s keen philosophic perspicacity is somewhat marred by a certain mixture of almost owlish purblindness, or else of some perverse, ineffectual, ironic tendency, our readers shall judge which

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

To say that it's about a dockworker would be both true and misleading. Nostromo is the dashing Capataz de Cargadores, a man obsessed with his image and driven to heroic tasks out of a desire to maintain it.

A chopped-up story from various points of view, the narrative is kaleidoscopically structured: fragmented, unclear, conflicting, and circular. Character motivations and world-views clash with each other as the fate of Costaguana is determined. Politics, heroism, revolt (internal and external), the worth of social status, reputations, perceptions, allegiances, and material vs idealistic interests. Betrayals of all kinds. Private and public vindications and redemptions. Great stuff.

To be a millionaire, and such a millionaire as Holroyd, is like being eternally young. The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand—which is better. One's time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

A story set in a future in which a cloistered religious-academic order is devoted to playing the Glass Bead Game, a kind of unification of all the arts and sciences. A kind of nihilistic telos for all intellectual pursuits, with an alluring beauty all of its own. The actual game itself is never described; instead we follow the life of Joseph Knecht from student, to leader of the order, and the next steps after that, as he is torn between the real world and the ivory tower.

The Borges influence can be felt throughout, and there's nothing quite like it.

The life of the mind, asceticism, the lifecycle of organizations, hierarchies and servitude, purpose and nihilism, beauty, sacrifice, duty, transcendence.

Especially for young men with gifts like those of Joseph Knecht, who have not been driven by a single talent to concentrate on a specialty, but whose nature rather aims at integration, synthesis, and universality, this springtide of free study is often a period of intense happiness and very nearly of intoxication. Were it not preceded by the discipline of the elite schools, by the psychic hygiene of meditation exercises and the lenient supervision of the Board of Educators, this freedom would even be dangerous for such natures and might prove a nemesis to many, as it used to be to innumerable highly gifted young men in the ages before our present educational pattern was set, in the pre-Castalian centuries. The universities in those days literally swarmed with young Faustian spirits who embarked with all sails set upon the high seas of learning and academic freedom, and ran aground on all the shoals of untrammeled dilettantism. Faust himself, after all, was the prototype of brilliant amateurishness and its consequent tragedy.

Laurent Binet, HHhH

Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich. The story of Operation Anthropoid (to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague) and everything that led up to it. 257 short chapters, sometimes consisting of nothing more than a quotation. It's a blend of a mostly-historical retelling of the operation with a ton of metafictional elements on top. Binet constantly comments on the issues with constructing a historical novel, compares his approach to other books and movies, and even brings his personal life into it. Irony, humor, self-consciousness (especially about the author's view of Heydrich), the tension between history and fiction, and a slow, horrific build-up that absolutely fills you with terror. Incredible that this book can manage such a powerful emotional effect despite the ironic tone. The absurd scenes (whether comical or horrific) are true, which makes the whole thing so strange. Goring is showing off his model train set to Heydrich when he's there to get the final solution started...

Anyway, the RSHA hydra has enough heads to keep him busy. So now he has to delegate. He gives each of the RSHA’s seven divisions to a colleague who is selected first and foremost for his abilities rather than his politics—and this is rare enough to be worth mentioning in the lunatic asylum that is the Nazi regime. Heinrich Müller, for example, who is put in charge of the Gestapo—and who identifies so completely with his job that hereafter he is known simply as “Gestapo” Müller—is a former Christian Democrat: an affiliation that does not prevent him from becoming one of the Nazis’ most devastating weapons. The other RSHA offices are given to brilliant intellectuals: youngsters such as Ohlendorf (Inland-SD) and Schellenberg (Ausland-SD), or experienced academics like Six (Written Records). Such men contrast strongly with the cohort of cranks, illiterates, and mental degenerates who populate the Party’s higher echelons. One minor branch of the Gestapo—a status that does not reflect its true importance, but it’s always better to remain discreet with such sensitive subjects—is devoted to Jewish affairs. Heydrich already knows who he wants to run it: that little Austrian Hauptsturmführer who did such good work before, Adolf Eichmann.

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

It's difficult to write anything about this bizarre, unfinished novel. Despite being comic or satirical, it's never really funny. It's extraordinarily repetitive. There are really no characters, no plot, no development of any sort. And yet it's a powerful commentary on the tragedy of the human quest for knowledge. With it, Flaubert renounced all his earlier technique and essentially inaugurated the 20th century (post-)modernist tradition in literature. I can't really recommend it, but it's a unique masterpiece.

They no longer had a single fixed idea about the individuals and events of that time. To form an impartial judgment, they would have to read every history, every memoir, every newspaper and manuscript, for the slightest omission could foster an error that would lead to others, and on unto infinity. They gave up. But they had acquired a taste for history, a need for truth for its own sake. Perhaps the truth was more easily uncovered in earlier periods? Surely the authors recounted events more dispassionately at a greater remove. And they delved into the good Rollin. “What a load of hogwash!” cried Bouvard as of the first chapter.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Here's a book that manages to entirely live up to its reputation. Parts of it can be a slog, but it's filled with great observations on psychology, sociology, economics, politics, law, the future of America, and more. Tocqueville's analysis of the pressures of social conformity prefigure the (great) work of Timur Kuran.

Fascinating both for how it reveals how things have changed, and how they have stayed the same.

The Americans of the United States must inevitably become one of the greatest nations in the world; their offspring will cover almost the whole of North America; the continent that they inhabit is their dominion, and it cannot escape them. What urges them to take possession of it so soon? Riches, power, and renown cannot fail to be theirs at some future time, but they rush upon this immense fortune as if but a moment remained for them to make it their own.

The Worst

David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

An unstructured mishmash of warmed-over pop science and a cavalcade of bad arguments around abduction, philosophy of science, intelligence, infinity, qualia, etc.

The arguments about superhuman general intelligence not being possible because humans are universal Turing machines are utterly absurd.

One of the worst treatments of abduction in the history of philosophy, and that's really saying something.

Deutsch's comments on heritability are downright idiotic, and it's clear that he didn't even bother spending 30 seconds reading the wikipedia page. He just makes stuff up (incorrectly). A lot of uppity commentary about shit he doesn't understand.

And then it's just filled with a whole bunch of random shit, like a galaxybrained theory of why the UK has the best voting system, a terrible theory of aesthetics, etc.

Qualia are currently neither describable nor predictable — a unique property that should make them deeply problematic to anyone with a scientific world view (though, in the event, it seems to be mainly philosophers who worry about it).

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Tainter's theory mostly comes down to decreasing marginal returns to additional societal complexity, which eventually leads to collapse. Parts of it are highly reminiscent of Chaisson's Energy-Rate Density paper (which everyone should read), but much more limited in scope. He's too focused on explaining everything with a single theory, leaving little room for contingency in history. He ignores the aspect of time: just because a system works well for 10 years does not mean it can work for 1000. And he treats rulers as being virtually unconstrained in their policy choices.

Ultimately I just found it badly argued and completely unconvincing. Full review.

In the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

Absurdly overlong scifi story about virtual realities and sinister conspiracies. There's a series of parallel fantastical stories set in a virtual reality and they're all pointless and awful. After 800 pages there is no resolution, only sequelbait. A bit outdated in terms of how it imagines the internet, it does have a few interesting ideas but overall not worth the effort at all.

Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle!

Links

Cormac

1. The Passenger: A brief and imperfect guide for the perplexed. A bit over the top, but I thought this was the best piece on The Passenger.

The Passenger is an omni-dissolver, an intergalactic acid rain, a necromantic encyclopedia whose entries are unfamiliar tarot cards.

2. A new conversation with David Krakauer. 100% worth listening to.

3. An article by Krakauer in Nautilus: The Cormac McCarthy I Know. Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Melville, and more.

It is over tea and lunch with our friends and colleagues that we discussed everything. A typical day might include new results in prebiotic chemistry, the nature of autocatalytic sets, pretopological spaces in RNA chemistry, Maxwell’s demon, Darwin’s sea sickness, the twin prime conjecture, logical depth as a model of evolutionary history, Godel’s dietary habits, the weirdness of Spengler’s Decline of the West, and allometric scaling of the whale brain. I believe Cormac’s recent novels The Passenger and Stella Maris have their origins partly in this foment of ideas that connect domains of unyielding precision to the frailty of life and the militancy of society.

4. James Wood's review is pretty good: "To traffic in serious mathematics is to commune with truth; to traffic in words, to merely write novels, is to produce dim approximations of the truth. This is what too many colloquies at the Santa Fe Institute will do to a novelist’s self-esteem."

5. Joy Williams is also not bad: Great, Beautiful, Terrifying

Perhaps the business of The Passenger, for all its somber romanticism and Gnostic leanings, is to defer to this unconsciousness, to give shape to that which might well be the soul, or at least its most faithful companion.

McCarthy is not interested in the psychology of character. He probably never has been. He’s interested in the horror of every living creature’s situation.

6. This negative(!) review in Slate compares the book to Pynchon, DeLillo, Ellroy, and Lovecraft.

Machine Learning/AI

7. Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

So, inside the imagined universe of ChatGPT's mind, our virtual machine accesses the url https://chat.openai.com/chat, where it finds a large language model named Assistant trained by OpenAI. This Assistant is waiting to receive messages inside a chatbox.

8. On the persistent mental effects of looking at AI art: Relaxed/Flawed Priors As A Result Of Viewing AI Art. "Since this period of consuming a large amount of this flawed AI art, perhaps a dozen notable times, I've recognized myself initially parsing some visual stimulus in an incorrect way - one that maps to some flaw common in AI art - only to moments later consciously realize that I must have parsed the stimulus incorrectly and fix my initial perception."

9. Ebook semantic search using AI.

10. Wordcraft Writers Workshop

The Wordcraft Writers Workshop is a collaboration between Google's PAIR and Magenta teams, and 13 professional writers from a diverse set of creative writing backgrounds. Together we explore the limits of co-writing with LaMDA and foster an honest and earnest conversation about the rapidly changing relationship between technology and creativity.

11. Midwit AI: Inverse scaling can become U-shaped

12. Riffusion: using an image model to generate images of spectrograms, which are then turned into audio.

13. Nintil makes predictions about AI in 2026.

Forecasting

14. Scoring the midterm election forecasts from PredictIt, 538, and Manifold.

15. Prediction market does not imply causation

Take the other 95% of the proposed projects, give the investors their money back, and use the SWEET PREDICTIVE KNOWLEDGE to pick another 10% of the RCTs to fund for STAGGERING SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS and MAXIMAL STATUS ENHANCEMENT.

16. Michael Story: Why I generally don't recommend internal prediction markets or forecasting tournaments to organisations.

Metascience

17. Nintil: Limits and Possibilities of Metascience.

The failure of meta-entrepreneurship to establish deep links with entrepreneurship, given stronger incentives for improvement, makes me be pessimistic about the possibilities of these bidirectional linkages from manifesting in metascience. Hence I predict metascience and metascience entrepreneurship will continue walking separate paths: The next big NIH reform or new institution started will not be strongly influenced by academic or theoretical metascience.

The Rest

18. The Sweet Life: The Long-Term Effects of a Sugar-Rich Early Childhood. Using the end of WWII rationing in the UK to look at the effects of early sugar consumption. "Excessive sugar intake early in life led to higher prevalence of chronic inflammation, diabetes, elevated cholesterol and arthritis." Not entirely convinced, a lot of marginal/non-significant results, but Figure 5 is really wild.

19. On Galton: How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century (Straussian)

Here’s a few highlights of Galton’s many experiments, studies, and investigations:

• Tries to learn arithmetic by smell, succeeds

• Worships a puppet to see if he can convince himself it has godlike powers, succeeds

• Makes a walking stick with a hidden high-pitched whistle inside it, takes it to the zoo and whistles at all the animals (most don’t care, but the lions hate it)

• Replaces the blood of a silver-grey rabbit with the blood of a lop-eared rabbit to see if it can still breed (it can)

• Tells himself that everyone is spying on him to see if he can make himself insane, succeeds

• Tries to consciously control all of his automatic bodily processes, nearly suffocates

• Hears animal magnetism is all the rage, learns it in secret (it’s illegal), magnetizes 80 people

20. Scott Sumner on...Robert Louis Stevenson?! A very good piece that will probably add some items to your to-read list. "So what’s going on here? It cannot be that Stevenson is too difficult for the literary establishment, as he’s also popular with average readers. I suspect it is more nearly the opposite problem—Stevenson is too pleasurable. Some critics wrongly equate greatness with difficulty."

21. What it's like to dissect a cadaver. One of the many hidden benefits of living in the Bay Area?

22. The robot on EA. Don't fully endorse it, but quite interesting.

23. Walking with Nietzsche

The path that Nietzsche took is documented, so I followed him in his walking again (this time solo), starting with the Le Chemin de Nietzsche from the Hotel Cap Estel, the exact hiking trail Nietzsche took almost daily, now dedicated to him. The 2.5-mile arduous ascent with coastal views of the Mediterranean, which goes from the village of Èze bord-de-Mer to the main town of Èze, is perhaps the most beautiful hike I had ever summited, crowned by Èze’s Église Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, perhaps also the most sublime church I had ever seen.

24. Pynchon's archive.

25. Erik Hoel on the MFA's influence on literature.

Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled, Dostoevsky had a degree in engineering. Joyce did major in literature, but even he entered medical school (before leaving), and also failed multiple classes in his undergraduate days. Not one of these great writers would now be accepted to any MFA in the country. The result of the academic pipeline is that contemporary writers, despite a surface-level diversity of race and gender that is welcomingly different than previous ages, are incredibly similar in their beliefs and styles, moreso than writers in the past.

26. Stuart Ritchie on the NIH deliberately crippling human genetics research because the results are politically inconvenient: The NIH's misguided genetics data policy.

Audio-Visual

27. And here's the 37-minute live version of Sister Ray.

What I've Been Reading

• The Passenger/Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy. Dark and beautiful. This may well be the last great novel of the human era in literature. It would be fitting for the 89-year old McCarthy to be writing a coda for himself and humanity at the same time. Especially since he views the 20th century productions of science and engineering as far more important and groundbreaking than those in literature.

  The plot is mostly irrelevant. Both books consist mostly of conversations: bars and restaurants for the first, a psychiatric institution for the second. McCarthy grapples with every idea that's been on his mind for the last few decades: mathematics, physics, language, the unconscious, the sins of the father, Kant, evolution, psychology, gnosticism, genius. It's not just a novel of ideas, though—The Passenger is filled with yearning, regret, nostalgia, isolation...just an incredibly melancholic atmosphere in general. Stella Maris is geekier, and basically The Virgin Internal Voice vs The Chad Cerebration: The Novel.

  To the usual mix of Hemingway and Captain Ahab, McCarthy adds strains of Pynchon and DeLillo. It works.

  There's even a cool, oblique Borges allusion: toward the end, Bobby writes down a couple of lines from a 17th century German poet, Daniel von Czepko. Those lines form the epigram of A New Refutation of Time!

• Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia, by John a. Matthews. This book comes out of academic "management" studies, which entails a lot of bullshit. A lot of overdone abstract ideas that are never really tested, a lot of extremely silly diagrams, etc. And its predictions about the future (it came out in 2000) turned out quite wrong. Viewed purely as a collection of facts it's quite an interesting book, however.

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller. Much stronger than the above, and also up to date as it just came out. Covers both the history of chip production across the world, as well as current issues and where they will lead in the future.

• Bouvard and Pecuchet, by Gustave Flaubert. A comic(?) novel of ideas, which is also about Ideas. Quite weird, very bad, very good, not sure if I can really recommend it to anyone. Full review forthcoming.

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick. Some interesting differences between the book and the movie. The latter is vastly superior. There's very little of the cyberpunk aesthetic present here, and Scott wisely ripped out almost everything about the artificial animals, the futuristic cult with the TV host antagonist, etc. Still, it's not bad.

• Children of Dune, by Frank Herbert. I can confirm these get sillier and worse as the series goes on.

• The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony. Pretty cool book on the origins of Indo-European, combining archaeological and linguistic evidence. Unfortunately it was written just before the ancient DNA era, so it contains some things we know today are inaccurate (though to Anthony's credit, he was leaning in the right direction). Dull in sections (dry lists of finds at various sites), but easily skimmable. It's difficult to recommend it when Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here exists.

• The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I love some of his work, but overall not a fan of the average poem.

• Flashman and the Mountain of Light, by George MacDonald Fraser. The audiobooks for this series are really well done. This time Flashman gets embroiled in the First Sikh War, a rather silly affair all around even without the fictional elements. Naturally, he gets his hands on the Koh-i-Noor. Not the best Flashman novel, but still good fun. The ending is pure perfection.

• Murder as a Fine Art, by David Morrell. Historical detective fiction, in which an old, opium-addled De Quincey and his hot, spunky daughter are roped into a murder mystery and become citizen-detectives. Meticulously researched but not very good, unfortunately.

• Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Just a dull collection of academic essays focusing on pointless minutiae and ignoring the big questions.

The forecasting ecosystem is in a weird spot right now. The "traditional" approach began with large-scale experiments focusing on the wisdom of the crowds, market mechanisms, etc. People were inspired by the predictive power of financial markets and wanted to replicate their strengths in other domains—policy, diplomacy, war, disease, science.

We quickly began to see a divergence, starting with the "superforecaster" phenomenon: researchers noticed that certain people consistently outperformed the rest, and if you focused on their views you could outperform both the experts and the crowd. Competitive prediction aggregation/market platforms also have serious issues with information sharing between participants, which is a big part of why teams of top forecasters outperform markets as a whole. It has taken a long time for this movement to play out, but I feel it has been accelerating lately and wanted to write down a few comments on where I think forecasting is headed.

One issue is identifying superforecasters. If you don't have access to them (they are GJO's moat in a way), then you need to find them on your own (or at least find a way to reach out to them and attract them). Thus other projects like CSET/INFER ran crowd forecasting platforms and then picked out the top predictors for their "pro team", for example. Recent AI forecasting efforts have also tried to pick out a small number of top forecasters. And then you have groups like Swift and Samotsvety (as Scott Alexander says, "If the point of forecasting tournaments is to figure out who you can trust, the science has spoken, and the answer is “these guys”."). Why pay tens of thousands for a prediction market (which takes time and effort to organize) when you can just give a couple of grand to Nuño and get better answers, faster?

Others have tried to do away with the market mechanism even without having access to top forecasting talent. The DARPA SCORE program (which I've written about before) had two separate components for prediction, one market-based (Replication Markets) and another which used a structured group discussion format to arrive at estimates (RepliCATS). The results aren't out yet, but my understanding is that RepliCATS outperformed the markets.

Personally, I find the shift from open markets and various fancy scoring and incentive mechanisms to "put a handful of smart dudes in a room and ask them questions" a bit disappointing. Why did we even need the markets and forecasting platforms in the first place? To identify the smart dudes, of course—but is that all there is to it? As the top forecasters abandon markets and start competing against them, they are (in a way) pulling up the ladder behind them. We need the public tournaments to identify the talent in the first place, but if the money just goes straight into Samotsvety's pockets instead of open tournaments, new people can't join the ecosystem any more. Where is the next Samotsvety going to come from? Part of the problem is that there's a positive externality to identifying forecasting talent and it's difficult to capture that value, so we end up with a bit of a market failure.

Perhaps the only way to make markets competitive is to make them lucrative enough that it's worthwhile to form hedge fund-like teams which can generate internal benefits from information-sharing and deploy those onto the market, with the added benefit of honing them through competition. But that seems unlikely at the moment, the money just isn't there.

In one of the possible worlds ahead of us, the endpoint of this process will be the re-creation of the consulting firm—except for real this time. With the right kind of marketing angle I could easily see Samotsvety becoming a kind of 21st century McKinsey for the hip SV crowd that wants to signal that it needs actual advice rather than political cover. Could the forecasters avoid the pitfalls of the consultancy world?

What are the limits to forecasting accuracy? Eli Lifland is skeptical about the possibility of improving his abilities, but I'm not sure I buy that line entirely. We're still very early on, and many obvious low-hanging fruits have yet to be tried. If the forecasting-group-as-consultancy takes off, I would expect to see many serious attempts at improvement, starting with things like teaching domain experts forecasting and then putting them in close collaboration with top-tier generalists and forecasters.

What worries me is that this is a movement away from objective scoring and back towards reputation-based systems of trust. Once you leave the world of open markets and platforms, you become disconnected from their inescapable, public, and powerful error-correcting mechanisms—weak arguments can once again be laundered in the dirty soapwater of prominence and influence. Perhaps the current crop of top forecasters have the integrity to avoid going down that path, but how can that be maintained in the long run, with a powerful headwind of incentives and entryism blowing against us?

From Above: Metaethics

You're (probably) all theological anti-realists; just apply the same reasoning to the existence of moral facts! If the magical invisible sky god is obviously fake, why do you accept magical invisible sky moral facts? Just take the standard "rationalist" toolkit, apply it to realism, and it disappears in a puff of smoke. The arguments can just be copy pasted: for example, one of the classic (and most powerful) arguments from the New Atheism internet wars was that theists are really atheists about every god except their own. The moral realist is an anti-realist about all moral claims except the ones he happens to like! What is the base rate of moral truth, and why do you believe your inside view is enough to overcome that?

Realist arguments always come across as utterly absurd because their task is 1) extremely simple and obvious, and 2) impossible. All they have to do is say "we used methods x, y, z to uncover moral facts a, b, c, and you can replicate the procedure independently to verify our results". But it's never like that, it's always some interminable verbcel nonsense to cover up the fact that they don't actually have any access to the moral facts that their theory says they should have access to!

Whenever I hear the word "intuition" out of the mouth of a philosopher I reach for my Browning!¹

It comes down to this:

• Naturalism: no evidence
• Non-naturalism: magic

Often they'll back off and come up with excuses about why moral facts aren't accessible in that way, but that just wrecks the whole thing. Even if realism is true, if there's no reliable empirical access to moral facts, then that's functionally equivalent to anti-realism. Any defense based on the immunity of moral propositions to empirical investigation also makes it impossible to find the truth. Your metaethics either has to have a way to determine what's true in ethics, or you're practically a nihilist.

Traditionally the problem has been solved with an appeal to God but EAs are, to a first approximation, 100% atheist. You can't pull an Euthyphro any more, so WHAT'S YOUR MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY MOTHERFUCKER? Why do epistemic standards seem to suddenly disappear when it comes to utilitarianism? Why am I constantly being asked to believe in the existence of these ontologically redundant entities?

The theologians at least have the decency to offer some kind of story: ask them about the origin of God and they might invoke the cosmological argument or the principle of sufficient reason. Ask a moralogian about the origin of moral facts and all you'll get in return is a stupefied bovine expression. The theologians can at least appeal to miracles. The moralogians appeal to nothing and expect you to accept it! Is the origin of moral facts natural, or supernatural? If natural, can we engineer our own? Why or why not? The universe, fundamentally, is dumb. You are positing the existence of entities that are very much not dumb. Where the hell did they come from?

Above all the moralogian is conspicuously shameless. Even in the 13th century, a man like Aquinas (who would not meet a single doubter in his entire life) felt it necessary to justify his faith and present arguments in favor of the existence of God. Today's moralogian on the other hand feels no such compulsion, although he is beset on all sides by skeptics! The EA.org page on meta-ethics speaks for itself:

Is this an excess of certainty, or is it because deep down the moralogian knows he has no real arguments?

And the moralogians are not stuck in airy castles of thought, they operate in the real world. The neoconservatives, for example, are a showcase of what happens when the moralogian takes hold of the reins of foreign policy—and it is a consistent ideology that genuinely seeks to spread the values it values. Buckhardt wrote that the foreign policy of Italian states of the Renaissance, free as it was from "moral scruples", gave him "the impression of a bottomless abyss". But who today could not prefer that naked self-interest to the neocon disaster of democracy and human rights? The effective altruists have yet to screw up that badly, but just look at the people who want to eliminate all wildlife and you have a good preview of what is possible—"Man, your head is haunted!"

Peter Singer offers one of the most memorable instances of intellectual cowardice in the entire history of philosophy. Like any reasonable person, he used to be an anti-realist. Then he read Parfit and realized that anti-realism meant utilitarianism was not the case (not sure why it took Parfit to point that out to him). Instead of abandoning utilitarianism, he became a realist just to salvage his ideology! Pathetic.

Hilariously, Parfit later abandoned realism for what he calls "non-realist cognitivism", which is basically the Sam Harris view except with bigger words.² Part 7 of vol. 3 of On What Matters is an incredible trainwreck, worth skimming just to see what kind of pretzel shapes people will contort themselves into in order to avoid accepting the obvious. At least Parfit understands that adding a magical normative layer on top of reality is completely incompatible with the scientific weltanschauung.

"But Alvaro, your instrumental goals are sort of like morality, maybe we could just re-brand..." Just let it go, man.

From Straight Ahead: What's Going On Here?

You're not actually a utilitarian anyway. At best it's a kind of ideal. That's why you tithe 10%. Just go with the 90% of your intuition that says "this shit is whack, yo". How do ideologies avoid purity spirals? Heuristics against demandingness. It’s one heuristic battling another! Why not go all the way with the one that’s winning?

So you're probably not a realist, and probably not a utilitarian either...where does this EA compulsion come from? You must have been memed into it. Don't feel bad, it happens to all of us, that's how these things work.

From Below: Genealogy

Nature has never generated a terminal value except through hypertrophy of an instrumental value. To look outside nature for sovereign purposes is not an undertaking compatible with techno-scientific integrity, or one with the slightest prospect of success.

Banger tweet Mr. Land, as the */acc transsexual teenagers of twitter dot com like to say.

Instead of getting tangled up in all this philosophy mumbo jumbo we can just pulverize the question with Bulverism.³

What is morality for, exactly? What does it mean for altruism to be "effective"? EAs take it for granted that the most effective altruism is the altruism that helps its targets the most. I would argue that altruism is really meant to help the altruist, not the altruee. That's the only way it could have evolved. So here's my pitch to you: effective altruism is the altruism that raises your status the most. The conspicuous lack of caring about the "effectiveness" of altruism among normal people is a hint! Hundreds of millions per year for the NY Metropolitan Opera? Sure, why not! They're not misfiring, you are.

Of course the problem with optimizing for status is that if you're seen as optimizing for status rather than having a plausible excuse⁴, it's bad—the altruism that increases your status the most is also the one that you can credibly signal that you actually believe in. Thus we get Triversian self-deception where the altruist "really means it" (but of course if he really meant it he wouldn't be giving 10%). So Actual Effective Altruism is simply too gauche to exist. If you hang around the Bay Aryan rationalists then EA may well satisfy those goals (and I'm sure there are many in EA purely for cynical reasons). But if you're not part of that crowd...

Scott Alexander writes that "all of our values are unjustifiable crystallizations of heuristics at some level", and then continues specifically on utilitarianism:

To be absolutely brutal about it:

EXPLICIT MODEL: Helping others will key me in to networks of reciprocal altruism and raise my status in the community
EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE: Desire to help others, empathy, horror at the suffering of others
REIFIED ESSENCE: “Utility”
ENDORSED VALUE: Utilitarianism, the belief that maximizing utility is the highest good regardless of what other goods it produces"

It's spot on! How someone can write that and go on believing in utilitarianism is beyond me, and Scott offers no explanation.

Now, you might be thinking "But Alvaro, you idiot, we're adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers! This is all perfectly alright, you see." Sure, we're adaptation executors, but that doesn't give you a blank check to execute whatever retarded adaptation was bred into your hairy great-....great-grandfather 500,000 years ago, and is now incompatible with the world you live in (or worse, become enslaved to "unjustified crystallizations" and meticulously engineered hyperstimuli designed to abuse your adaptations). Effective altruism is the coca cola of morality, and you are morally obese!

The adaptation for helping out people in your community has hypertrophied in the toxic sludge of modern civilization into an absurd ideology about maximizing imaginary sky utilons by helping people you will never meet, or who do not yet (and may never) exist. Given the rapid shift in our environment it's unsurprising that there are maladaptations in our system; but we can recognize and avoid them. Your "adaptation execution" has been memetically hijacked—where once you would get good things in return for your "altruism" (a stronger community, status, reciprocal altruism, coalition-building, or even "niceness, community, and civilization"), a runaway meme has now convinced you that it's actually better to get nothing!⁵ You get all the costs of religion, and none of the prosocial benefits! Even worse, the infected are trying to spread this meme to others. Things are in the saddle, and ride you! It's a particularly dumb version of your typical California cult in which there isn't even a creepy guy with a harem of underage girls at the top. What's the point, man?

There was a type of deer in Ireland whose antlers hypertrophied (probably through sexual selection) to the point that it killed off the entire species. When I look at effective altruists, all I see is overgrown antlers pulling them to the ground.

The absurdity is heightened because we obviously know where these tendencies come from, regardless of what philosophers try to imagine. We know where the evolved desire to gobble up an entire cake comes from—as you resist the clarion call of the chocolate cake, so you must also resist the call of "effective" altruism. A serious valuing of values can only begin when this baggage is dispensed with and laughed at.

Fin

There are plenty of arguments against utilitarianism's internal logic: problems with interpersonal comparisons, aggregation, second-order effects, negative utility, average utility, discounting, etc. Whether you go negative, average, rule, or fluorescent there are tons of inescapable and fatal flaws. Empirically, human beings don't have coherent utility functions so what are we even maximizing? Above all, utilitarians ignore the value (and necessity) of suffering—for life and for Life. The fine porcelain of your being was forged in the fires of hell.

But I don't think it's necessary to meet utilitarianism on its own turf, so...⁶

Let me also say that atheism for the masses, in retrospect, was an enormous error. Organized religion as a social technology is invaluable and the modern atomized welfare state is a pathetic replacement. Atheism for the intellectual class is perfectly alright, but in the age of mass literacy there is really no barrier between them and the rest of society. Was atheism inevitable? Perhaps. But the New Atheists certainly didn't help. Extrapolating this line of reasoning is left as an exercise to the reader.

Are there values which are not merely instrumental? In a way—Gnon and all that. Do they have anything to do with the values of effective altrusim? Of course not. But that's a story for another time.

Links

Machine Learning/AI

1. Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better

2. Ajeya Cotra update on AI timelines (shorter, of course).

3.The Library of Babel, stable diffusion edition. I love this bit from the Borges story:

When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind's hope.

The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.

4. On how various plans miss the hard bits of the alignment challenge.

5. Understanding Conjecture: Notes from Connor Leahy interview

We think that in order for things to go well, there needs to be some sort of miracle. But miracles do happen. When Newton was thinking about stuff, what were the odds that motion on earth was governed by the same forces that governed motion in the stars? And what were the odds that all of this could be interpreted by humans? Then you see calculus and the laws of motion and you’re like “ah yes, that just makes sense.

6. Inverse scaling prize winners!

Forecasting

7. Five Questions for Michael Story: "Nearly all forecasters are paid more by their day jobs to do something other than forecasting. The market message is “don’t forecast”!"

8. On training experts to be forecasters. Lots of good points in this one, especially on the softer social aspects of forecasting.

Metascience

9. Rain, Rain, Go Away: 192 Potential Exclusion-Restriction Violations for Studies Using Weather as an Instrumental Variable

10. Status bias in peer review. Would be curious to see an attempt at estimating how much of this is actually justified. After all, research quality follows a power law, and past results are certainly indicative of future performance. Perhaps there is not enough status bias in peer review!

The Rest

11. All the cool kids are listening to The Lunar Society. José Luis Ricón says Dwarkesh "is probably the best podcaster there is right now". Tyler Cowen says "highly rated but still underrated!". The Stephen Hsu episode is my favorite, but do check out the other ones too.

12. From the robot: the map is of the territory. "I am affirming that you have write access to the realm of the Gods."

13. From the banana, on the efficacy of depression treatments and more.

14. Dysgenics by the Numbers. In my view probably overstates the rate of loss within societies a bit. But overall completely right. Probably doesn't matter though.

15. Scraping training data for your mind. “But Karl Ove”, Renberg says about his writing, “there is… nothing _there_”.

16. A Future History of Biomedical Progress

Progress in tools has created the potential for a radically different research ethos that will end biomedical stagnation. But to understand this new research ethos, we must first understand the telos of the mechanistic mind and why it is at odds with the biomedical problem setting.

17. Good interview with Vitalik. "The kinds of communities you get when low taxes are the primary reason to come are just really boring and lame".

18. Evaluating Longtermist Institutional Reform. Public choice, counterfactuals, long-range forecasting.

Audio-Visual

What I've Been Reading

• Nostromo by Joseph Konrad. Tangled, fragmented, unclear, conflicting, and circular narratives/motivations/goals/priorities. A chopped-up story from various points of view, taking a look at a world filled with great characters surrounding the titular Nostromo. Politics, heroism, revolt, the worth of social status, reputations, perceptions, allegiances, and material vs idealistic interests. Betrayals of all kinds. Private and public vindications and redemptions. Great stuff.

• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Fascinating Borgesian novel about a futuristic game that combines all arts and sciences into some sort of grand unified plaything. It's about music, duty, the lifecycle of organizations, transcendence, the life of the mind, and probably much more on top of that. Highly recommended.

• Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age by Stephen R. Platt. Kind of weirdly structured, it mainly takes a look at the era from the point of view of various minor players, mostly traders, "supercargos", and so on. The big politics don't get much attention. Somewhat revisionist I guess? It's fine.

• Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique; Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky by John Carroll. A fairly shallow exegesis, written in an indefensible style. Just go straight to the primary sources.

• The Twilight World by Werner Herzog. Another Herzog book! Nowhere near as brilliant as Conquest of the Useless, unfortunately, but still not bad. Concerns of those Japanese soldiers who kept up the guerilla war for decades after the end of WW2, refusing to surrender and refusing to face reality. Very Herzogian with the jungle and everything. Some wonderful metaphors.

• City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams. Gwern gave it 5 stars so I couldn't resist, but I didn't enjoy it at all. Absurdly overlong at 800 pages, it just ends with a cliffhanger (and there's more than one sequel). There's a series of parallel fantastical stories set in a virtual reality and they're all pointless and awful. A bit outdated in terms of how it imagines the internet, it does have a few interesting ideas but overall I don't think it's worth the effort.

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel. I guess it's the best business book I've ever read. A bunch of concepts from it have penetrated the broader culture (definite vs indefinite optimism for example). It's a quick read so go for it

• Philip Larkin: Poems selected by Martin Amis by Philip Larkin. His best poems are great, but be warned that they are also extraordinarily pathetic in a way that can really fuck up your mood (if not your soul).

• HHhH by Laurent Binet. Split into 257 short chapters, it blends a straightfoward and minimally fictionalized retelling of Operation Anthropoid (the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) with all sorts of metafictional elements, as Binet constantly comments on the issues with constructing a historical novel, compares his approach to other books and movies, and even brings his personal life into it. Irony, humor, self-consciousness (especially about the author's view of Heydrich), the tension between history and fiction, and a slow, horrific build-up that absolutely fills you with terror. Strange how powerful emotionally a book that is at the same time so detached can be. Quite good and very different.

• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman. Fun and highly readable pop biography, I blasted through it in a day. "I doubt if he would have recognized my first name even though I worked with him for twenty years. The only person he called by his first name was Tom Trotter, whom he called Bill."

• The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. A curious artifact from a different era. Perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the peak of internet atheism and creationism debates. One could make statements about human evolution then which would be quite dangerous today. The stuff on DNA and evolution is pretty wide and not that deep. All of it has been covered better elsewhere. There's a chapter on EvoDevo for example, but it stays on the surface of things and I would recommend reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful (by the same author!) instead. On top of the evolution stuff you also have a random sprinkling of skeptic-related causes (dull and cringey rants about chiropractors), plus a very generic liberal environmentalism which basically ignores everything the author had written up to that point. Probably more interesting as a marker of a (short, but memorable) era than a book about DNA and evolution.

• The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset W. Maugham. A fictionalized retelling of the life of Paul Gaugin, as a middle-aged English man abandons his family to go be a painter in Paris (and eventually Tahiti). I wasn't convinced by the central character, and there's nothing to this novel beyond him. The "egotistic, single-minded genius" trope has been done much better elsewhere, and the novel really strays very far from the actual life of Gaugin.

• The Golden Bowl by Henry James. I made it about 50 pages in. Not for me.

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deusch. An unstructured mishmash of warmed-over pop science and a cavalcade of bad arguments around abduction, philosophy of science, intelligence, infinity, qualia, etc. The arguments
  about superhuman general intelligence not being possible because humans are universal Turing machines are utterly absurd and could be added verbatim to "On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines". One of the worst treatments of abduction in the history of philosophy, and that's really saying something. Deutsch's comments on heritability are downright idiotic, and it's clear that he didn't even bother spending 30 seconds reading the wikipedia page. He just makes stuff up (incorrectly). A lot of uppity commentary about shit he doesn't understand. And then it's just filled with a whole bunch of random shit, like a galaxybrained theory of why the UK has the best voting system, a terrible theory of aesthetics, etc.

• First Light by Geoffrey Wellum. Fairly conventional WW2 memoir from a British fighter pilot. Not bad, not great.

• The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger. A standard tale of a British explorer somehow making himself accepted and comfortable among the primitive natives (look up Thesiger's pics), and bemoaning the disappearance of their way of life. This particular one, among the pastoral tribes of the marshes of southern Iraq. Perhaps what makes it unique is that it is set not in the 19th century, but in the late 1950s. Comfy but unexceptional, ultimately the Madan are just not that interesting.

Links

Machine Learning

1. Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners: "Simply adding “Let’s think step by step” before each answer increases the accuracy on MultiArith from 17.7% to 78.7% and GSM8K from 10.4% to 40.7% with GPT-3." Here's how different prompts compare:

2. DALL·E 2 is pretty crazy. Tons of good threads on twitter featuring its work, here's one of my favorites.

3. Gwern comments on GPT-3's 2nd Anniversary

A psychologist thrown back in time to 2012 is a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, with no advantage, only cursed by the knowledge of the falsity of all the fads and fashions he is surrounded by; a DL researcher, on the other hand, is Prometheus bringing down fire.

4. Speaking of AI and Prometheus...

5. A model trained on /pol/ data successfully(?) sends out thousands of shitposts.

6. Yarvin contra AI x-risk fears. I am not convinced.

Forecasting

7. Very good and important: Beware boasting about non-existent forecasting track records.

8. Future Fed Chair Basil Halperin on prediction markets and monetary policy.

9. Nuño Sempere released 3 short and sweet papers on designing prediction scoring rules. Also subscribe to his excellent forecasting newsletter if you haven't already.

Metascience

10. The New Science report on the NIH. Enormous but very much worth your time.

11. On that baby brainwave study and more general issues around that sort of research.

12. In the Guardian: The big idea: should we get rid of the scientific paper?

13. Ideological biases in research evaluations? The case of research on majority—minority relations

Within this field, social contact and conflict theories emphasize different aspects of majority—minority relations, where the former has a left-liberal leaning in its assumptions and implications. We randomized the conclusion of the research they evaluated so that the research supported one of the two perspectives. Although the research designs are the same, those receiving the social contact conclusion evaluate the quality and relevance of the design more favorably. We do not find similar differences in evaluations of a study on a nonpoliticized topic.

Note the effect is quite small though.

Economic History

14. On the role of millet, rice, and timing of agriculture in Chinese state formation.

Book Reviews

15. The SSC book review contest is pretty strong this year as well. My favorite thus far: The Dawn Of Everything

A “Gossip Trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years.

16. Judge Woolsey on Ulysses: ""[i]n respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce's] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring. [...] [W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac."

17. SMTM on Disco Elysium.

18. Devis Kedrosky reviews Koyama & Rubin's How the World Became Rich.

The Rest

19. Latest news from the Good, Actually dpt: incarceration cuts mortality by half.

20. Matt Lakeman continues his travel blogs, this time he reports from Ukraine.

21. What I learned gathering thousands of nootropic ratings.

22. Daniël Lakens has released a free ebook on improving your statistical inferences.

23. New evidence on the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews: "our results suggest that the AJ founder event and the acquisition of the main sources of ancestry pre-dated the 14th century and highlight late medieval genetic heterogeneity no longer present in modern AJ."

24. Mechanical Watch (lots of crazy shit on this blog)

25. On foreign aid and ethnic conflict.

26. Eigenrobot gives advice to academic refugees.

Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them. Industry is by comparison a mass of green field areas of inquiry with large budgets, minimal bureaucracy, and ample data.

Audio-Visual

27. And here's Masayoshi Takanaka's The Rainbow Goblins.

What I've Been Reading

• Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Lives up to its reputation. Fascinating observations on law, politics, psychology, sociology, America's Westward expansion, and more. Prefigures Timur Kuran in many ways. Incredibly prescient. Interesting both in terms of what has stayed the same since it was written, but also for a look at all that has changed. "The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for like them he is the sole interpreter of an occult science."

• The Memoirs of the Baron de Tott, on the Turks and the Tartars, by the Baron de Tott. Found through Braudel. Written just a few decades before Democracy in America, the Baron de Tott went East instead of West. And instead of seeing the future, he saw the past. Roughly at the time the American revolution was happening, the same time when Johnson and Boswell were drinking too much claret at the Mitre, de Tott was joining the Crimean Tatars on a slave raid into Southern Russia. Most fascinating for its observations of Ottoman society, and the role de Tott played in the Russo-Turkish war of '68-'74. Somewhat niche and obviously nowhere near as insightful as Democracy in America, but definitely worth a read if this is your kind of thing. What causes the fall of empires? Culture, Tott says: all decay ultimately comes from within.

• Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph Tainter. Tainter's theory mostly comes down to decreasing marginal returns to additional societal complexity, which eventually leads to collapse. Parts of it are highly reminiscent of Chaisson's Energy-Rate Density paper (which everyone should read), but much more limited in scope. He's too focused on explaining everything with a single theory, leaving little room for contingency in history. He ignores the aspect of time: just because a system works well for 10 years does not mean it can work for 1000. And he treats rulers as being virtually unconstrained in their policy choices.

  The examples he marshals in support of this theory are not particularly convincing, and (at least in some cases like the Western Roman Empire), the Mancur Olson view which focuses on public choice issues (which Tainter pretty much dismisses out of hand) seems like a vastly better fit to me. Especially when it comes to contemporary society, the examples Tainter brings up seem like a slam dunk in favor of Olson and against Tainter! Take education for example: is it really plausible that the ballooning costs and declining efficiency of educational spending over the past few decades is due to increased complexity? Of course not, it's clearly an issue of special interest groups with socially misaligned incentives. Tainter misses it because he never actually dives into the details of exactly how increased complexity is supposed to be working to produce all these effects.

• The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, by James Burnham. On Machiavelli and some of his successors: Mosca, Sorel, Michels, Pareto. Published in 1943 and it shows. Strong on the general ideas about the objective treatment of power and politics, divorced from sentimentality and moralizing. Pretty weak on the specifics. I was expecting something deeper based on its reputation. A bit dull overall.

• Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle. Borges mentions that it inspired him to read German philosophy and that's how it ended up on my list. What can I even say about this crazy book? Carlyle invents a fictional German philosopher, who has written a treatise on clothing, and then also invents a fictional English editor who tries to explain the German philosopher's work, which turns out to be a philosophy of everything. Layer upon layer of irony and postmodern misdirection, and that outrageous Carlylean 19th century style to top it off. Heavily influenced by Tristram Shandy. Surprisingly influential (especially in America), though I'm really not sure how seriously one is meant to take the ideas presented within.

• Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, by Eric Berger. Fast-paced and exciting, mostly based on insider interviews, Liftoff gives a good idea of what the crazy early years were like at SpaceX. Once they start launching the Falcon 9 it skips over a decade in a few paragraphs, which kind of sucks. If you were wondering exactly what factors made SpaceX succeed where everyone else has failed, you will probably come away from the book disappointed. Still, recommended.

• Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray (yes, that Charles Murray). One of the better Apollo books, this one is focused mostly on the bureaucratic aspects with a few glimpses into engineering as well. At 500 pages it still feels far too short, as some major events and personalities are given very little space. Overall very strong, and it's truly astonishing how there was almost nothing at all in terms of the space program in 1960, how young everyone was, how nobody really knew what they were doing, etc. For some reason it seems to be out of print.

• The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World, by Lynn Hunt. The story of the publication of the titular book, and a look at the religious environment of the 18th century. Freethinking Protestant refugees congregate in cosmopolitan Amsterdam and make waves through their printing presses. Fascinating subject, terrible execution. Unorganized, repetitive, badly written, and filled with pointless digressions. There's an irrelevant digression in the very first paragraph of the book! Maybe if a competent editor had gone to town on it...Also, I think the authors wildly overrate the book's ultimate importance.

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman. Audiobook. A look at 14th century Europe, mostly as it was seen from the perspective of the French nobleman Enguerrand VII de Coucy. Mainly based on the Chronicles of Froissart. Plague, the 100 years' war, religious fanaticism, popes and antipopes, peasant revolts, crusades, etc. Very entertaining, but it sacrifices quite a lot of rigor to get there. Too many blatantly false statements from the 14th century are taken at face value. And there's more than a bit of Monty Python about this: at points, I thought I discerned the distant—but unmistakable—beat of coconuts in the background of the audiobook. This sentence gives you the vibe: "A decision was perforce taken to march straight through the dark, fobidding forest of the Ardennes, where, Froissart remarks with awed inaccuracy, "no traveler had ever before passed.""

• Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir. Audiobook. It's the same schtick as The Martian all over again, but with more plotholes and a more impressive setting. Pleasant scifi entertaintment for the gym.