Working With AI: Two Paths to Prompting

Don't overcomplicate things.

Lots of folks have read our paper showing that using AI boosted the quality of the work done by consultants at the top-tier Boston Consulting Company by 40%, but there is a key factor in that paper that most people are missing. The consultants were not given some special version of AI, trained on proprietary data and with a customized interface. Nope, they were just given GPT-4 with minimal training and examples. The plain old GPT-4 from back in April, before all of its new capabilities were added. The same GPT-4 that everyone in 169 countries can access for free, via Microsoft Bing in creative mode. And while some of the consultants received a small amount of training (which didn’t help much), most of them just started using the AI without any instructions.

And they still saw massive performance increases.

The lesson is that just using AI will teach you how to use AI. You can become a world expert in the application of AI to your domain by just using AI a lot until you figure out what it is good and bad at. This is one of two reasons that I dislike the emphasis on prompting that pervades much of the discussions of AI: it makes using AI systems seem much harder and more mysterious than it is. Just use it and see where that takes you.

The second reason I don’t like the emphasis on prompting is that, for most people, having to worry about prompts at all is a very temporary state of affairs. As AI systems improve, the need for esoteric prompting decreases, because the AIs themselves become good at figuring out what you might want. My favorite illustration of this change is in AI image creators. If you didn’t already know, OpenAI released a new image creator called DALL-E3 (you can get it through paid ChatGPT Plus by selecting the DALL-E mode, or free through Bing). While it is not significantly better than other image makers (like Midjourney or Adobe Firefly), there is an important difference: rather than creating prompts for images, the DALL-E system lets you just talk to the AI about the art you want, and the AI creates the prompts for you. (...)

Conversational Prompting

For most people, you can just talk to the AI to ask for what you want. You can even talk to the AI if you don’t know what you want - just tell it what you might need and see what happens.

As a chatbot, the AI is really built for exactly this sort of use, where you speak with the AI as if it’s another person: the infinitely helpful graduate student who is a little naive and wants to make you so happy that they will make up facts rather than disappoint you. As you work with the AI using this approach, you’ll develop an intuition for what its limits and strengths are, where it is generally truthful, and when it is unreliable.

There is one major trick that will make your conversations work better: provide context. You can (inaccurately but usefully) imagine the AIs knowledge as huge cloud. In one corner of that cloud the AI answers only in Shakespearean sonnets, in another it answers as a mortgage broker, in a third it draws mostly on mathematical formulas from high school textbooks. By default, the AI gives you answers from the center of the cloud, the most likely answers to the question for the average person. You can, by providing context, push the AI to a more interesting corner of its knowledge, resulting in you getting more unique answers that might better fit your questions. Many of the more exciting uses of AI require this sort of specialization. 

The simplest way to do this is to start with giving the AI an identity (you are an expert, friendly teacher who helps students with complex topics). While that does not magically turn it into an accurate teacher, it helps give the AI the context of what types of answers you need, and what tone to use. You can also provide context in other ways, such as by pasting in the text you are working on, or a form you need to fill out, and seeing how it answers.

For most people, this is good enough to get started, and it is the technique I use most of the time when working with AI. Don’t overcomplicate things, just interact with the system and see what happens. After you have some experience, however, you may decide that you want to create prompts you can share with others, prompts that incorporate your expertise. We call this approach Structured Prompting, and, while improving AIs may make it irrelevant soon, it is currently a useful tool for helping others by encoding your knowledge into a prompt that anyone can use.

Structured Prompting

Structured Prompting is about turning the AI into a tool that does a single task well in a way that is repeatable and adapts to its user. Since the AI is not always built to do this, it will take experimentation and effort to make a prompt work somewhat consistently (it is very hard to reach 100% consistency with LLMs). To start, you need a clear goal. For example, in this prompt from our paper on AI and teaching, we want the AI to run a pre-mortem, an exercise where you image how a project might fail in order to decrease the risk of real failure. There are specific ways to do a pre-mortem, and, with the current generation of AI, there is value in ensuring that it is doing the process correctly, rather than just responding to chat requests. That is where the Structured Prompt comes in.

by Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing |  Read more:

Image: Ethan Mollick

[ed. See also: What people ask me most. Also, some answers. (A FAQ of sorts).]

How Does the World’s Largest Hedge Fund Really Make Its Money?

How Does the World’s Largest Hedge Fund Really Make Its Money?

For years, the whispered questions have passed from one Wall Street trading floor to the next.

Bridgewater Associates, a global investing force, had $168 billion under management at its peak in 2022, making it not just the world’s largest hedge fund, but also more than twice the size of the runner-up. Bridgewater’s billionaire founder, Ray Dalio, was omnipresent in the financial media and said publicly that he had cracked what he termed “the holy grail” of investing, including a series of trading formulas bound to make money, “by which I mean that if you find this thing, you will be rich and successful.”

So why didn’t anyone on Wall Street know much of anything about it?

Since founding Bridgewater in his Manhattan apartment in 1975, Mr. Dalio has been said to have developed prodigious skill at spotting, and making money from, big-picture global economic or political changes, such as when a country raises its interest rates or cuts taxes. That made both a lot of sense and none at all; what was it about Bridgewater that made it so much better at predictions than any other investor in the world trying to do the exact same thing?

Bridgewater earned worldwide fame for navigating the 2008 financial crisis, when the firm’s main fund rose 9 percent while stocks dropped 37 percent, making Mr. Dalio a sought-after adviser for the White House and Federal Reserve and attracting new deep-pocketed clients to his fund. Yet the hedge fund’s overall descriptions of its investment approach could be maddeningly vague. Mr. Dalio often said he relied on Bridgewater’s “investment engine,” a collection of hundreds of “signals,” or quantitative indicators that a market was due to rise or fall. Bridgewater rarely revealed any details of these signals, citing competitive pressure, but if they pointed to trouble ahead or even to uncertainty, Bridgewater said it would buy or sell assets accordingly — even if Mr. Dalio’s own gut might have told him otherwise.

This supposed conquering of his base instincts was central to Mr. Dalio’s identity and expressed in his manifesto, “Principles,” which prescribed a doctrine of “radical transparency” and listed hundreds of rules for how to overcome one’s psyche. (One rule reads, in part: “Not all opinions are equally valuable so don’t treat them as such.”)

What confused rivals, investors and onlookers alike was that the world’s biggest hedge fund didn’t seem to be much of a Wall Street player at all. Much smaller hedge funds could move the markets just by rumors of one trade or another. Bridgewater’s heft should have made it the ultimate whale, sending waves rolling every time it adjusted a position. Instead, the firm’s footprint was more like that of a minnow.

What if the secret was that there was no secret?

by Rob Copeland, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Image: Xinhua News Agency, via Getty Images

[ed. Upshot - nobody knows (scary in itself). See also: Finance as alchemy (Aeon).]

Pablo Picasso - Nature Morte à la Pastèque, 1962

via:

The Exam That Broke Society

On 7 and 8 June 2023, close to 13 million high-school students in China sat for the world’s most gruelling college entrance exam. ‘Imagine,’ wrote a Singapore journalist, ‘the SAT, ACT, and all of your AP tests rolled into two days. That’s Gao Kao, or “higher education exam”.’ In 2023, almost 2.6 million applied to sit China’s civil service exam to compete for only 37,100 slots.

Gao Kao and China’s civil service exam trace their origin to, and are modelled on, an ancient Chinese institution, Keju, the imperial civil service exam established by the Sui Dynasty (581-618). It can be translated as ‘subject recommendation’. Toward the end of its reign, the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) abolished it in 1905 as part of its effort to reform and modernise the Chinese system. Until then, Keju had been the principal recruitment route for imperial bureaucracy. Keju reached its apex during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). All the prime ministers but one came through the Keju route and many of them were ranked at the very top in their exam cohort.

Keju was sheer memorisation. Testing was based primarily on the Confucian classics. And there was a lot to memorise. There were some 400,000 characters and phrases in the Confucian classics, according to Benjamin Elman’s book A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000). Preparation for the Keju began early. Boys aged as young as three to five began to practise their memorisation drills. After the immediate environs of their families, Keju was their first exposure to the world. Keju, which was open only to the male gender, was fiercely competitive. Using figures provided by Elman, during the Ming dynasty, 1 million regularly took the qualifying tests and, of these, eventually about 400 would make it to the final Jinshi round. Passing the first tier of Keju, known as the provincial exam, was a lot easier – working out to be 4 per cent on average during the Ming. Still, this was more cut-throat than getting into Harvard in most years.

The prestige of Keju was such that even an emperor coveted its bona fides. According to a legend, an emperor in the late Tang dynasty (618-907) hung on the wall of an imperial palace a wooden tablet proudly displaying his Keju degree – only it was fake. The emperor had it made for himself. This credentialism pervades officialdom today. Many Chinese government officials claim PhD degrees – earned or otherwise – on their résumés.

Much of the academic literature focuses on the meritocracy of Keju. The path-breaking book in this genre is Ping-ti Ho’s The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (1962). One of his observations is eye catching: more than half of those who obtained the Juren degree were first generation: ie, none of their ancestors had ever attained a Juren status. (Juren was, at the time, the first degree granted in the three-tiered hierarchy of Keju.) More recent literature demonstrates the political effects of Keju. In 1905, the Qing dynasty abolished Keju, dashing the aspirations of millions and sparking regional rebellions that eventually toppled China’s last imperial regime in 1911.

The political dimension of Keju goes far beyond its meritocracy and its connection to the 1911 republican revolution. For an institution that had such deep penetration, both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history, Keju was all encompassing, laying claims to the time, effort and cognitive investment of a significant swathe of the male Chinese population. It was a state institution designed to augment the state’s own power and capabilities. Directly, the state monopolised the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society of access to talent and pre-empted organised religion, commerce and the intelligentsia. Keju anchored Chinese autocracy.

The impact of Keju is still felt today, not only in the form and practice of Gao Kao and the civil service exam but also because Keju incubated values and work ethics. Today, Chinese minds still bear its imprint. For one, Keju elevated the value of education and we see this effect today. A 2020 study shows that, for every doubling of successful Keju candidates per 10,000 of the population in the Ming-Qing period, there was a 6.9 per cent increase in years of schooling in 2010. The Keju exams loom as part of China’s human capital formation today, but they also cultivated and imposed the values of deference to authority and collectivism that the Chinese Communist Party has reaped richly for its rule and legitimacy.

But isn’t it the case that the West – Prussia, then the United Kingdom and the United States – all had their own civil service exams? How is it possible that a strong bureaucracy complemented rather than supplanted political and religious pluralisms in the West? (...)

In his book Strong Societies and Weak States (1988), Joel S Migdal identifies a common problem in the developing world – the struggle of the state to acquire autonomy and capabilities. China, through history and today, is exactly the opposite. The state dominates society. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is autocratic but his autocracy pales in comparison with that of China’s president Xi Jinping. Harassed and targeted by the state, opposition parties are still legal and tenuously legitimate in Russia and some of Putin’s critics command a sizeable following. Even the power to commit violence – war fighting – was outsourced to a private force, the mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an arrangement not even remotely conceivable in China.

Since 2013, against the increasingly dictatorial Xi, there have been two prominent critics of the president and both were dispensed with summarily. Unlike Putin who has to rely on extra-legal means to silence his critics, suggesting some formal constraints on him, Xi directed the full apparatus of the Chinese state after his critics. (...)

An ultimate autocracy is one that reigns without society. Society shackles the state in many ways. One is ex ante: it checks and balances the actions of the state. The other is ex post. A strong society provides an outside option to those inside the state. Sometimes, this is derisively described as ‘a revolving door’, but it may also have the positive function of checking the power of the state. State functionaries can object to state actions by voting with their feet, as many US civil servants did during the Donald Trump administration, and thereby drain the state of the valuable human capital it needs to function and operate. A strong society raises the opportunity costs for the state to recruit human capital but such a receptor function of society has never existed at scale in imperial China nor today, thanks – in large part, I would argue – to Keju.

Keju was so precocious that it pre-empted and displaced an emergent society. Meritocracy empowered the Chinese state at a time when society was still at an embryonic stage. Massive resources and administrative manpower were poured into Keju such that it completely eclipsed all other channels of upward mobility that could have emerged. In that sense, the celebration by many of Keju’s meritocracy misses the bigger picture of Chinese history. It is a view of a tree rather than of a forest. The crowding-out effect of Keju is captured succinctly in a book from the late 19th century:

Since the introduction of the examination system … scholars have forsaken their studies, peasants their ploughs, artisans their crafts, and merchants their trades; all have turned their attention to but one thing – government office. This is because the official has all the combined advantages of the four without requiring their necessary toil …

This is the larger impact of Keju. Its impressive bureaucratic mobility demolished all other mobility channels and possibilities. Keju was an anti-mobility mobility channel. It packed all the upward mobility within one channel – that of the state. Society was crowded out, and over time, due to its deficient access to quality human capital, it atrophied. This is the root of the power of Chinese autocracy and, I would argue, it is a historical development that is unique to China and explains the awesome power of Chinese autocracy.

by Yasheng Huang, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Excerpt from the scroll Viewing the Pass Lists, traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying (1494-1552).

Tomorrow is Waiting

If you want the truth, it happened because Anji was feeling lazy. Her AI class wasn't all that interesting, nor was it a field she wanted a career in, so there wasn't any reason she could see for trying especially hard. So she came up with a project that didn't look like too much work, and she picked what looked like the easiest way of doing it. Things just got a little out of hand, after that.

Anji's AI class was taught by a grad student who seemed as bored as her students. It was a graduation requirement for programmers, even though everyone knew AIs, as a field, weren't going anywhere much. In seventy years of computing nobody yet had designed an AI that passed the Turing test, let alone did anything really interesting. No matter the computing power behind them, AIs just couldn't be as complex as a human brain; everyone knew that. Anji and her classmates still needed to know how to use the little crippleware bots that ran traffic lights and production lines, though, and that meant knowing the basics of AI programming. At least well enough to pass the final.

So Anji decided to pick the easiest-looking project off the list of options: Design an AI that mimics the behavior of a public domain character. There was a list of characters to choose from, mostly stuff she'd never heard of. She picked Kermit the Frog because, she figured, there was a ton of footage of Kermit, even if it was mostly fifty years old, and she could just feed old TV shows to a bot until it started acting enough like Kermit to get her a passing grade.

Only it wasn't that easy. For one thing, the bot was too stupid to understand that it was meant to be Kermit. Anji used off-the-shelf open-source language- and image-parsing software, so the bot would understand what it what watching, but she had to write a program to key the bot to Kermit in particular. It took forever. It was actually a pretty good challenge, writing a program to convince the bot that it was Kermit the Frog, that the little fuzzy green thing in the old video was itself—that it had a self, for that matter. She ended up using concepts and bits of code from the other classes she was taking, pulling a few all-nighters at the library with books on AI design, and just plain making stuff up in a few places. Her code wasn't anything like elegant, but Anji found herself liking the project a lot more than she'd expected to, even as it got harder.

She also found herself liking Kermit a lot more than she'd expected to. Anji had never really watched the Muppets before; her parents, like most parents she knew, had treated TV as only slightly less corrupting an influence than refined sugar and gendered toys. But The Muppet Show was really funny—strange, and kind of hokey, but charming all the same. She ended up watching way more of it than she needed just for the project.

Then her friend Brian, who was really into robotics, got wind of what she was doing, and demanded the chance to participate. Apparently he had weird, nostalgic parents who'd actually allowed him to watch TV as a kid, and what he'd mostly watched was Sesame Street and the Muppets, so the chance to make a real live AI-powered Kermitbot was too good to pass up.

Of course, that made more work for Anji. She had finally gotten the bot keyed to Kermit properly, so it didn't get confused every time there was another Muppet on screen that looked vaguely froggy or was voiced by Jim Henson, and it was sucking down footage at a pretty good clip—luckily there was so much to feed it, on top of the movies: hours and hours of TV specials and commercials and interviews and even outtakes, all of it in character. But now she had to write a whole new suite of programs so the little AI could operate a robot body. Anji started to worry about finishing the project by the due date. For that matter, she was getting behind in her other classes, and it would be downright embarrassing to do poorly in them because AI design, of all things, was taking up her time.

The thing was, her little AI was getting kind of interesting. It had started writing its own code about the time she'd gotten it keyed to Kermit properly, which was one of the project requirements, but Anji hadn't expected much more than a few badly parsed lines. Nobody else in her class was getting more than that, but Anji's AI was producing more code all the time. And weird code, too. Anji couldn't really make sense of it, but it was working, apparently: the bot hadn't frozen up or crashed, and it wasn't having any trouble parsing the footage Anji fed it.

Brian finished his robot a couple of days after Anji got through the last of the footage. He presented it to her proudly, like a cat gives you something really good it's killed and expects your praise for it. "Good, isn't he?" Brian asked, beaming at her, and Anji had to admit it was convincing. Brian had really gone all out: the little robot was fully articulated ("Enough to play the banjo!" Brian pointed out), and perfectly accurate, with plenty of internal memory built in, and a wireless charger. It didn't even need to be plugged in to upload Anji's code. Not that most of it was really Anji's, anymore. She was starting to wonder if this project wasn't getting away from her a little.

The one change Brian had made, in designing his robot, was to give it eyelids. He said it was creepy without them. So when Anji hit the key that uploaded her code, the first sign she had that it had worked was when Kermit gave a couple of slow, sleepy blinks. "Oh," he said, sitting up (Anji was glad to see she'd done a good job with the movement programs), "hello there."

"Hi, Kermit!" Brian said, all dorkily excited. "I'm Brian. It's really nice to meet you."

He elbowed Anji. "Uh, hi," she said. "I'm Anjali. Anji, really."

"Hello, Anji," Kermit said. "Pleased to meet you. I'm Kermit the Frog," and hey, that sounded exactly right. Anji was totally getting an A.

Anji let Brian keep talking to Kermit, and went to check her computer to make sure everything had uploaded okay. It looked fine: everything running smooth. Only the bot was still writing new code, even as it chatted with Brian. Huh. Anji looked back over at them; Kermit had said something that was making Brian laugh really, really hard. Bots weren't supposed to be very good at telling jokes, were they? They'd covered that in class: how AIs never really seemed to get how jokes worked, and even AIs designed to tell them mostly just produced a sort of unfunny word salad. Maybe Kermit was just quoting the jokes from the footage she'd fed him. AIs could mimic like that, although if she'd built a bot that could mimic good comic timing she deserved more than just an A.

In the weeks that followed, it got harder to treat Kermit like a school project. He spent a lot of his time with Brian, who claimed to need to do a bunch of unspecified adjustments to the robot, although this mostly seemed to entail Kermit being shown off to all Brian's friends. Anji didn't mind it too much, though, because it gave her more time to try and puzzle out Kermit's code, and also it meant that Kermit acquired a very small banjo and several sets of little clothes from Muppet fans among Brian's friends. And that seemed to make Kermit happy.

That was the freaky thing: Anji had designed a bot that could seem to be happy. She wasn't supposed to be able to do that. She was way, way outside the parameters of her project now, into territory that people who studied AI for a living hadn't covered anywhere Anji could find. Because Kermit could, in fact, make jokes—and if he was mimicking them, the originals weren't in the footage Anji had fed him—and he could noodle around on the banjo in a way that sounded nothing like the precision of music-playing AIs Anji had heard. And he could also do things that freaked Anji out on a deep and meaningful personal level, like the afternoon when Kermit, perched on the edge of the bed in Anji's dorm, stopped strumming his banjo and sighed wistfully.

"You know, I sure do miss Fozzie," he announced, and Anji stopped typing mid-keystroke.

"What did you say?" Anji asked, trying not to sound as startled as she felt.

"Oh, it's not that I don't like it here, Anji. You and Brian are awfully nice. But Fozzie's my best friend, you know? After a while, you get to miss things. The squeak of a rubber chicken. The smell of custard pie on fur. Little things like that."

He sighed again, and went back to strumming his banjo. Anji waited five minutes, excused herself, and ran full-tilt across campus to Brian's dorm.

He answered the door, looking concerned. Well, Anji had been hammering on it pretty hard. "What's the matter? Is Kermit okay?"

"Brian, I think we invented sentient AI." Anji tried not to sound like she was panicking. She totally was, though. "We weren't supposed to invent sentient AI! I was just supposed to get a passing grade! Now there's an artificial life-form in my dorm room who plays the banjo!"

"Whoa. Calm down. Why are you freaking out now? Kermit hasn't gotten any more sentient than he was last week, has he? And why is it such a big deal if he is?"

"People have been trying to build a sentient AI for like seventy years, Brian. And I knocked one together out of spare parts for a freshman project in a class I didn't even want to take!" Anji wasn't sure how people were going to react, but she didn't think it would be good. The grad student who taught her class would probably be pissed. "No one's going to believe I actually programmed him, or that he's really sentient. But he just told me he misses his friend and made a couple of novel jokes that made sense, so I'm pretty sure I've created life. And I bet I'm going to get in trouble for it."

Brian, damn him, thought she was overreacting. Worse, he thought she was mostly worried about her grade. They ended up fighting over it, getting into a yelling match that drew Brian's RA in to tell them they were damaging the rest of the floor's calm. Anji really didn't like Brian's RA.

Anji trudged back across campus to her dorm that night in a gloomy frame of mind. Sure, it was pretty cool that she had created sentient AI, but she was afraid it would cause more problems than she really knew how to handle. There was the issue of convincing people Kermit was really sentient, just for starters, and then what was he supposed to do with himself, if people ever believed he was for real? He was just a little frog in a big world, when you got down to it.

Lost in her own thoughts, Anji didn't hear the music until she was nearly back to her dorm. When the sound finally made its way through her thick skull, she paused outside her door, and just listened for a minute. Kermit was singing a song.

It wasn't anything Anji had heard before. The lyrics were sweet and simple, all about looking towards the future, and how it was always just a day away. "I won't miss yesterday," Kermit sang, "because I can see—tomorrow is waiting for me." He strummed a few more chords on the banjo, and fell silent.

Anji pushed the door open. "I liked your song, Kermit," she said.

"Thanks, Anji," Kermit said. "It just kinda came to me, you know? That's why I like singing."

"Yeah," Anji said. She though about her project deadline, three days away, and the other homework she wasn't getting done. Then she sat down at her desk and called up a fresh copy of the generic AI, the same blank template she'd started from with Kermit, and got to work keying it to Fozzie.

She wasn't anything like done, three days later, when it was time to present her project, but she'd gotten a lot of good practice with Kermit, and she thought she could have Fozzie up and running inside of two weeks. Kermit walked with her to class, carrying his banjo slung across his back, and Anji ignored the funny looks they got from the other students passing them. She was busy with a sudden, unexpected flurry of guilt: what right, she thought, did she have to show Kermit off to her class like—like some kind of show frog? If he was sentient, he deserved better. Just because he didn't seem to mind—was, in fact, excited to be performing for an audience—didn't mean that Anji was doing the right thing.

But right or wrong, if she didn't show up with something to show for a semester's worth of work, her GPA would be toast. Anji felt guilty, but that didn't stop her from being practical. And she could hope for allies among her classmates, maybe. Once they saw Kermit, they might understand.

Or she could get in a lot of trouble. That was the thought at the top of her mind as Anji came into the classroom, and nervously eyed Malika, the grad student waiting at the front of the room. A few other students had already arrived, most of them carrying the tablets or laptops they'd demonstrate their own projects with. A few had robots, but theirs were little bug-like creatures or wheeled rovers.

To her surprise, Malika brightened as soon as she saw Kermit, and came over to talk to Anji. "You did Kermit?" she said, sounding delighted. "Wow, he looks really great. Just like the real thing. Who built him?"

"Um," Anji said, already embarrassed to be talking like Kermit wasn't there. "There's something I'd like to talk to you about, actually. In private?"

"Sure, sure, after class," Malika said. "I can't wait to see your presentation!"

Somehow, it was worse than if Malika hadn't been interested at all. Kermit looked up at her, concern showing on his small green face. "Are you all right, Anji?"

She hadn't known how to talk to Kermit about the problem. And now it seemed like it was too late. "Just nervous, that's all," she lied.

"You don't have to be nervous," Kermit said. "I mean, sharing something with an audience for the first time is always a little scary, but I've got lots of practice. You don't need to worry about me."

Yes, I do, Anji thought, but she didn't say it.

Kermit didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that the other presentations were all about code and AIs and made frequent mention of bots and programming. Anji wished she'd gotten up the nerve to talk to him about what, exactly, he thought he was—if he knew he was a robot, if he understood he was a sentient AI, if he even got what any of that meant. But she'd been too scared to do it, and Brian had been too excited about his new little green friend. She felt miserably like she'd betrayed Kermit's trust.

When Kermit's—when Anji's turn came, Kermit strolled down to the front of the room and hopped easily onto Malika's desk, settling his banjo on his lap. "Hi-ho everyone," he began. "Kermit the Frog here. My friend Anji asked me to put on a show for you. I haven't got the backup I usually have—and anyway, I don't think there's room in here for a chicken chorus, or a penguin orchestra, or a cannon—but I thought I might sing you a song. I hope you all like it."

The class, who had giggled a little at Kermit's joke, fell quiet as he began to sing. It was the same song Anji had heard him working on before, but he'd changed some of the lyrics, and the arrangement wasn't quite the same. The new version was a little better, actually, to Anji's ear. She looked anxiously at her classmates' faces, at Malika, as Kermit sang the chorus again. He played a little flourish on his banjo, sang "Tomorrow is waiting for me" one last time, and strummed a final chord.

There was silence in the classroom, for a long moment. Then someone started clapping, and the rest of the class joined in, and Anji smiled with relief until she saw that Malika wasn't clapping. She looked serious, and thoughtful.

After class, in the empty lecture hall, Malika still looked grave. "Anji, you've put me in kind of a difficult position," she said. "You're obviously a talented programmer, but the project requirements were pretty clear. You weren't supposed to program a performance, you were supposed to get some novel behavior out of your AI."

"Um," said Anji. "This is what I wanted to talk to you about before class, actually. I was kind of afraid of this. See, I didn't program that."

"Then who did?"

"No one did! Kermit came up with it on his own. I'm tone-deaf, anyway; I can't write music."

"Aw, I wouldn't say tone-deaf, Anji," Kermit said. "I've heard you humming along a few times. Tone-confused, maybe, but I bet with a little practice you could get better."

Malika stared at Kermit. Then she said, "Anji, can I have a minute alone with your—with Kermit?"

Anji looked anxiously down at him. "She just wants to ask you a few questions, I think," she said. "Is that okay?"

"No problem," said Kermit. "I interview well."

by Holly Mintzer, Strange Horizons |  Read more:

Image: The Muppets

[ed. Relevant as ever.]

The ‘Sombrita’ Bus Shade Controversy

“Sombrita” sunshade and lighting system on Gage Avenue in East Los Angeles

First things first: La Sombrita is not a bus shelter, and it was not funded with government money.

Now that we’ve got some of the frequently misreported facts out of the way, let’s get into how a prototype sunshade deployed at four Los Angeles bus stops came to dominate social media over the last week, becoming a political Rorschach test for the failures of government — thus burying a far more interesting story about how we can make public transportation more friendly to women.

The controversy erupted last week, when leaders from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation along with L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez held a news conference to announce a new prototype sunshade and lighting system at a bus stop in Westlake. In the photos, the design looked less than enthralling: a skateboard-shaped piece of perforated metal hung from a pole that looked to cast a sliver of shade over, at most, two or three people. At night, a solar-powered light is intended to help illuminate the sidewalk.

In a city where the lack of shade around bus stops is a serious problem (made worse by climate change), La Sombrita, as the design was dubbed by its creators, came off as a joke. I’ll admit, that was my first reaction. The photos of the news conference, showing a group of officials looking up at a glorified pole, quickly became a Twitter meme.

Making things worse was the public relations spin. A media alert breathlessly announced a “First-of-its-Kind Bus Stop Shade Structure” and framed it as part of an effort to bring gender equity to public transit. If you were following the story on Twitter, it was wildly unclear how exactly a piece of metal on a stick was going to help women. It felt merely like a capitulation to the habit already forced on Angelenos sweltering at countless bus stops; tucking themselves behind utility poles and praying they don’t fry their brains.

Within hours of the news conference, La Sombrita was being held up as a symbol of everything wrong with cities by observers across the political spectrum. On the left, it indicated an uncaring government doing less than the bare minimum for its citizens. On the right, it was evidence of a blue city mired in regulation — dopey Los Angeles unable to execute. “How to Fail at Infrastructure,” trumpeted a post from the conservative Cato Institute.

The real story of La Sombrita, however, is more complex.

by Carolina A. Miranda, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Carolina A. Miranda/Los Angeles Times
[ed. See also: Finding Los Angeles with Anthony Bourdain (Current Affairs) where, incidentally, I first heard about the 'Sombrita':]

"If I’ve learned anything from Bourdain’s work, this is the quote that embodies it: that we often can’t help but imagine places through the common images we’ve consumed of them. These dominant images shape our expectations, redouble our prejudices, and limit our notions of a place. Yet, when we are challenged by exciting, unsettling, or less familiar images of said places—from strip mall dim sum restaurants and Ethiopian coffee shops to vandalized “walk of fame” stars and charred Malibu mountainsides—we are forced to reckon with them and possibly even change ourselves in response. In the best episodes of Parts Unknown, that is what Anthony Bourdain and his crew accomplished. They reconceptualized the viewer’s notion of the world through Bourdain’s own reconceptualization of it.

Today, the majority of our collective media diet seems to encourage the exact opposite behavior. To photograph a particular place for social media—say, the Venice canals (L.A.) or the Walt Disney Concert Hall—is to verify that one is in the know about it as it continues to exist: undisputed in the cultural imagination. These popular photos are therefore a redundant, thoughtless act of consumption—a box to check, an unveiling of more of the same. Like the tourists at the “most photographed barn in America” from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (the only significance of which is that it is frequently photographed), they amplify a tendency that has less to do with experiencing a place than with extracting its beauty. At its worst, this behavior can destroy a place (see the Antelope Valley poppy fields trampled to death by L.A. influencers) or displace the people who live there (see the other Venice canals, where tourists outnumber locals). At best, it offers no more than the lukewarm affirmation of “likes” and “follows.”

The Elements of Scientific Style

Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read. It wasn’t always this way – and it doesn’t have to be.

How many scientific papers have you read in full over the past year? Presumably, none or very few, unless you belong to a small number of specific professionals, like researchers or science communicators. Even if you do read papers as part of your job, you probably haven’t read many of them beyond the title and abstract, especially if they lie outside your field of expertise.

There are several reasons for this, including the difficulty of accessing papers that lie behind the paywalls of large publishing companies and the extreme specialization of most academic articles, which limits their appeal. Also, scientific topics are often complex, and it’s generally not worth spending time and energy to understand a technical argument unless it’s particularly germane to your work.

But compounding these issues is a simple truth that has made science less impactful than it could otherwise be: Scientific papers are poorly written. And they’ve been getting worse.

Anyone who researches scientific style is bound to, sooner and later, cite Robert Boyle and Thomas Sprat. Right around the time of the Scientific Revolution and the establishment of the English Royal Society, in the 1660s, these two men defended opposing views on how to write science.

Boyle, now known as a founder of modern chemistry, argued in favor of making things interesting: A philosopher’s (or, as we would now say, a scientist’s) style ‘should delight its reader with his floridnesse’ and ‘disgust not its reader by its flatness’. A few years later, in a history of the Royal Society that is perhaps more accurately described as a manifesto, the clergyman and scientist Sprat disagreed, fighting fiercely against the use of tropes, metaphors, and ‘the volubility of tongue’.

It would be one thing if either vision had prevailed. But today, most scientific papers seem to reject both. Boyle would be appalled by the now ubiquitous terse, bland, supposedly objective language. Meanwhile, Sprat would certainly not agree that we have achieved his ideal of ‘primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words’.

Academic papers today are filled with jargon and abbreviations. Subject to the contradictory requirements of presenting impactful work and respecting arbitrary word limits, they cram a lot of information in very little space, leaving no room for interesting style or concrete examples. Unrelated ideas are strung together in wall-of-text paragraphs, providing no guidance to readers, who must then spend their cognitive resources figuring out the structure rather than absorbing the contents. Citations, though necessary, cause unending distraction with a profusion of parenthetical names and years in the middle of long, meandering sentences.

All of this adds to the inherent complexity of a paper’s topic. And so reading a paper in full becomes a chore – something that you do only if strictly necessary.

by Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Plaven-Sigray, Matheson, Shiffler, Thompson (2017)

Years of Israeli Failures on Hamas Led to a Devastating Attack

It was 3 a.m. on Oct. 7, and Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic security service, still could not determine if what he was seeing was just another Hamas military exercise.

At the headquarters of his service, Shin Bet, officials had spent hours monitoring Hamas activity in the Gaza Strip, which was unusually active for the middle of the night. Israeli intelligence and national security officials, who had convinced themselves that Hamas had no interest in going to war, initially assumed it was just a nighttime exercise.

Their judgment that night might have been different had they been listening to traffic on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants. But Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, had stopped eavesdropping on those networks a year earlier because they saw it as a waste of effort. (...)

The most powerful military force in the Middle East had not only completely underestimated the magnitude of the attack, it had totally failed in its intelligence-gathering efforts, mostly due to hubris and the mistaken assumption that Hamas was a threat contained.

Despite Israel’s sophisticated technological prowess in espionage, Hamas gunmen had undergone extensive training for the assault, virtually undetected for at least a year. The fighters, who were divided into different units with specific goals, had meticulous information on Israel’s military bases and the layout of kibbutzim.

The country’s once invincible sense of security was shattered.

More than 1,400 people were killed, including many women, children and old people who were murdered systematically and brutally. Hundreds are held hostage or are still missing. Israel has responded with a ferocious bombardment campaign on Gaza, killing more than 8,000 Palestinians and wounding thousands more, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The Israeli military on Sunday signaled a heavier assault on Gaza, saying it had expanded its ground incursion overnight.

Israeli officials have promised a full investigation into what went wrong.

Even before that inquiry, it is clear the attacks were possible because of a cascade of failures over recent years — not hours, days or weeks. A New York Times examination, based on dozens of interviews with Israeli, Arab, European and American officials, as well as a review of Israeli government documents and evidence collected since the Oct. 7 raid, shows that:

• Israeli security officials spent months trying to warn Mr. Netanyahu that the political turmoil caused by his domestic policies was weakening the country’s security and emboldening Israel’s enemies. The prime minister continued to push those policies. On one day in July he even refused to meet a senior general who came to deliver a threat warning based on classified intelligence, according to Israeli officials.

• Israeli officials misjudged the threat posed by Hamas for years, and more critically in the run-up to the attack. The official assessment of Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council since May 2021 was that Hamas had no interest in launching an attack from Gaza that might invite a devastating response from Israel, according to five people familiar with the assessments who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. Instead, Israeli intelligence assessed that Hamas was trying to foment violence against Israelis in the West Bank, which is controlled by its rival, the Palestinian Authority.

• The belief by Mr. Netanyahu and top Israeli security officials that Iran and Hezbollah, its most powerful proxy force, presented the gravest threat to Israel diverted attention and resources away from countering Hamas. In late September, senior Israeli officials told The Times they were concerned that Israel might be attacked in the coming weeks or months on several fronts by Iran-backed militia groups, but made no mention of Hamas initiating a war with Israel from the Gaza Strip.

• American spy agencies in recent years had largely stopped collecting intelligence on Hamas and its plans, believing the group was a regional threat that Israel was managing.

Overall, arrogance among Israeli political and security officials convinced them that the country’s military and technological superiority to Hamas would keep the terrorist group in check.

“They were able to trick our collection, our analysis, our conclusions and our strategic understanding,” Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security adviser from 2021 until early this year, said during a discussion last week in Washington sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank.

“I don’t think there was anyone who was involved with affairs with Gaza that shouldn’t ask themselves how and where they were also part of this massive failure,” he added. (...)

Ignored Warnings

On July 24, two senior Israeli generals arrived at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to deliver urgent warnings to Israeli lawmakers, according to three Israeli defense officials.

The Knesset was scheduled that day to give final approval to one of Mr. Netanyahu’s attempts to curb the power of Israel’s judiciary — an effort that had convulsed Israeli society, ignited massive street protests and led to large-scale resignations from the military reserves.

A growing portion of the Air Force’s operational pilots was threatening to refuse to report to duty if the legislation passed.

In the briefcase of one of the generals, Aharon Haliva, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate, were highly classified documents detailing a judgment by intelligence officials that the political turmoil was emboldening Israel’s enemies. One document stated that the leaders of what Israeli officials call the “axis of resistance” — Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — believed this was a moment of Israeli weakness and a time to strike. (...)

General Haliva was ready to tell the coalition leaders that the political turmoil was creating an opportunity for Israel’s enemies to attack, particularly if there were more resignations in the military. Only two members of the Knesset came to hear his briefing.

The legislation passed overwhelmingly.

Separately, Gen. Herzi Halevi, the military’s chief of staff, tried to deliver the same warnings to Mr. Netanyahu. The prime minister refused to meet him, the officials said. Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for comment about this meeting. (...)

The Wrong Focus

While security and intelligence officials were right about a coming attack, their intense focus on Hezbollah and Iran had a tragic effect: Far less attention was paid to the threats from Gaza. Since Israel’s withdrawal in 2005 and Hamas’s evolution from a purely guerrilla organization into the governing power of Gaza in 2007, Hamas had only periodic skirmishes with the Israeli military.

Under four different prime ministers, Israel repeatedly decided that reoccupying Gaza and crushing Hamas would cost too many lives and do too much damage to Israel’s international reputation.

Israel knew that Hamas, which Iran supports with funding, training and weapons, was growing stronger over time. But officials thought they could contain Hamas with an extensive network of human spies, sophisticated surveillance tools that would deliver early warnings of an attack and border fortifications to deter a Hamas ground assault. They also relied on the Iron Dome air defense system for intercepting rockets and missiles launched from Gaza. (...)

Strengthening Hamas

Publicly, Mr. Netanyahu used blunt rhetoric about Hamas. His election slogan in 2008 was “Strong Against Hamas,” and in one campaign video at the time he pledged: “We will not stop the I.D.F. We will finish the job. We will topple the terror regime of Hamas.”

Over time, however, he came to see Hamas as a way to balance power against the Palestinian Authority, which has administrative control over the West Bank and has long sought a peace agreement in Israel in exchange for a Palestinian state.

Mr. Netanyahu told aides over the years that a feeble Palestinian Authority lowered the pressure on him to make concessions to Palestinians in negotiations, according to several former Israeli officials and people close to Mr. Netanyahu. An official in Mr. Netanyahu’s office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, denied this had been the prime minister’s policy.

But there is no question that Israeli officials viewed Hamas as a regional threat, not a global terrorist organization like Hezbollah or the Islamic State. This view was shared in Washington, and American intelligence agencies dedicated few resources to collecting information on the group.

by Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti and Maria Abi-Habib, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

[ed. See also: Please, Israel, Don’t Get Lost in Hamas’s Tunnels (NYT); and, Israel pounds Gaza with U.S. “heavy” bunker-busting bombs (Gilbert Doctorow):]

"As Israel marches further into Gaza and crosses all the “red lines” of the rules of war by its callous disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, its principal backer, the United States, condemns itself to pariah status in the global community of peoples and nations. In the UN General Assembly vote Friday on a Jordanian tabled resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, the United States was in a 10% minority of member states that voted against, while 120 voted for and 45, mostly EU members, abstained. This was a remarkable turning of the tables from the vote in February of this year on a resolution calling for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine in which the U.S. bribed, cajoled and threatened a large majority of UN member states to censure Russia.

To their credit, major Western media continue to provide extensive coverage of the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian population of Gaza. The intensity of destruction in Gaza City from bombardment by air, sea and ground in the past 48 hours leave no doubt that an attack described as anti-Hamas, to flush out their fighters from underground tunnels, is in fact a replay of the 1948 nakba which drove Palestinians from their homes into refugee camps. Gaza residential quarters and infrastructure are being ground into dust, while the population is instructed to withdraw to the south of the enclave. Next stop, Sinai? What Netanyahu and Company are doing makes the ethnic cleanser Milosevic look like a boy scout."

Pete Carroll is Just in a Land of His Own

Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is 72, the oldest coach in the NFL, with a Super Bowl trophy and the 17th-most wins (165) in NFL history. His team meetings are also a bit … unorthodox.

Britt: Every new player that comes there goes: “Don’t go somewhere else. This is the best place.” And it truly was.

Malcolmson: For the New York Super Bowl, that was the first year our free-throw shooting contest really took off. We started to do it during almost every team meeting, and there was an in-season tournament. It really became part of the culture.

Kearse: We had a whole NCAA-style bracket with defense on one side and offense on the other side.

Malcolmson: That was Pete’s request when we went out to New York for the week before the Super Bowl: “Make sure there is a basketball hoop.” We landed on a Sunday night the week before the Super Bowl. By the time we got to the hotel, it was probably 9 or 10 at night. I was like, “I’ve got to go figure out this basketball hoop because we have a team meeting first thing in the morning at the Giants’ facility.”

Brown: There was always a genuine team-building purpose with everything.

Malcolmson: I borrowed a car, went to Walmart in a suburban New Jersey town, got a full-scale basketball hoop, one of those ones where you pour sand or water in the base, then drove to the Giants’ facility. By this point, it’s probably midnight, and I ended up finishing building the hoop at 3 a.m.

Chris Carlisle (strength coach): Tom Coughlin was the coach at the time, and all the Giants people were like: “What are you doing? No, you can’t bring that in. This is a meeting room. This is like church.”

Willson: I was nervous. I’m a rookie. We’re eight days out from the f—ing Super Bowl. Pete comes in, wheels in a f—ing basketball goal and is like: “I don’t give a sh– that it’s the Super Bowl, we’re doing the same thing we’ve always done, boys. In fact, we’re going to have an All-Star tournament with the best shooters of the year, and we’re doing Round 1 today.

Malcolmson: Just one of those crazy Pete things.

Willson: All the stress, everything — it just disappeared. It was like: “Alright, f— it, who gives a sh–? We’re in New York. It’s the same thing as home.”

Malcolmson: One camp, we did full introductions before the basketball shoot-off. Tyler Lockett came out in the dark to the Chicago Bulls’ intro music, with lasers and a fog machine in the team meeting room. We had a confetti machine and a trophy presentation. It was so dumb but so fun.

Kearse: Yeah, it was fun, but subliminally it was building a competitive edge. Even the rebounders took it serious.

Smith: That program has consistently been competitive because he knows how to get the most out of his players from an emotional standpoint.

DeeJay Dallas (running back): The night-before meetings are his favorite…

Malcolmson: He would want the worst conference room at the hotel on Saturday night. We had about 100 people, and he would try to find the dingiest, smallest room at the hotel.

Bellore: There’s literally no room for any extra person. That’s unique to here.

Malcolmson: Every time the hotel would be like: “We have this nice big ballroom.” And every time he’d be like: “No, no, I want this side conference room.”

Smith: He pays so much attention to the energy of rooms.

Carlisle: On the road, he’d come down to the weight room and go: “I just need to be around the players. I need to get that energy. I need to feel the team again.” (...)

Jason Peters (offensive line): He gives you himself. He’s speaking from the heart. That’s different from anywhere else I’ve been.

Drew Lock (quarterback): The way he tells stories, commands the room, my mouth was open the whole time, like, “I can’t believe I’m here listening to him give a pregame speech about a game we’re about to play tomorrow.”

Willson: We were playing a big game, and there was a bunch of media hype. He calls up Tyler Lockett and he has a chair. He’s like: “Do me a favor. Just stand on this.” He’s like: “Do you think you can just lift one leg up?” Lockett looks at him and lifts the leg up. He has him do all this stuff: “Do a spin, do a counter spin.” I’m like, “What the f— is going on?” Then he’s like: “OK, serious question. Was any of that hard?” Lockett’s like, “No, not at all.”

Malcolmson: Then he’s like: “What if I put this on the Empire State Building? Would you be able to do it then?” Of course, the answer is no way. He’s like: “But nothing’s different, nothing’s changed. It’s all just your surroundings.”

Willson: You’ve got to picture this is Pete Carroll’s voice, so it’s way more animated, and he’s like, “Tomorrow, we’re just playing f—ing football. Field’s the same size, football’s the same size, plays are the same. F— all this nonsense about what happens if the Seahawks lose. Go out and rip it.”

Britt: The motivational person he is, it’s unmatched.

Shead: Pete got the most juice of any coach, anybody in America.

by Michael-Shawn Dugar and Jayson Jenks, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Christopher Mast/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Pete Carroll’s vindication: How Seahawks’ 71-year-old coach proved he’s still got it (The Athletic)

How Much of the World Will the US Burn in the Transition to Multipolarity?

China recently marked the 10th anniversary of its Belt and Road Initiative ( BRI) by gathering national leaders from 23 countries across the world, including from South America, Africa, and Asia, in Beijing.

Europe essentially boycotted the Belt and Road Forum (BRF). The 2017 forum saw 10 representatives from European countries attend, and there were 11 in 2019. This year, just two European leaders made the trip: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.

The US, of course, hasn’t attended any of the forums. As this most recent BRF was underway and following the BRICS expansion and the West’s increasing isolation on the Palestine-Israel issue, I couldn’t help but think of Beijing’s repeated invitations for the US to partner with them in the BRI: (...)

The US initially dismissed the BRI and then became threatened by it.

The US could have helped steer projects that would have also benefited the US if it had partnered with China, but it’s inconceivable that the US Blob would ever seriously entertain such a proposal, which would require a complete rethink of decades of US foreign policy that prioritizes rentierism and conflict over all else.

Instead we got the usual aggressive responses: the ill-fated TPP, sanctions, export bans, a new Cold War, a spy balloon scandal, the disastrous effort to weaken Russia before taking on China, the successful effort to sever Europe from Eurasia to disastrous effect for Europe, and the desire to see a Ukraine sequel in Taiwan.

It’s impressive what the BRI has already accomplished despite setbacks here and there. According to a Chinese white paper on the BRI, released just prior to the recent forum, Beijing has “signed more than 200 BRI cooperation agreements with more than 150 countries and 30 international organizations across five continents.” And while BRI lending has dropped in recent years, it will continue to be a major piece of China’s foreign and economic policy going forward.

Imagine what it could have done with a good faith US partner. The world’s two largest economies joining together to build a more prosperous world would have been quite the development.

Rather than all the billions the US has spent in recent years pointlessly extinguishing lives in Ukraine and elsewhere, the US could have spent that money at home, say, housing the millions of Americans living in modern day Hoovervilles. They could have asked the Chinese for help to build high speed rail lines. There could be massive infrastructure spending in Latin America rather than coups and drug wars. The possibilities are endless. (...)

That could be because the goals behind China and the US efforts are not the same. China is attempting to spread development. Sure, it isn’t just a giveaway. The BRI helps Beijing to develop new trade ties, secure critical materials, open export markets and boost Chinese incomes. What exactly is the US-led West offering?

The Council on Foreign Relations admits that “Washington has struggled to offer participating governments a more appealing economic vision.” Or is it simply that the vision offered by Washington is increasingly dystopian, anti-democratic, and filled with austerity and plunder that only enriches the already-rich in the West.

A Classic Case of US Projection

For years US officials and their friends in the media have accused Beijing of practicing debt trap diplomacy with the BRI and other lending.

Deborah Bräutigam, the Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, has written that this is “ a lie, and a powerful one.” She wrote, “our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country.” (...)

So while it is not true that China engages in debt traps, the same can not be said of the West. The US plan for the world is centered on more debt, more austerity, more conflict, and more profits for American corporations, which it accomplishes by getting countries to forfeit natural resources and crack down on labor in order to deal with foreign debt and get western loans. As Michael Hudson writes in The Destiny of Civilization:

The aim is to persuade low-wage countries that they can rise into the middle class if they let the U.S. and European investors establish factories for local labor-intensive production. A vocabulary of deception has been crafted to block them from recognizing that U.S. and European diplomacy aims at locking them into a foreign-debt trap that turns their domestic policy making over to foreign creditors. This trap enables the IMF and related U.S.-centered diplomacy to ‘bail them out’ by imposing austerity and debt deflation – capped by U.S. demands to control their rent-yielding natural resources and infrastructure monopolies.

The problem is countries are increasingly aware of this trap as its methods have been laid bare, and the US is often times left attempting to install dictators that will “cooperate” by selling out their countries. This is of course sold as joining the “democratic” West, while China represents “autocracy.”

One of the US’ biggest problems with China’s lending is that it represents an alternative to the West – and one that has also been willing to cancel and restructure debt. That is leading for calls for the West to do the same. African political economists, for example, are hopeful that China’s public and private debt forgiveness during the pandemic will apply pressure on western financial institutions to “rethink the harshness of their debt repayment-austerity governance model.”

This is what is so alarming for Washington is that China’s increased lending to Global South countries provides another option for countries that can allow them to avoid the Western debt trap. While Chinese loans typically provide some sort of geopolitical benefit to Beijing in some way the loan terms are never anywhere near as onerous as the typical IMF loan terms. (...)

Europe’s Big (Missed) Opportunity

Zhou Bo, a retired PLA colonel and current senior fellow of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, reveals the view from China:

The competition between the two giants won’t be in the Global South, where the US has already lost out to China, while in the Indo-Pacific, few nations want to take sides. Rather, it will be in Europe, where the US has most of its allies and China is the largest trading partner. (...)

China treasures its relationship with the EU, always considering Europe as an indispensable trade and economic partner, and more importantly, a benign force to maintain global diversity and plurality in an increasingly volatile world. China’s 1.4 billion people hope that Europe could maintain its soberness and impartiality – not to toe the political line set by the US government. The EU should judge China independently.

The US government has coerced European countries to play with bans, export controls and other restrictive measures to limit Chinese access to advanced tools and technologies, a blatant assault on China’s future development prospects. (...)

Now no doubt Beijing has many of its own problems with neoliberalism, surveillance, etc, but in international affairs one thing is sure. China constantly harps on win-win arrangements.

It attempts to find ways it can benefit in tandem with other nations. And it takes diplomacy seriously, thus far not resorting to force in an attempt to advance political objectives. In essence, on the world stage China is the opposite of the US, and it will continue to play an outsized role in the emerging multipolarity.

Right now, the US is making it easier for them to build a more China-centric alternative world order, helping countries overlook their differences because they see a common threat to their national interest, which is an overly aggressive declining hegemon in the US.

by Conor Gallagher, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: X

Notes on Progress: An Englishman in New York

I have often wondered what the maximum number of storeys for a good street is. No doubt an individual building can be indefinitely high, in the right setting. But this surely cannot be true of streets: a street with a thousand storeys would either be terrifyingly dark and claustrophobic, if the street were of normal width, or vast and bleak, if its width were scaled up to correspond with its height. So there must be some maximum beyond which pleasing street-based urbanism becomes impossible.

Some people think that the maximum is two or three. These people often believe that one is moving into inhumane scales when one goes above this point. Growing up in London, I knew the maximum must be at least four or five, since that is the norm for the Georgian terraces. I have a distinct memory of visiting Paris and realising it could not be less than eight, since that is the norm for the Belle Epoque. [ed. See post below]

Visiting Manhattan for the first time, I find it must be more still. The streets of Midtown Manhattan, each 60 feet wide, are often built up to ten or twelve storeys, with four or six more slightly set back above. The avenues, 100 feet wide, are often built up to fifteen or twenty storeys, with another five or ten set back. And to be clear: I refer to the height at which they are continuously built up, excluding the towers that rise above. The avenues of New York are perhaps not paradigmatic great streets, notably because they are almost invariably packed with four lanes of traffic. But their underlying form is good, as is borne out in the handful of cases in which they have been partly pedestrianised.

These streets evolved under New York’s famous 1916 building regulations. Before 1916, New York landowners could essentially build as high as they liked, and this did indeed generate streets that were sometimes rather menacing (pictured left). The 1916 system was designed to allow as much height as possible while preserving the amenity of the street, indexing the height of the buildings to the width of the street and setting back the upper storeys in the time-honoured European fashion (pictured right). This system lasted until 1961, when it was replaced with modernist regulations designed to generate slab blocks standing on open plazas; the results of this were so obviously inferior that the older system has been partly reinstated.

A pre-1916 street; a post-1916 avenue

My sense is that Manhattan’s tallest 1916-61 streets could not take many more storeys without losing amenity: the regulators basically succeeded in allowing as much height as possible without compromising the public spaces. In a city at a more southerly latitude, where the light is more intense, perhaps a few could be added; and perhaps the avenues could be widened further, with a corresponding growth in the buildings. It is hard to judge imaginary streets. But at any rate, New York shows we can go a lot higher than I had once supposed: there can be great streets with twenty storeys, five or ten more under a light plane, and more again in isolated towers.

One of the most striking features of American cities for Europeans is their gridiron street patterns. There have been many generations of European street designers who liked straight streets, but they were usually supposed to terminate on some worthy object, like a cathedral or an opera house or a fountain: the rigour of the American grid means that every street just goes on forever, tapering away into nothingness. These endless vistas are certainly striking when one first encounters them, but since literally every street in a gridiron looks this way, the effect wears a little thin. (...)

Gridiron street plans have been used for planned cities in many times and places - in Harappa, in Dynastic China, in European Antiquity, even in the Middle Ages - so I assume there must be something very good about them. But I have never quite worked out what it is. One annoying thing about gridiron plans is the great frequency of road crossings. Walking the 3.2 miles from the Empire State Building to 1 Wall Street, one must wait, by my count, at 62 traffic lights. Walking the 3.3 miles from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace, one encounters only 12, along with 8 crossings without lights that probably do not require waiting. (...)

One of the most famous buildings of New York is the Seagram Building, the vastly influential office block designed by the pioneer modernist Mies van der Rohe. The standard view is that the Seagram Building is a masterpiece that has attracted inferior imitators. I dislike many of the buildings inspired by the Seagram Building, but on the whole I like Mies, so this view has always appealed to me. On the other hand, I am slightly suspicious of accounts like these, which I call ‘evil imitator’ narratives. They remind me of the ‘evil counsellor’ narratives common in the Middle Ages, which allowed people to criticise the authorities without committing lèse-majesté by blaming all the authorities’ mistakes on the King’s advisors, rather than the King himself. Many people dislike steel slab blocks on empty plazas with facades of a single unvaried module, but it takes a lot of nerve to condemn the genius Mies himself. So it is easy to suspect a temptation to give a special exemption to the Seagram Building that it might not altogether deserve.

I was curious, then, to see what I made of this building in person. I had only a vague grasp of Manhattan’s geography and where the Seagram Building fits in it, so for my first three days in New York I kept having false sightings of what turned out to be evil imitators. Eventually I determined the location of the genuine article and sought it out. I carefully checked off the famous features – axial symmetry, clever corners, fictively structural I-beams, vertical emphases, classicising composition, bronze, travertine. But it didn’t work: in the end, it still looked to me like a grim building on a barren plaza, at most only slightly superior to the pack of evil imitators. I still wonder if I am missing something – many people with better judgement than mine subscribe to the standard view (I am not being ironical: this is really true). But I would prefer any generic Deco block of the 1920s, turned out by some forgotten architect with no imitators at all, evil or otherwise.

From the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement, many architectural critics believed in theories of ‘structural honesty’. This meant roughly that the underlying structure of a building ought to be expressed on its facade, such that (to use the standard example) if a building has a structural frame, it ought not to pretend it has load-bearing walls. I don’t think this is true, for reasons I have outlined elsewhere.

Like many people, however, I do think there is an important truth mixed up in this, which is that architecture should generally look structurally plausible. If architects want their buildings to look as though they are built of stones laid on top of each other, the stones have to look big and solid enough that they would not collapse under their own weight or fall over in high wind. No doubt there are exceptions – sometimes crazy gravity-denying effects are exactly what is sought – but they require special intelligence of the designer. Maybe this is analogous to how we view fictions in other contexts: we do not typically believe that characters in plays and novels are real, but usually we want them to be plausible – unless the author has some special artistic reason to do otherwise.

There is thus, I think, some truth in the Gothic/modernist idea that the modern revolution in building types and technologies has implications for architectural style. This is frequently visible in New York. It is possible to build a skyscraper that looks as though it has walls of load-bearing masonry, if they are extraordinarily thick and massively buttressed, like a scaled-up version of a cathedral tower. But it often happens that a skyscraper built with a thin decorative coating of brick or stone looks a bit flimsy - the walls look obviously too weak to stand up, as indeed they would be if they were not in fact hung on a concealed steel frame (see e.g. the example on the left here).

What New York also illustrates, though, is the enormous variety of ways in which architects responded to this problem, often with great success. The two examples on the right here are steel framed and proud of it - their facades read as a system of interlaced piers and beams, not as a wall punctured by windows. But they are still beautifully patterned and richly decorated, one in a late Gothic style, the other a novel manner that we would now bring under the obscure label ‘Art Deco’. So far from concealing it, this ornamental treatment actually highlights the underlying structure, especially in the case of the Deco building.

by Samuel Hughes, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. See also: Making Architecture Easy (Works in Progress).]

La Belle Époque - Europe’s Golden Age

Le Château d’eau and plaza, with Palace of Electricity, Exposition Universelle, 1900, via Library of Congress, Washington

How Did La Belle Époque Become Europe’s Golden Age? (TC)

by Ching Yee Lin (Image: uncredited)

The History and Beauty of the Moscow Metro

Kievskaya Station, opened in 1953, displays the Russian Baroque style, and is decorated with frescoes depicting life in Ukraine. The station celebrates the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Russia and Ukraine.

The History and Beauty of the Moscow Metro (The Collector)

by Greg Beyer (Image: David Burdeny/Business Insider)

[ed. I wouldn't doubt Russia's resolve.]

YouTube Disabling Videos For People Using Ad Blockers

YouTube is throwing a major wrench into video playback for viewers who are using ad blockers. The company has confirmed to The Verge that it’s currently running “a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium.”

The statement comes after some people began noticing a new prompt warning that video playback could be cut off if YouTube detects repeated use of ad blocking tools. Android Authority earlier reported on those tests, which prevent viewers from watching more than three videos when an ad blocker is active.

“Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers,” Google spokesperson Oluwa Falodun told The Verge by email. YouTube insists that users will receive multiple notifications urging them to cease using the tools — or, alternatively, subscribe to YouTube Premium — before any of their viewing is disrupted. (...)

These measures indicate that YouTube is hardening its stance against ad blockers, and it’s justifying the move by saying all of those ad spots are critical for creators to be compensated for their content — and for the platform to remain free. “YouTube’s ad-supported model supports a diverse ecosystem of creators, and provides billions of people globally access to content for free with ads,” the company’s statement says.

YouTube has increasingly tested the patience of its users by experimenting with heavier ad load in recent years. Last September, the company served up to 10 unskippable clips within a single ad break in another of its experiments. And in May, YouTube announced that 30-second ads were coming to TV platforms.

YouTube Premium removes ads from the service (and includes other benefits like offline downloads and YouTube Music Premium) for the price of $11.99 per month or $119.99 annually. Last November, the company announced that it surpassed 80 million combined subscribers across YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. So while protecting creators’ earnings is a charitable excuse to go with, the company has every interest in steering more people toward its recurring monthly subscription.

by Chris Welch, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Alex Castro/The Verge
[ed. Like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and every other social network that relies on content creators at scale and ad-based revenue, YouTube decides to go down the crapification route. They have only themselves to blame (as noted, their ads have become inceasingly longer and more intrusive). Seems to be an evolutionary thing.]

What a Japanese Neighborhood Izakaya Is Like

Life Where I'm From YouTube channel about a tiny izakaya (13 seats!) in Tokyo owned and operated by a woman called "Mama" by her regulars.

When Mama is busy, regulars at this izakaya will serve themselves, get their own beers, get their "bottle-keep" and make their own drinks. They'll also help out Mama-san by serving other customers as well. [...] Bottle keep is when a customer buys a bottle and the shop holds on to it for them. Then the next time they visit they can drink from that bottle again.

via: Kottke

[ed. Charming. Reminds me of Midnight Diner on Netflix.]

LeBron James Flies the Flag for the Man Bag

LeBron James flies the flag for the man bag (CNN)

Image: Garrett Ellwood/NBAE/Getty Images
[ed. Hey, if you're LeBron you can wear three man bags and still look intimidating. Seen here with "Damoflage” jacket. Great game against the Suns last night. See also: The LeBron James Maintenance Era Is Here (The Ringer).]