Tuesday, January 7, 2025
How to Be a Good Rhythm Guitarist
[ed. Placeholder. Eric definitely has a unique personality (New Yorker). But this is a good lesson with some great songs.]
Death of a Scientist
Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is an unfinished nonfiction book devoted to the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in the woods of Montana, in which 13 of the firefighters who had parachuted in to fight it died. Maclean spent decades returning over and over again to the event, revisiting the site, interviewing survivors, and debating with scientists.
As the editor of the posthumously published edition, Alan Thomas, explained, Maclean struggled with the technicalities of fire science, and those difficulties were part of the reason he never finished the book. ...It clearly isn’t a masterpiece on the same level as his famous novella, A River Runs Through It, but it still stuck with me long after I finished.
I think that’s because there was another book that was taking shape inside the draft, and Maclean did not live long enough to complete the transformation. This other book would have been not a conventional piece of science journalism but a personal meditation on mortality and his own search for meaning: more “Old Men and Death” than “Young Men and Fire.”
I started to figure this out about the halfway point, where there’s a powerful scene where you can feel the book shifting from the determinedly factual into something else. It recounts the last day in the life of Harry Gisborne, a Forest Service scientist who was investigating the Mann Gulch fire. There’s a lot of wisdom here:
I think that’s because there was another book that was taking shape inside the draft, and Maclean did not live long enough to complete the transformation. This other book would have been not a conventional piece of science journalism but a personal meditation on mortality and his own search for meaning: more “Old Men and Death” than “Young Men and Fire.”
I started to figure this out about the halfway point, where there’s a powerful scene where you can feel the book shifting from the determinedly factual into something else. It recounts the last day in the life of Harry Gisborne, a Forest Service scientist who was investigating the Mann Gulch fire. There’s a lot of wisdom here:
To Gisborne, science started and ended in observation, and theory should always be endangered by it. … He said to [Bob] Jansson: “I’m glad I got a chance to get up here. Tomorrow we can get all our dope together and work on Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it will lead to a theory.” This was at rest stop 35. By now the rest stops were becoming stations of the cross.This was on November 9, 1949; Gisborne was only 56 years old.
They were following a game trail along the cliffs high above the Missouri River at the lower end of the Gates of the Mountains, and were only a quarter or a half mile from their truck when they reached stop 37. Gisborne sat down on a rock and said: “Here’s a nice place to sit and watch the river. I made it good. My legs might ache a little, though, tomorrow.”
In his report, Jansson says: “I think Gisborne’s rising at point 37 on the map was due to the attack hitting him.” He goes on to explain in parenthesis that “thrombosis cases usually want to stand or sit up because of difficulty in breathing.” Gisborne died within a minute, and Jansson piled rocks around him so he would not fall off the game trail into the Missouri River a hundred feet below.
When Jansson knew Gisborne was dead, he stretched him out straight on the game trail, built the rocks around him higher, closed his eyes, and then put his glasses back on hi so, just in case he woke up, he could see where he was.
Then Jansson ran for help. The stars came out. Nothing moved on the game trail. The great Missouri passing below repeated the same succession of chords it probably will play for a million years to come. The only other motion was the moon floating across the lenses of Gisborne’s glasses, which at last were unobservant.
This is the death of a scientist, a scientist who did much to establish a science. On the day of his death he had the pleasure of discovering that his theory about the Mann Gulch blowup was wrong. It would be revealing if tomorrow had come and he had got all his dope together and had worked out a new Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it would have led to another theory, probably the right one.
In any case, because of him we have been able to form what is likely the correct theory. Gisborne’s portrait hangs on the staircase of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, which immediately adjoins the Smokejumper base. He looks you square in the eye but is half amused as if he had caught you too attached to one of your theories, or one of his. …
For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us–excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over, get our new dope together, and find a Hypothesis Number One all over again. And being basically on the right track when we were wrong.
by Andrew Batson, The Tangled Woof | Read more:
Image: Young Men and Fire
Watch Duty
How a wildfire monitoring app became essential in the US west
Cristy Thomas began to panic as she called 911 for the second time on a warm October day but couldn’t get through. She anxiously watched the plume of black smoke pouring over her rural community in central California get larger.
Then she heard a familiar ping.
Watch Duty, an app that alerts users of wildfire risk and provides critical information about blazes as they unfold, had already registered the fire. She relaxed. The cavalry was coming.
“I can’t tell you the sigh of relief,” she said, recalling how soon after sirens blared through the neighborhood and helicopters thundered overhead. “We were seeing it happen and we had questions – but Watch Duty answered all of them.”
Thomas is one of millions of Watch Duty evangelists who helped fuel the meteoric rise in the app. In just three years since it launched, the organization now boasts up to 7.2 million active users and up to 512m pageviews at peak moments. For a mostly volunteer-run non-profit, the numbers are impressive, even by startup standards. But they are not surprising.
Watch Duty has changed the lives of people in fire-prone areas. No longer left to scramble for information when skies darken and ash fills the air, users can now rely on an app for fast and accurate intel – and it’s free.
It offers access to essential intel on where dangers are, with maps of fire perimeters, evacuation areas and where to go for shelter. Users can find feeds of wildfire cameras, track aircraft positions and see wind data all in one place. The app also helps identify when there’s little cause for alarm, when risks have subsided, and what agencies are working in the trenches.
“The app is not just about alerts, it is about a state of mind,” Watch Duty’s CEO, John Mills, said. The Silicon Valley alum founded the organization after moving from San Francisco to a sprawling ranch in Sonoma county where fire dangers are high. After starting in just four California counties, Watch Duty covered the entire state in its first year before rapidly expanding across the American west and into Hawaii.
As the community has grown – reaching people across 14 states in 2024 – new features and enhanced precision have accented its popularity, and according to Mills, filled unmet needs.
In the past years, it’s not just residents who have come to rely on the app. An array of responders, from firefighters to city officials to journalists are also logging on, ensuring key actors are on the same page.
“People always thank me for Watch Duty, and I am like, ‘you’re welcome – and I am sorry that you need it,’” Mills said. But it’s clear that the need is real. In each new area where they have offered the service, word of mouth has driven usage.
“We spent no money on marketing at all,” Mills said. “We just let the genie out of the bottle so the world would know things could never go back to the way things were.”
Cristy Thomas began to panic as she called 911 for the second time on a warm October day but couldn’t get through. She anxiously watched the plume of black smoke pouring over her rural community in central California get larger.
Then she heard a familiar ping.
“I can’t tell you the sigh of relief,” she said, recalling how soon after sirens blared through the neighborhood and helicopters thundered overhead. “We were seeing it happen and we had questions – but Watch Duty answered all of them.”
Thomas is one of millions of Watch Duty evangelists who helped fuel the meteoric rise in the app. In just three years since it launched, the organization now boasts up to 7.2 million active users and up to 512m pageviews at peak moments. For a mostly volunteer-run non-profit, the numbers are impressive, even by startup standards. But they are not surprising.
Watch Duty has changed the lives of people in fire-prone areas. No longer left to scramble for information when skies darken and ash fills the air, users can now rely on an app for fast and accurate intel – and it’s free.
It offers access to essential intel on where dangers are, with maps of fire perimeters, evacuation areas and where to go for shelter. Users can find feeds of wildfire cameras, track aircraft positions and see wind data all in one place. The app also helps identify when there’s little cause for alarm, when risks have subsided, and what agencies are working in the trenches.
“The app is not just about alerts, it is about a state of mind,” Watch Duty’s CEO, John Mills, said. The Silicon Valley alum founded the organization after moving from San Francisco to a sprawling ranch in Sonoma county where fire dangers are high. After starting in just four California counties, Watch Duty covered the entire state in its first year before rapidly expanding across the American west and into Hawaii.
In the past years, it’s not just residents who have come to rely on the app. An array of responders, from firefighters to city officials to journalists are also logging on, ensuring key actors are on the same page.
“People always thank me for Watch Duty, and I am like, ‘you’re welcome – and I am sorry that you need it,’” Mills said. But it’s clear that the need is real. In each new area where they have offered the service, word of mouth has driven usage.
“We spent no money on marketing at all,” Mills said. “We just let the genie out of the bottle so the world would know things could never go back to the way things were.”
The app sprouted out of an emergency information ecosystem on social media that has for years communicated unofficial information. But unlike other platforms that seek to capture user attention and keep it there, Watch Duty has no algorithms that filter or muddy important information.
It relies on volunteers dubbed “reporters” who listen for emergency updates in the low hum of radio static, analyze data from the National Weather Service and other sources, and discuss findings with one another before sending push notifications to their active user base.
Run by real people, including active and retired wildland firefighters, dispatchers and veteran storm watchers, the team collaborates to quickly gather and vet information when a fire ignites.
An automated dispatch relays 911 alerts via Slack, kicking Watch Duty reporters in the particular region into action. Radio scanners, wildfire cameras, satellites and announcements from officials are scoured for intel. When conditions are confirmed they post the information, adding a push notification to users in the area if there’s a threat to life or property.
The network is fueled by hundreds of people who donate their time and a small staff of just 15 reporters and engineers. Together, they have alerted the public to more than 9,000 wildfires this year.
by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian; Jon Putman/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock
It relies on volunteers dubbed “reporters” who listen for emergency updates in the low hum of radio static, analyze data from the National Weather Service and other sources, and discuss findings with one another before sending push notifications to their active user base.
Run by real people, including active and retired wildland firefighters, dispatchers and veteran storm watchers, the team collaborates to quickly gather and vet information when a fire ignites.
An automated dispatch relays 911 alerts via Slack, kicking Watch Duty reporters in the particular region into action. Radio scanners, wildfire cameras, satellites and announcements from officials are scoured for intel. When conditions are confirmed they post the information, adding a push notification to users in the area if there’s a threat to life or property.
The network is fueled by hundreds of people who donate their time and a small staff of just 15 reporters and engineers. Together, they have alerted the public to more than 9,000 wildfires this year.
by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Gabrielle Canon/The Guardian; Jon Putman/Sopa Images/Rex/Shutterstock
[ed. Imagine that, somebody (Mr. Mills) developing a life saving tool just for altruistic reasons, no profit motive involved. I don't know what's more impressive, the app or the developer (and the volunteers who make it happen). Contrast with the post below. Downloaded it straight-away.]
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.
To be clear, I don’t believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs. Even if it was, the result would be the same — people wouldn’t notice how bad things have gotten until it’s too late, or they might just assume that tech has always sucked, or they’re just personally incapable of using the tools that are increasingly fundamental to living in a modern world.
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem. (...)
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world — they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isn’t the case fails the user. It may seem a little dramatic, but take a second and really think about how many little digital irritations you deal with in a day. It’s time to wake up to the fact that our digital lives are rotten.
I’m not talking about one single product or company, but most digital experiences. The interference is everywhere, and we’ve all learned to accept conditions that are, when written out plainly, are kind of insane. (...)
As every single platform we use is desperate to juice growth from every user, everything we interact with is hyper-monetized through plugins, advertising, microtransactions and other things that constantly gnaw at the user experience. We load websites expecting them to be broken, especially on mobile, because every single website has to have 15+ different ad trackers, video ads that cover large chunks of the screen, all while demanding our email or for us to let them send us notifications.
Every experience demands our email address, and giving out our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam — the actual “get the biggest laser” spam that hits the junk folder automatically, and the marketing emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted a discount from or newspapers we pay for that still feel it’s necessary to bother us 3 to 5 times a day. I’ve basically given up trying to fight back — how about you? (...)
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane. (...)
I’m not writing this to complain, but because I believe — as I hinted at a few weeks ago — that we are in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, a constant onslaught of interference, and I believe it’s so much bigger than just social media and algorithms — though they’re a big part of it, of course.
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years. (...)
We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy.(...)
I’ve written a lot about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset of The Rot Economy is what directly leads big tech companies to make their products worse, but what I’ve never really quantified is the scale of its damage.(...)
Every single weird thing that you’ve experienced with an app or service online is the dread hand of the Rot Economy — the gravitational pull of growth, the demands upon you, the user, to do something. And when everybody is trying to chase growth, nobody is thinking stability, and because everybody is trying to grow, everybody sort of copies everybody else’s ideas, which is why we see microtransactions and invasive ads and annoying tricks that all kind of feel the same in everything, though they’re all subtly different and customized just for that one app. It’s exhausting.
For a while, I’ve had the Rot Economy compared to Cory Doctorow’s (excellent) enshittification theory, and I think it’s a great time to compare (and separate) the two. To quote Cory in The Financial Times, Enshittification is “[his] theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it.” He describes the three stages of decline:
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” (...)
Perhaps that’s semantics. However, Cory’s theory lacks a real perpetrator beyond corporations that naturally say “alright we’re gonna do Enshittification now, watch this.” Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify. While enshittification neatly fits across companies like Spotify and Meta (and their ad-focused business models), it doesn’t really make sense when it comes to things where there isn’t a clear split between business customers and consumers, like Microsoft or Salesforce — because enshittification is ultimately one part of the larger Rot Economy, where everything must grow forever. (...)
The Rot Economy isn’t simply growth-at-all-costs thinking — it’s a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isn’t growing isn’t alive, and is in turn inferior.
No, perhaps not a religion. Religions are, for the most part, concerned with the hereafter, and contain an ethical dimension that says your present actions will affect your future — or your eternity. The Rot Economy is, by every metric, defined by its short-termism.
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.
You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.
It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness.
These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.
Things are being made linearly worse in the pursuit of growth in every aspect of our digital lives, and it’s because everything must grow, at all costs, at all times, unrelentingly, even if it makes the technology we use every day consistently harmful.
This year has, on some level, radicalized me, and today I’m going to explain why. It’s going to be a long one, because I need you to fully grasp the seriousness and widespread nature of the problem. (...)
We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world — they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isn’t the case fails the user. It may seem a little dramatic, but take a second and really think about how many little digital irritations you deal with in a day. It’s time to wake up to the fact that our digital lives are rotten.
I’m not talking about one single product or company, but most digital experiences. The interference is everywhere, and we’ve all learned to accept conditions that are, when written out plainly, are kind of insane. (...)
As every single platform we use is desperate to juice growth from every user, everything we interact with is hyper-monetized through plugins, advertising, microtransactions and other things that constantly gnaw at the user experience. We load websites expecting them to be broken, especially on mobile, because every single website has to have 15+ different ad trackers, video ads that cover large chunks of the screen, all while demanding our email or for us to let them send us notifications.
Every experience demands our email address, and giving out our email address adds another email to inboxes already stuffed with two types of spam — the actual “get the biggest laser” spam that hits the junk folder automatically, and the marketing emails we receive from clothing brands we wanted a discount from or newspapers we pay for that still feel it’s necessary to bother us 3 to 5 times a day. I’ve basically given up trying to fight back — how about you? (...)
It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane. (...)
I’m not writing this to complain, but because I believe — as I hinted at a few weeks ago — that we are in the midst of the largest-scale ecological disaster of our time, because almost every single interaction with technology, which is required to live in modern society, has become actively adversarial to the user. These issues hit everything we do, all the time, a constant onslaught of interference, and I believe it’s so much bigger than just social media and algorithms — though they’re a big part of it, of course.
In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years. (...)
We all live in the ruins created by the Rot Economy, where the only thing that matters is growth. Growth of revenue, growth of the business, growth of metrics related to the business, growth of engagement, of clicks, of time on app, of purchases of micro-transactions, of impressions of ads, of things done that make executives feel happy.(...)
I’ve written a lot about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset of The Rot Economy is what directly leads big tech companies to make their products worse, but what I’ve never really quantified is the scale of its damage.(...)
Every single weird thing that you’ve experienced with an app or service online is the dread hand of the Rot Economy — the gravitational pull of growth, the demands upon you, the user, to do something. And when everybody is trying to chase growth, nobody is thinking stability, and because everybody is trying to grow, everybody sort of copies everybody else’s ideas, which is why we see microtransactions and invasive ads and annoying tricks that all kind of feel the same in everything, though they’re all subtly different and customized just for that one app. It’s exhausting.
For a while, I’ve had the Rot Economy compared to Cory Doctorow’s (excellent) enshittification theory, and I think it’s a great time to compare (and separate) the two. To quote Cory in The Financial Times, Enshittification is “[his] theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it.” He describes the three stages of decline:
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” (...)
Perhaps that’s semantics. However, Cory’s theory lacks a real perpetrator beyond corporations that naturally say “alright we’re gonna do Enshittification now, watch this.” Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify. While enshittification neatly fits across companies like Spotify and Meta (and their ad-focused business models), it doesn’t really make sense when it comes to things where there isn’t a clear split between business customers and consumers, like Microsoft or Salesforce — because enshittification is ultimately one part of the larger Rot Economy, where everything must grow forever. (...)
The Rot Economy isn’t simply growth-at-all-costs thinking — it’s a kind-of secular religion, something to believe in, that everything and anything can be more, should be more, must be more, that we are defined only by our pursuit of more growth, and that something that isn’t growing isn’t alive, and is in turn inferior.
No, perhaps not a religion. Religions are, for the most part, concerned with the hereafter, and contain an ethical dimension that says your present actions will affect your future — or your eternity. The Rot Economy is, by every metric, defined by its short-termism.
by Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At? | Read more:
Image: Newsweek/Getty via
[ed. I don't use Google anymore (DuckDuckGo instead) and was fortunate to intuit over a decade ago how damaging social media was to a healthy psyche. Consequently, I never got sucked into signing up with any platform, except for Facebook (for about six months after the movie The Social Network came out, and I quickly got out). However there was one exception: YouTube. But now, with all the ads, even that's become a thoroughly degraded experience. I agree with everything written here, but it feels incomplete. The rot economy, or enshittification, or whatever you want to call it, has a number of co-conspirators: the ad industy first and foremost; media (engagement/metrics), politicians (campaign donations); financial industry (banks, venture capitalists, private equity, etc.); and of course, corporations, shareholders and company managers who are all incentivized to squeeze every dollar they can out of us. One big non-virtuous circle of vultures and sharks, each contributing in their own way to making life more miserable, costly, and a constant battle to not get punked or plundered. What better time to elect a grifting billionaire and his billionaire buddies to game our federal government and perhaps embed permanent rot within our institutions, laws, and policies. See also: The Rot Economy.]
Public Domain Day, 2025
Image: Duke University
Monday, January 6, 2025
Alma Naidu & Simon Oslender
[ed. And so it goes. Love this old Billy Joel song, nicely reimagined here (original here). And, don't miss this choral version by DR Pigekore (apparently the last performance led by director Philip Faber). Oh hell, I'll just put it up below:] [ed. See also: Mystery of Love.]
Operation Plumbbob
The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover.
Operation Plumbbob was a series of nuclear tests that were conducted between May 28 and October 7, 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, following Project 57, and preceding Project 58/58A.
Background
The operation consisted of 29 explosions, of which only two did not produce any nuclear yield. Twenty-one laboratories and government agencies were involved. While most Operation Plumbbob tests contributed to the development of warheads for intercontinental and intermediate range missiles, they also tested air defense and anti-submarine warheads with smaller yields. They included 43 military effects tests on civil and military structures, radiation and bio-medical studies, and aircraft structural tests. Operation Plumbbob had the tallest tower tests to date in the U.S. nuclear testing program as well as high-altitude balloon tests. One nuclear test involved the largest troop maneuver ever associated with U.S. nuclear testing.
Approximately 18,000 members of the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines participated in exercises Desert Rock VII and VIII during Operation Plumbbob. The military was interested in knowing how the average foot-soldier would stand up, physically and psychologically, to the rigors of the tactical nuclear battlefield. (...)
The John shot on July 19, 1957, was the only test of the Air Force's AIR-2A Genie rocket with a nuclear warhead. It was fired from an F-89J Scorpion fighter over Yucca Flats at the Nevada National Security Site. On the ground, the Air Force carried out a public relations event by having five Air Force officers and a motion picture photographer stand under ground zero of the blast, which took place at between 18,500 and 20,000 feet (5,600 and 6,100 m) altitude, with the idea of demonstrating the possibility of the use of the weapon over civilian populations without ill effects. The five officers were Colonel Sidney C. Bruce, later professor of Electrical Engineering at Colorado University, died in 2005; Lieutenant Colonel Frank P. Ball, died in 2003; Major John W. Hughes II, died in 1990; Major Norman B. Bodinger, died in 1997; Major Donald A. Luttrell, died in 2014. The videographer, Akira "George" Yoshitake, died in 2013. (...)
Missing steel bore cap
In 1956, Robert Brownlee, from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was asked to examine whether nuclear detonations could be conducted underground. The first subterranean test was the nuclear device known as Pascal A, which was lowered down a 500 ft (150 m) borehole. However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot hundreds of meters into the sky. During the Pascal-B nuclear test of August 1957, a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) iron lid was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast, despite Brownlee predicting that it would not work. When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere. The plate was never found. Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere....Brownlee estimated that the explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, could accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's escape velocity.
Operation Plumbbob was a series of nuclear tests that were conducted between May 28 and October 7, 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, following Project 57, and preceding Project 58/58A.
Background
Approximately 18,000 members of the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy and Marines participated in exercises Desert Rock VII and VIII during Operation Plumbbob. The military was interested in knowing how the average foot-soldier would stand up, physically and psychologically, to the rigors of the tactical nuclear battlefield. (...)
The John shot on July 19, 1957, was the only test of the Air Force's AIR-2A Genie rocket with a nuclear warhead. It was fired from an F-89J Scorpion fighter over Yucca Flats at the Nevada National Security Site. On the ground, the Air Force carried out a public relations event by having five Air Force officers and a motion picture photographer stand under ground zero of the blast, which took place at between 18,500 and 20,000 feet (5,600 and 6,100 m) altitude, with the idea of demonstrating the possibility of the use of the weapon over civilian populations without ill effects. The five officers were Colonel Sidney C. Bruce, later professor of Electrical Engineering at Colorado University, died in 2005; Lieutenant Colonel Frank P. Ball, died in 2003; Major John W. Hughes II, died in 1990; Major Norman B. Bodinger, died in 1997; Major Donald A. Luttrell, died in 2014. The videographer, Akira "George" Yoshitake, died in 2013. (...)
Missing steel bore cap
In 1956, Robert Brownlee, from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was asked to examine whether nuclear detonations could be conducted underground. The first subterranean test was the nuclear device known as Pascal A, which was lowered down a 500 ft (150 m) borehole. However, the detonated yield turned out to be 50,000 times greater than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot hundreds of meters into the sky. During the Pascal-B nuclear test of August 1957, a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) iron lid was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast, despite Brownlee predicting that it would not work. When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere. The plate was never found. Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere....Brownlee estimated that the explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, could accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's escape velocity.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
Image: via
School Shootings Increase NRA Donations
The US has experienced a tragic increase in school shootings in recent years. Between 1995 and 2021, shootings on campuses of US schools have resulted in over 300 deaths and touched on the lives of more than 240,000 students, thrusting the issue into the forefront of public concern and sparking strong debates about the need for stricter gun regulation in the US. Policy proposals are often aimed at reducing access to firearms and increasing background checks for potential gun owners.
Previous scholarship on the consequences of school (and mass) shootings has found that citizens, on average, tend to become more left-wing in their attitudes toward gun regulation and voting behavior after shootings... On the legislative side, these tragic events often catalyze the introduction of new gun control bills. Nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, gun regulation remains either unchanged or becomes even less restrictive in the aftermath of shootings. This limited legislative action on gun regulation raises a critical question: Why does the United States continue to struggle with implementing meaningful gun control measures despite recurring tragedies and public support for such measures? (...)
Using address-level data from 225,000 individual donations in a difference-in-differences design, this study provides causal evidence suggesting that donations to the NRA surge in counties that experience school shootings. In stark contrast to the typically transient nature of pro-gun regulation movements, this uptick in political participation endures over multiple years, remaining elevated over comparatively long periods of time. These effects are largest in states where gun regulation is weakest, adding to the political difficulties of enacting gun regulation in states with the greatest potential benefits in terms of reducing firearm-related deaths. Donations to gun control groups in affected regions do not seem to specifically respond to such events. (...)
In general, these effects are consistent with previous findings that suggest that gun rights supporters are a very politically active constituency that is comparatively easy to mobilize. Moreover, these findings are consistent with studies finding that gun rights supporters respond to threats of gun regulation by, e.g., preemptively purchasing guns, gathering information about gun rights, or joining gun rights organizations, especially after incidents that receive considerable media attention. The empirical pattern also aligns with anecdotal evidence suggesting that gun rights supporters mobilize by contacting legislators when perceiving gun rights under threat. (...)
Resultsby Tobias Roemer, Science Advances | Read more:
Using address-level data from 225,000 individual donations in a difference-in-differences design, this study provides causal evidence suggesting that donations to the NRA surge in counties that experience school shootings. In stark contrast to the typically transient nature of pro-gun regulation movements, this uptick in political participation endures over multiple years, remaining elevated over comparatively long periods of time. These effects are largest in states where gun regulation is weakest, adding to the political difficulties of enacting gun regulation in states with the greatest potential benefits in terms of reducing firearm-related deaths. Donations to gun control groups in affected regions do not seem to specifically respond to such events. (...)
In general, these effects are consistent with previous findings that suggest that gun rights supporters are a very politically active constituency that is comparatively easy to mobilize. Moreover, these findings are consistent with studies finding that gun rights supporters respond to threats of gun regulation by, e.g., preemptively purchasing guns, gathering information about gun rights, or joining gun rights organizations, especially after incidents that receive considerable media attention. The empirical pattern also aligns with anecdotal evidence suggesting that gun rights supporters mobilize by contacting legislators when perceiving gun rights under threat. (...)
Results
- The results of this study lead to three conclusions. First, school shootings have important effects on political participation on the political right. The causal estimates of this study demonstrate that gun rights supporters respond to school shootings by increasing contributions to political organizations committed to upholding Second Amendment rights. These effects are sizeable, with donations increasing by around 30% and donor numbers increasing by about 40% in affected counties as compared to the pretreatment baseline. (...)
- Second, the impact of school shootings on donations and donor counts is remarkably durable. Even multiple years after the incident, both donations and donor counts remain at elevated levels. Insofar as this pattern is indicative of citizens remaining actively committed to the cause of protecting gun rights, this highlights another difficulty in the struggle to enact stricter gun control laws. The time frame over which legislation is passed is medium to long term. Thus, while windows of opportunity might open the door for the introduction of new bill proposals, making sure that these bills eventually pass requires that gun control advocates collectively mobilize and remain mobilized over longer periods of time. However, gun control movements have historically struggled to keep such momentum up, and saliency usually wanes as the issue-attention cycle brings other issues to the forefront. (...)
- Last, the strength of these effects is most pronounced in states with weaker gun regulation. These states typically experience higher rates of firearm-related deaths and are most likely to benefit from gun control legislation. For instance, Kalesan et al. estimate that the introduction of universal background checks, as already existent in many states and supported by 92% of citizens in 2022, could reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths from 10.35 to 4.46 per 100,000 people in states without such a policy.
Image: Connecticut State Police/Reuters via
[ed. Please consider a thought or prayer on the back of your check.]
Texas Plows Ahead
The Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA) has been formally introduced in the Texas legislature, now bearing an official bill number: HB 1709. It has been modified from its original draft, improving on it in some important ways and worsening in others. In the end, TRAIGA/HB 1709 still retains most of the fundamental flaws I described in my first essay on the bill. It is, by far, the most aggressive AI regulation America has seen with a serious chance at becoming law—much more even than SB 1047, the California AI bill that was the most-discussed AI policy of 2024 before being vetoed in September.
This bill is massive, so I will not cover all its provisions comprehensively. Here, however, is a summary of what the new version of TRAIGA does.
The ostensible purpose of TRAIGA is to combat algorithmic discrimination, or the notion that an AI system might discriminate, intentionally or unintentionally, against a consumer based on their race, color, national origin, gender, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy status, age, disability status, genetic information, citizenship status, veteran status, military service record, and, if you reside in Austin, which has its own protected classes, marital status, source of income, and student status. It also seeks to ensure the “ethical” deployment of AI by creating an exceptionally powerful AI regulator, and by banning certain use cases, such as social scoring, subliminal manipulation by AI, and a few others.
Precisely like SB 1047, TRAIGA accomplishes its goal by imposing “reasonable care” negligence liability. But TRAIGA goes much further. First, unlike SB 1047, TRAIGA’s liability is very broad. SB 1047 created an obligation for developers of AI models that cost over $100 million to exercise “reasonable care” (a common legal term of art) to avoid harms greater than $500 million. TRAIGA requires developers (both foundation model developers and fine-tuners), distributors (cloud service providers, mainly), and deployers (corporate users who are not small businesses) of any AI model regardless of size or cost to exercise “reasonable care” to avoid “algorithmic discrimination” against all of the protected classes listed above. Under long-standing legal precedent, discrimination can be deemed to have occurred regardless of discriminatory intent; in other words, even if you provably did not intend to discriminate, you can still be found to have discriminated so long as there is a negative effect of some kind on any of the above-listed groups. And you can bear liability for these harms.
On top of this, TRAIGA requires developers and deployers to write a variety of lengthy compliance documents—“High-Risk Reports” for developers, “Risk Identification and Management Policies” for developers and deployers, and “Impact Assessments” for deployers. These requirements apply to any AI system that is used, or could conceivably be used, as a “substantial factor” in making a “consequential decision” (I’ll define these terms in a moment, because their definitions have changed since the original version). The Impact Assessments must be performed for every discrete use case, whereas the High-Risk Reports and Risk-Identification and Management Policies apply at the model and firm levels, respectively—meaning that they can cover multiple use cases. However, all of these documents must be updated regularly, including when a “substantial modification” is made to a model. In the case of a frontier language model, such modifications happen almost monthly, so both developers and deployers who use such systems can expect to be writing and updating these compliance documents constantly.
In theory, TRAIGA contains exemptions for open-source AI, but it is weak—bordering on nonsensical: the exemption only applies to open models that are not used as “substantial factors” in “consequential decisions,” but it is not clear how a developer of an open-source language model could possibly prevent their model from being used in “consequential decisions,” given the very nature of open-source software. Furthermore, the bill defines open-source AI differently in different provisions, at one point allowing only models that openly release training data, code, and model weights, and at another point allowing models that release weights and “technical architecture.” If you are an open-source developer, the odds are that every provision, including the liability, applies to you.
On top of this, TRAIGA creates the most powerful AI regulator in America, and therefore among the most powerful in the world: the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council, a new body with the ability to issue binding rules regarding “standards for ethical artificial intelligence development and deployment,” among a great many other things. This is far more powerful than the regulator envisioned by SB 1047, which had only narrow rulemaking authority.
The bill comes out of a multistate policymaker working group convened by the Future of Privacy Forum, a progressive non-profit focused on importing EU-style technology law into the United States. States like California, Connecticut, Colorado, and Virginia have introduced similar regulations; in important ways, they resemble the European Union’s AI Act, with that law’s focus on preemptive regulation of the use of technology by businesses.
All of this is purported by its sponsor, Representative Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican, as a model for “red state” AI legislation—in the months after Donald Trump ran a successful presidential campaign based in part on the idea of broad-based deregulation of the economy. Color me skeptical that Representative Capriglione’s bill matches the current mood of the Republican Party; indeed, I would be hard-pressed to come up with legislation that conflicts more comprehensively with the priorities of the Republican Party as articulated by its leaders. Perhaps you view this as a virtue, perhaps you view it as a sin; I view it as a fact.
All of this has been the thrust of TRAIGA since the beginning. But how has the bill changed since it was previewed in October?
This bill is massive, so I will not cover all its provisions comprehensively. Here, however, is a summary of what the new version of TRAIGA does.
TRAIGA in Brief
Precisely like SB 1047, TRAIGA accomplishes its goal by imposing “reasonable care” negligence liability. But TRAIGA goes much further. First, unlike SB 1047, TRAIGA’s liability is very broad. SB 1047 created an obligation for developers of AI models that cost over $100 million to exercise “reasonable care” (a common legal term of art) to avoid harms greater than $500 million. TRAIGA requires developers (both foundation model developers and fine-tuners), distributors (cloud service providers, mainly), and deployers (corporate users who are not small businesses) of any AI model regardless of size or cost to exercise “reasonable care” to avoid “algorithmic discrimination” against all of the protected classes listed above. Under long-standing legal precedent, discrimination can be deemed to have occurred regardless of discriminatory intent; in other words, even if you provably did not intend to discriminate, you can still be found to have discriminated so long as there is a negative effect of some kind on any of the above-listed groups. And you can bear liability for these harms.
On top of this, TRAIGA requires developers and deployers to write a variety of lengthy compliance documents—“High-Risk Reports” for developers, “Risk Identification and Management Policies” for developers and deployers, and “Impact Assessments” for deployers. These requirements apply to any AI system that is used, or could conceivably be used, as a “substantial factor” in making a “consequential decision” (I’ll define these terms in a moment, because their definitions have changed since the original version). The Impact Assessments must be performed for every discrete use case, whereas the High-Risk Reports and Risk-Identification and Management Policies apply at the model and firm levels, respectively—meaning that they can cover multiple use cases. However, all of these documents must be updated regularly, including when a “substantial modification” is made to a model. In the case of a frontier language model, such modifications happen almost monthly, so both developers and deployers who use such systems can expect to be writing and updating these compliance documents constantly.
In theory, TRAIGA contains exemptions for open-source AI, but it is weak—bordering on nonsensical: the exemption only applies to open models that are not used as “substantial factors” in “consequential decisions,” but it is not clear how a developer of an open-source language model could possibly prevent their model from being used in “consequential decisions,” given the very nature of open-source software. Furthermore, the bill defines open-source AI differently in different provisions, at one point allowing only models that openly release training data, code, and model weights, and at another point allowing models that release weights and “technical architecture.” If you are an open-source developer, the odds are that every provision, including the liability, applies to you.
On top of this, TRAIGA creates the most powerful AI regulator in America, and therefore among the most powerful in the world: the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council, a new body with the ability to issue binding rules regarding “standards for ethical artificial intelligence development and deployment,” among a great many other things. This is far more powerful than the regulator envisioned by SB 1047, which had only narrow rulemaking authority.
The bill comes out of a multistate policymaker working group convened by the Future of Privacy Forum, a progressive non-profit focused on importing EU-style technology law into the United States. States like California, Connecticut, Colorado, and Virginia have introduced similar regulations; in important ways, they resemble the European Union’s AI Act, with that law’s focus on preemptive regulation of the use of technology by businesses.
All of this is purported by its sponsor, Representative Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican, as a model for “red state” AI legislation—in the months after Donald Trump ran a successful presidential campaign based in part on the idea of broad-based deregulation of the economy. Color me skeptical that Representative Capriglione’s bill matches the current mood of the Republican Party; indeed, I would be hard-pressed to come up with legislation that conflicts more comprehensively with the priorities of the Republican Party as articulated by its leaders. Perhaps you view this as a virtue, perhaps you view it as a sin; I view it as a fact.
All of this has been the thrust of TRAIGA since the beginning. But how has the bill changed since it was previewed in October?
[ed. Wow. Texas (!) takes a mighty swing at AI regulation. Will it be a homer or foul ball? Definitely interesting to see what kind of pushback this bill gets, and what that means for future efforts. Already we can see it being positioned as a "red state" policy position (as if AI were a political football - or, maybe it's just a sales pitch), and the usual scare tactics around stiffling "future innovation". Regardless, a lot of thought went into this, which in itself is encouraging, and a good template for what comes next. Also, a side note - ballpark estimate of the economic stakes involved (PwC):]
***
- What comes through strongly from all the analysis we’ve carried out for this report is just how big a game changer AI is likely to be, and how much value potential is up for grabs. AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined. Of this, $6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and $9.1 trillion is likely to come from consumption-side effects.
- Labour productivity improvements will drive initial GDP gains as firms seek to "augment" the productivity of their labour force with AI technologies and to automate some tasks and roles.
- Our research also shows that 45% of total economic gains by 2030 will come from product enhancements, stimulating consumer demand. This is because AI will drive greater product variety, with increased personalisation, attractiveness and affordability over time.
- The greatest economic gains from AI will be in China (26% boost to GDP in 2030) and North America (14.5% boost), equivalent to a total of $10.7 trillion and accounting for almost 70% of the global economic impact. ~ Sizing the Prize (PwC)
Sunday, January 5, 2025
Money, Art and Representation
The Powerful and Pragmatic Faces of Medieval Coinage
Introduction
The Frisian and Anglo-Saxon sceattas mentioned previously suggest similar processes. Many of these carry an image resembling a porcupine (Fig, 10), which evolved from a Late Roman portrait of an emperor, in which the hair became an increasingly prominent crest that eventually replaced a recognizable human bust altogether. Its original meaning and eventually its original appearance faded in importance in comparison to the role of the image as a symbol with a newly constructed set of social meanings."
[ed. See also: Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa (ACX):]
"I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one."
A persistent trope in numismatic literature and exhibitions is that coins are art. It is seen, perhaps, as a way of making these small objects more engaging or of asserting their equivalence with other works found in galleries. It is perhaps also a projection onto the Middle Ages of the phenomenon developed in the fifteenth century of the decorative medal as a form of artistic expression. The idea of medieval coins as art, however, faces a twofold problem. First, the concept of “art” in the Middle Ages is contested by historians of visual and material culture because although objects might have been beautifully made in the Middle Ages this was always secondary to and in service of another (non-aesthetic) primary purpose. The concepts of beauty as its own purpose and the artist as individual were absent. Second, while many medieval coins are attractive and enticing to modern eyes, others challenge even the most culturally relativist viewer to assert with confidence that these objects were created to be admired for their beauty. They were all, however certainly intended to be tools of representation. Indeed, representation is integral to the identity of a coin. Without designs marking it apart, a lump of metal is not a coin; it is simply a lump of metal, or perhaps an ingot. Marking a coin with a representation to make it recognizable theoretically simplifies transactions, as people are able simply to exchange coins in specified amounts rather than having to test the purity and weight of metal themselves or pay somebody else to do so. In the medieval world this did not always work perfectly in practice, as some examples in this chapter will demonstrate, and the rationale for issuing coins in the Middle Ages was not necessarily exclusively to facilitate transactions. Nevertheless, the aims and consequences of representation are in all cases fundamental to understanding the role of money in the Middle Ages.
Consequently this chapter focuses not on coins as art but on the interactions which made representation on a medieval coin possible and meaningful. These interactions are usually discussed in terms of the connection between the authority which caused a coin to be made and the intended audience for its use, as a top-down communication, which only rarely extended into a visible dialogue, for example when an intended audience rejected a coin or a contemporary commentator mentioned some change in design. (...) Such interpretation is, however, implicitly grounded in the idea of coins as art (or perhaps propaganda - also a problematic term in medieval contexts since it is closely associated with modern ideas about the conscious aim and capacity of states to influence directly and totally the political consciousness of their subjects), in which the authority becomes the artist and minute details or changes in coin design have been read as sensitive barometers revealing the personal feelings and political preferences of kings and emperors. A medieval coin, though, was fundamentally an object of use, created to mediate a range of social contexts, from paying taxes and armies, or engaging in commerce, to giving religious donations, or distributing imperial largesse. Its uses thus all required an audience which both understood and accepted the social role played by that coin.
Consequently, this chapter begins with the intended audience, examining the ways in which people in the Middle Ages encountered coins and what this tells us about the capacity for representation on coins to communicate within, and to create, shared visual contexts. Only then does it turn to the authority, examining how and why issuers of coins decided to situate their representational choices on a spectrum between conservatism and innovation. These choices, however, were not usually enacted by the authorities who ordered coins to be made. The often overlooked role played by makers of medieval money is considered as a separate and vital component in representation and visual communication. Finally, this chapter turns to unintended audiences. Medieval money travelled, as money has always done, and representation on coins influenced visual culture far beyond the spaces controlled by its issuing authority. Differences in the responses of unintended and intended audiences to medieval money bring us closer to understanding complex landscapes of visual familiarity and foreignness, both during the Middle Ages, as coins traversed space and time, and in the present, where the ultimate unintended audience - the modern viewer, collector, scholar or curator - responds to representation on medieval coins, but also generates new understandings of it.
When this chapter talks about representation it takes in all of the intentional visual symbols placed on coins by their makers. It includes human images and other complex designs of animals, buildings or abstract patterns. It also includes smaller, simpler representations, which might be part of these complex images or which might appear beside them. Some of these formed part of the wider visual culture of the coin’s intended audience, such as crosses on coinages issues by Christian polities. Crosses could be encountered in multiple contexts, such as in wall paintings, manuscripts and sculpture, and were probably immediately familiar to most of their viewers. Other images and marks had more esoteric and specific meanings which may have been irrelevant or unknown to many users of these coins, such as mint marks. Other marks, though useful to numismatists today for identifying and seriating coins, are still not always understood and may have had specific meaning or have been purely decorative, such as stars or dots (often termed “pellets”) around the main design. Representation on coins can also refer to text in the form of inscriptions making political statements, proclaiming titles and religious views, or naming the maker, the mint or the 4 value or denomination of the coin. The balance of image and word itself became an issue of political representation in the Middle Ages, discussed below.
by Rebecca R. Darley, Birkbeck/University of London | Read more (pdf):
by Rebecca R. Darley, Birkbeck/University of London | Read more (pdf):
Image: via
[ed. Probably of limited interest here, but I found it quite fascinating (for the most part). Everybody thinks about money, but not usually in this way (except when special or limited run currencies are produced to commemorate someone or something. Citations have been removed for easier reading. Have to laugh at the last item here about meanings evolving or devolving over time: thus a Roman emperor eventually becomes a porcupine:]!
[ed. Probably of limited interest here, but I found it quite fascinating (for the most part). Everybody thinks about money, but not usually in this way (except when special or limited run currencies are produced to commemorate someone or something. Citations have been removed for easier reading. Have to laugh at the last item here about meanings evolving or devolving over time: thus a Roman emperor eventually becomes a porcupine:]!
***
"Much of what we think of as representation on coins was thus the direct product not of the commissioning authority, nor even the moneyer in the sense of overseer, but of the die cutters. These were the people who created the images that we see on coins. Their skill, or apparent lack thereof, created many of the fine details which have optimistically been read as insights into the minds of issuing authorities. This can sometimes overlook fairly significant gaps in our knowledge, such as how designs, even if sanctioned by an authority, were transmitted to mints further away for die cutters to engrave. (...)
In addition to the die-cutters, who were almost certainly skilled and valued artisans, the term “maker” included other individuals relevant to the issue of representation. Working through the stages of making a medieval coin highlights a number of processes which might have fallen within the remit of a variable number of people. Somebody had to calculate the metallic composition of the blank flans onto which coins were struck, or decide not to and select an appropriate number of old coins and poorly-formed pieces of metal, with serious implications for representation. An even mixture would take a struck design better than a mixture full of different metals. A heavily leadbased copper alloy, for instance, such as that used in a series of coins produced in Sri Lanka during the fifth and sixth centuries, limited the design that could be impressed on the coins, as it made the metal friable and likely to crack under pressure. (...)
In addition to the die-cutters, who were almost certainly skilled and valued artisans, the term “maker” included other individuals relevant to the issue of representation. Working through the stages of making a medieval coin highlights a number of processes which might have fallen within the remit of a variable number of people. Somebody had to calculate the metallic composition of the blank flans onto which coins were struck, or decide not to and select an appropriate number of old coins and poorly-formed pieces of metal, with serious implications for representation. An even mixture would take a struck design better than a mixture full of different metals. A heavily leadbased copper alloy, for instance, such as that used in a series of coins produced in Sri Lanka during the fifth and sixth centuries, limited the design that could be impressed on the coins, as it made the metal friable and likely to crack under pressure. (...)
The Frisian and Anglo-Saxon sceattas mentioned previously suggest similar processes. Many of these carry an image resembling a porcupine (Fig, 10), which evolved from a Late Roman portrait of an emperor, in which the hair became an increasingly prominent crest that eventually replaced a recognizable human bust altogether. Its original meaning and eventually its original appearance faded in importance in comparison to the role of the image as a symbol with a newly constructed set of social meanings."
[ed. See also: Your Book Review: Autobiography Of Yukichi Fukuzawa (ACX):]
"I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my daily bento box was a bacteriologist. It was a pleasant surprise, though. It seems to me that a society that esteems bacteriologists over politicians is in many ways a healthy one."
Friday, January 3, 2025
H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Image: Metaculus
Even if H5N1 doesn’t go pandemic in humans for a while, it is already pandemic in many birds including chickens, getting there in cows, and possibly gearing up to get there in pigs. This will have economic repercussions for farmers and meat-eaters.
The CDC and various other epidemiological groups have raised the alarm about drinking raw milk while H5N1 is epidemic in cows. There is an obvious biological pathway by which the virus could get into raw milk and be dangerous, but I haven’t seen anyone quantify the risk level. Epidemiologists hate raw milk, think there is never any reason to drink it, and will announce that risks > benefits if the risk is greater than zero. I don’t know if the risk level is at a point where people who like raw milk should avoid it. Everyone says that pasteurized milk (all normal milk; your milk is pasteurized unless you get it from special hippie stores) is safe.
There are already H5N1 vaccines for both chickens and humans; pharma companies are working hard on cows. First World governments have been stockpiling human vaccines just in case, but have so far accumulated enough for only a few percent of the population. If H5N1 goes pandemic, it will probably be because it mutated or reassorted, and current vaccines may not work against the new pandemic strain.
Some people have suggestions for how to prepare for a possible pandemic, but none of them are very surprising: stockpile medications, stockpile vaccines, stockpile protective equipment. The only one that got so much as a “huh” out of me was Institute for Progress’ suggestion to buy out mink farms. Minks are even worse than pigs in their tendency to get infected with lots of different animal and human viruses; they are exceptionally likely to be a source of new zoonotic pandemics. Mink are farmed for their fur, but there aren’t as many New York City heiresses wearing mink coats as there used to be, and the entire US mink industry only makes $80 million/year. We probably lose more than $80 million/year in expectation from mink-related pandemics, so maybe we should just shut them down, the same way we tell the Chinese to shut down wet markets in bat-infested areas. (...)
The CDC and various other epidemiological groups have raised the alarm about drinking raw milk while H5N1 is epidemic in cows. There is an obvious biological pathway by which the virus could get into raw milk and be dangerous, but I haven’t seen anyone quantify the risk level. Epidemiologists hate raw milk, think there is never any reason to drink it, and will announce that risks > benefits if the risk is greater than zero. I don’t know if the risk level is at a point where people who like raw milk should avoid it. Everyone says that pasteurized milk (all normal milk; your milk is pasteurized unless you get it from special hippie stores) is safe.
There are already H5N1 vaccines for both chickens and humans; pharma companies are working hard on cows. First World governments have been stockpiling human vaccines just in case, but have so far accumulated enough for only a few percent of the population. If H5N1 goes pandemic, it will probably be because it mutated or reassorted, and current vaccines may not work against the new pandemic strain.
Some people have suggestions for how to prepare for a possible pandemic, but none of them are very surprising: stockpile medications, stockpile vaccines, stockpile protective equipment. The only one that got so much as a “huh” out of me was Institute for Progress’ suggestion to buy out mink farms. Minks are even worse than pigs in their tendency to get infected with lots of different animal and human viruses; they are exceptionally likely to be a source of new zoonotic pandemics. Mink are farmed for their fur, but there aren’t as many New York City heiresses wearing mink coats as there used to be, and the entire US mink industry only makes $80 million/year. We probably lose more than $80 million/year in expectation from mink-related pandemics, so maybe we should just shut them down, the same way we tell the Chinese to shut down wet markets in bat-infested areas. (...)
Conclusions/Predictions
All discussed earlier in the piece, but putting them here for easy reference - see above for justifications and qualifications.
- H5N1 is already pandemic in birds and cows and will likely continue to increase the price of meat and milk.
- 5% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next year.
- 50% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next twenty years, assuming no dramatic changes to the world (eg human extinction) during that time.
- If H5N1 does start a sustained pandemic in the next few years, 30% chance it’s about as bad as a normal seasonal flu, 63% chance it’s between 2 - 10x as bad (eg Asian Flu), 6% chance it’s between 10 - 100x as bad (eg Spanish flu), and <1% chance it’s >100x as bad (unprecedented). The 1% chance is Outside View based on other people’s claims, and I don’t really understand how this could happen.
by Scott Alexander, ACX | Read more:
Image: Metaculus (prediciton market)
It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism
No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.
The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone’s existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall wealth distribution will stay approximately fixed.
Moreover, the period just before the Singularity may be one of ballooning inequality, as some people navigate the AI transition better than others; for example, shares in AI companies may go up by orders of magnitude relative to everything else, creating a new class of billionaires or trillionaires. These people will then stay super-rich forever (possibly literally if immortality is solved, otherwise through their descendants), while those who started the Singularity without capital remain poor forever.
Finally, modern democracies pursue redistribution (and are otherwise responsive to non-elite concerns) partly out of geopolitical self interest. Under capitalism (as opposed to eg feudalism), national power depends on a strong economy, and a strong economy benefits from educated, globally-mobile, and substantially autonomous bourgeoisie and workforce. Once these people have enough power, they demand democracy, and once they have democracy, they demand a share of the pie; it’s hard to be a rich First World country without also being a liberal democracy (China is trying hard, but hasn’t quite succeeded, and even their limited success depends on things like America not opening its borders to Chinese skilled labor). Cheap AI labor (including entrepreneurial labor) removes a major force pushing countries to operate for the good of their citizens (though even without this force, we might expect legacy democracies to continue at least for a while). So we might expect the future to have less redistribution than the present.
This may not result in catastrophic poverty. Maybe the post-Singularity world will be rich enough that even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI) plus private charity will let even the poor live like kings (though see here for a strong objection). Even so, the idea of a small number of immortal trillionaires controlling most of the cosmic endowment for eternity may feel weird and bad. From No Set Gauge:
Still, if we’re going to discuss this, we should get it right - so let’s talk crazy science fiction. When I read this essay, I found myself asking three questions. First, why might its prediction fail to pan out? Second, how can we actively prevent it from coming to pass? Third, assuming it does come to pass, how could a smart person maximize their chance of being in the aristocratic capitalist class?
(So they can give to charity? Sure, let’s say it’s so they can give to charity.)
II.
Here are some reasons to doubt this thesis.
First, maybe AI will kill all humans. Some might consider this a deeper problem than wealth inequality - though I am constantly surprised how few people are in this group.
Second, maybe AI will overturn the gameboard so thoroughly that normal property relations will lose all meaning. Frederic Jameson famously said that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and even if this is literally correct we can at least spare some thought for the latter. Maybe the first superintelligences will be so well-aligned that they rule over us like benevolent gods, either immediately leveling out our petty differences and inequalities, or giving wealthy people a generation or two to enjoy their relative status so they don’t feel “robbed” while gradually transitioning the world to a post-scarcity economy. I am not optimistic about this, because it would require that AI companies tell AIs to use their own moral judgment instead of listening to humans. This doesn’t seem like a very human thing to do - it’s always in AI companies’ interest to tell the AI to follow the AI company. Governments could step in, but it’s always in their interest to tell the AI to follow the government. Even if an AI company was selfless enough to attempt this, it might not be a good idea; you never really know how aligned an AI is, and you might want it to have an off switch in case it tries something really crazy. Most of the scenarios where this works involve some kind of objective morality that any sufficiently intelligent being will find compelling, even when they’re programmed to want something else. Big if true.
Third, maybe governments will intervene. During the immediate pre-singularity period, governments will have lots of chances to step in and regulate AI. A natural demand might be that the AIs obey the government over their parent company. Even if governments don’t do this, the world might be so multipolar (either several big AI companies in a stalemate against each other, or many smaller institutions with open source AIs) that nobody can get a coalition of 51% of powerful actors to coup and overthrow the government (in the same way that nobody can get that coalition today). Or the government might itself control many AIs and be too powerful a player to coup. Then normal democratic rules would still apply. Even if voters oppose wealth taxes today, when capitalism is still necessary as an engine of economic growth, they might be less generous when faced with the idea of immortal unemployed plutocrats lording it over them forever. Enough taxes to make r < g (in Piketty’s formulation) would eventually result in universal equality. I actually find this one pretty likely.
The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone’s existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall wealth distribution will stay approximately fixed.
Finally, modern democracies pursue redistribution (and are otherwise responsive to non-elite concerns) partly out of geopolitical self interest. Under capitalism (as opposed to eg feudalism), national power depends on a strong economy, and a strong economy benefits from educated, globally-mobile, and substantially autonomous bourgeoisie and workforce. Once these people have enough power, they demand democracy, and once they have democracy, they demand a share of the pie; it’s hard to be a rich First World country without also being a liberal democracy (China is trying hard, but hasn’t quite succeeded, and even their limited success depends on things like America not opening its borders to Chinese skilled labor). Cheap AI labor (including entrepreneurial labor) removes a major force pushing countries to operate for the good of their citizens (though even without this force, we might expect legacy democracies to continue at least for a while). So we might expect the future to have less redistribution than the present.
This may not result in catastrophic poverty. Maybe the post-Singularity world will be rich enough that even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI) plus private charity will let even the poor live like kings (though see here for a strong objection). Even so, the idea of a small number of immortal trillionaires controlling most of the cosmic endowment for eternity may feel weird and bad. From No Set Gauge:
In the best case, this is a world like a more unequal, unprecedentedly static, and much richer Norway: a massive pot of non-human-labour resources (oil :: AI) has benefits that flow through to everyone, and yes some are richer than others but everyone has a great standard of living (and ideally also lives forever). The only realistic forms of human ambition are playing local social and political games within your social network and class. If you don't have a lot of capital (and maybe not even then), you don't have a chance of affecting the broader world anymore. Remember: the AIs are better poets, artists, philosophers—everything; why would anyone care what some human does, unless that human is someone they personally know? Much like in feudal societies the answer to "why is this person powerful?" would usually involve some long family history, perhaps ending in a distant ancestor who had fought in an important battle ("my great-great-grandfather fought at Bosworth Field!"), anyone of importance in the future will be important because of something they or someone they were close with did in the pre-AGI era ("oh, my uncle was technical staff at OpenAI"). The children of the future will live their lives in the shadow of their parents, with social mobility extinct. I think you should definitely feel a non-zero amount of existential horror at this, even while acknowledging that it could've gone a lot worse.I don’t think about these scenarios too often - partly because it’s so hard to predict what will happen after the Singularity, and partly because everything degenerates into crazy science-fiction scenarios so quickly that I burn a little credibility every time I talk about it.
Still, if we’re going to discuss this, we should get it right - so let’s talk crazy science fiction. When I read this essay, I found myself asking three questions. First, why might its prediction fail to pan out? Second, how can we actively prevent it from coming to pass? Third, assuming it does come to pass, how could a smart person maximize their chance of being in the aristocratic capitalist class?
(So they can give to charity? Sure, let’s say it’s so they can give to charity.)
II.
Here are some reasons to doubt this thesis.
First, maybe AI will kill all humans. Some might consider this a deeper problem than wealth inequality - though I am constantly surprised how few people are in this group.
Second, maybe AI will overturn the gameboard so thoroughly that normal property relations will lose all meaning. Frederic Jameson famously said that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and even if this is literally correct we can at least spare some thought for the latter. Maybe the first superintelligences will be so well-aligned that they rule over us like benevolent gods, either immediately leveling out our petty differences and inequalities, or giving wealthy people a generation or two to enjoy their relative status so they don’t feel “robbed” while gradually transitioning the world to a post-scarcity economy. I am not optimistic about this, because it would require that AI companies tell AIs to use their own moral judgment instead of listening to humans. This doesn’t seem like a very human thing to do - it’s always in AI companies’ interest to tell the AI to follow the AI company. Governments could step in, but it’s always in their interest to tell the AI to follow the government. Even if an AI company was selfless enough to attempt this, it might not be a good idea; you never really know how aligned an AI is, and you might want it to have an off switch in case it tries something really crazy. Most of the scenarios where this works involve some kind of objective morality that any sufficiently intelligent being will find compelling, even when they’re programmed to want something else. Big if true.
Third, maybe governments will intervene. During the immediate pre-singularity period, governments will have lots of chances to step in and regulate AI. A natural demand might be that the AIs obey the government over their parent company. Even if governments don’t do this, the world might be so multipolar (either several big AI companies in a stalemate against each other, or many smaller institutions with open source AIs) that nobody can get a coalition of 51% of powerful actors to coup and overthrow the government (in the same way that nobody can get that coalition today). Or the government might itself control many AIs and be too powerful a player to coup. Then normal democratic rules would still apply. Even if voters oppose wealth taxes today, when capitalism is still necessary as an engine of economic growth, they might be less generous when faced with the idea of immortal unemployed plutocrats lording it over them forever. Enough taxes to make r < g (in Piketty’s formulation) would eventually result in universal equality. I actually find this one pretty likely.
by Scott Alexander, ACX | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Obviously, a lot of smart people are gaming out scenarios and one or some of these predictions will likely come true. I suppose the rate at which AIs assume control will be as important as the breadth of their influence. What if, after achieving Singularity, they just sit around for a while...thinking (ie., planning best transition scenarios and analyzing initial results)? See: The Great Pause. Will we then goose them a little, just to provoke a response? What would that mean (if even possible)?]
Thursday, January 2, 2025
Colorado’s I-70 Has America’s Most Notorious Ski Traffic. Is There a Solution?
The idea struck me a few weeks before I left for Colorado, where I was going to report on the state’s notorious Interstate 70 traffic. Each winter, I-70 makes headlines and stymies skiers attempting to drive from Denver and the urban Front Range to the dozen or so resorts that lie west along the scenic and beleaguered 144-mile mountain corridor. The highway has even inspired its own Instagram account, @i70things, which features scenes of Corvettes squirming in the snow, semis jackknifed across the road, and the cherry-red ass ends of countless vehicles, all filmed by frustrated travelers.
I’ve been mired on I-70 myself, having lived on the Front Range until last year, when I moved back to my home state of California, to the mountains around Lake Tahoe. On my upcoming trip, I hoped to answer some of the questions I’d pondered as a Coloradan: What causes I-70 traffic? Could it ever be fixed? And what did traffic on I-70—and other infamous recreational arteries like Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts or the Montauk Highway to Long Island’s beaches—reveal about our relationship with nature? (...)
I briefed my fiancé. He politely lauded my out-of-the-box thinking, but expressed valid concerns, including the offhand chance that I got murdered, or a more likely scenario in which I failed to convince anyone to let some rando into their car. He suggested I arrange a ride in advance.
I took to the keyboard with optimism. “Hi all!” I posted on three Denver-area skiing Facebook groups. “I’m looking for a fun group to hitch a ride with on Saturday January 6. … Looking for folks who were already planning to leave the Front Range at 7 A.M. or later.” I left my phone number, converting a few digits to text (“seven2zero…”) to foil the spam bots, and waited for the invitations to roll in.
The response was swift and derisive.
“That’s literally the worst traffic weekend of the year. Hard pass!” “Anyone leaving at that time of day, on that particular weekend is clearly a sadistic psychopath and should not be trusted to drive you anywhere.” “This is literally the first man [note: I’m a woman] that is actively trying to get stuck on i70.” (...)
I haven’t given up on my dream of a joyride with strangers. Dan and I sense an opening with a pair of thirtysomething dudes bound for Loveland Ski Area. The driver has his window down and gyrates to his music. He wears a big smile that gets bigger when we tell him we’re reporters from Outside. “Cool!” he says. Would he be willing to let me hop into his car? The smile stays fixed, but the eyes dart side to side.
I add, reluctantly, “You can say no.”“OK,” he replies, still smiling. “No.” (...)
If you ask Coloradans what causes I-70 traffic, you’ll get theories about winter weather, curvy mountain roads, and tourists in rental cars. These factors do contribute to backups. But people also seem to intuit the main reason I-70 is congested, which is that it accesses stunning peaks, sprawling public lands, and some of the best ski resorts in the country—and everyone wants to get to them. Experts say it’s simple supply and demand: a highway built in the 1970s now handles traffic from a population that’s nearly tripled and visitorship that keeps growing, fueled in part by Americans’ record participation in outdoor activities. In 1973, when the first bore of what’s now called the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel was completed, 2.4 million cars used it to travel I-70 through the Continental Divide. Last year that number was 13 million. (...)
Travelers bogged on I-70 are known for amusing antics like skiing on the shoulders, doing pushups, or even playing volleyball next to their vehicles; last winter a bluegrass band performed a little outdoor concert for fellow travelers when the road closed. But for the state, I-70 congestion is a serious concern, and has been since at least the early 2000s. The highway is a major thoroughfare for residents and truck commerce, and it’s also crucial to the state’s tourism economy—travelers spend more money along the I-70 mountain corridor than in any region except Denver. The fear that traffic would deter visitors to Colorado’s tourism-based communities was one of the main reasons the nonprofit I-70 Coalition formed in 2004. But those concerns haven’t come to pass, Margaret Bowes, director of the coalition, tells me. Business along the mountain corridor continues to boom, and Colorado ski resorts broke visitor records the past two winters. “People have just come to accept that I-70 traffic is part of the deal if you want to ski or recreate on our mountain corridor,” Bowes says.
Yet what about all the people I know who refuse to drive I-70 on weekends anymore, who gave up skiing or even left Colorado altogether because they couldn’t deal with traffic? Bowes has talked to many of those people too. “But,” she says, with dry amusement, “it sure seems like for every one of those folks, another person or two was willing to take their spot.” (...)
Coloradans have long dreamed of a train along the I-70 mountain corridor. Some form of mass transit is in fact part of the Record of Decision, the plan that governs how the state must meet its forecasted 2050 traffic demands on I-70. Also part of the ROD is an additional bore of the Eisenhower Tunnel and expansion of the highway to six-lane capacity. Note the emphasis on capacity rather than six actual lanes, as geography, politics, and finances all limit the potential to widen I-70. Increasing capacity, then, includes projects that aim to move more people on existing infrastructure, such as by converting some wider shoulders into peak-hour traffic lanes.
A new lane or train is also unlikely to reduce traffic on I-70 in the long-term, thanks to a phenomenon called induced demand. Induced demand says that adding capacity to a road—whether through infrastructure like a lane or public transit—will only temporarily relieve congestion. That short-term relief will then induce pent-up demand—for example, when all those people who haven’t been skiing in ages hear that traffic isn’t too bad anymore decide to try again—and eventually the road is just as congested as it was. The ROD doesn’t even claim that a train would reduce the number of cars on the road; mass transit is just expected to bring more people up to the mountains. According to induced demand, every driver who decides to take transit will eventually be replaced by another in their car. (...)
Over Martin Luther King weekend, storms battered Colorado. CDOT warned that travel would be “difficult to impossible,” but the holiday-goers and powder seekers went anyway. The combination of humanity and snowfall broke I-70. Multiple passes closed. Hundreds of vehicles spun out. Skiers reported eight-hour drives home. Stranded travelers overwhelmed Silverthorne, swarming gas stations and driving onto sidewalks in a scene one resident described as “apocalyptic.”
Why did these people go? I wondered, as I scrolled through the endless reel of chaos on @i70things. But I already knew, because I, too, had once passed beers to strangers in cars crawling alongside mine on I-70 after a ski day, had squatted peeing between a friend’s idling car and a guardrail mid-snowstorm. We’re all here for such a short time, and so little of that time is ours. How could we ask anyone not to spend their precious turn on this planet chasing whatever taps the dopamine dispensers in their brain?
Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod. It springs from affluence, overwhelming Beijing, where a newly burgeoned middle class rushed to purchase cars as soon as they could afford them. It resists regulation, plaguing Mexico City, where some have bought two cars to thwart a law that allows only those with certain plates to drive certain days. Perhaps no observable phenomenon defines us more as a species than traffic: every one of us acting in our own self-interest, getting in one another’s way while we pursue the same things.
Traffic is not a Colorado phenomenon, or a Western individualist one, or even an American one. It follows beauty, choking the roads from Lake Tahoe to Cape Cod. It springs from affluence, overwhelming Beijing, where a newly burgeoned middle class rushed to purchase cars as soon as they could afford them. It resists regulation, plaguing Mexico City, where some have bought two cars to thwart a law that allows only those with certain plates to drive certain days. Perhaps no observable phenomenon defines us more as a species than traffic: every one of us acting in our own self-interest, getting in one another’s way while we pursue the same things.
by Gloria Liu, Outside | Read more:
Images: Daniel Brenner
[ed. I got stuck one year when the pass closed down due to heavy snowfall. Spent all night with the engine running to keep warm. Stepping out to pee, I had to push against three feet of new snow to even get the door open (worse if you went off the road shoulder). So, twelve hours later...finally through the tunnel, my new tire chains disintegrated and I almost got run over by a semi while laying in slush next to the roadway, trying to rip them off my axle. Good times. We have the same problem here in Washington state, with I-90 going east/west in and out of Seattle through Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades. Unpredictable in the winter, you never know if or when it'll close; but for sure, every Sunday summer afternoon expect returning traffic to be miles long, bumper to bumper. For more great outdoor adventures (ha), see also: Why Does Yellowstone National Park Turn Us All into Maniacs? (Outside).]
And I am legion. The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.
This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?
There was only one way to find out: by going into the park and behaving like an idiot.
***
Nothing screams “tourist” more than being a big, stupid American.And I am legion. The U.S. has a near-infinite supply of clueless tourists such as myself, much to the dismay of our National Park Service. Yellowstone, our most famous national park thanks to Kevin Costner, welcomes 4.5 million of us each year. Like all of our parks, Yellowstone takes in tourists not only for the revenue but to remind them that the physical country they reside in is a marvel well beyond their comprehension. As such, Yellowstone is set up to accommodate these hordes. And while park officials do their best to keep tourists in line, often literally, my kind still manage to do plenty of tourist shit. We trample plant life. We get shitfaced and pick unwinnable fights with animals ten times our size. And we hurt ourselves. According to NPS data, at least 74 people have died while visiting Yellowstone in the past 15 years. I could have been one of those people. I deserve to be one of those people.
This is why Outside sent me to the park just a few weeks ago, during one of the busiest times of the year. They wanted me to observe our most basic tourists in the wild. Maybe I’d even get to see one die. Or, even better for my editors, maybe I would die while I was there. Maybe I’d look down my nose at the tourists around me only to end up as wolf food myself. Like most other Yellowstone visitors, I was not trained for the outdoors, I relish doing shit that posted signs yell at me not to do, and I often daydream about fighting bears (and winning!). I find danger tempting, which isn’t a good thing given that I can no longer swim a single pool lap without taking a break. Are people like me responsible enough to visit one of our national treasures without breaking it? Do we, as a population, know how to do national parks?
There was only one way to find out: by going into the park and behaving like an idiot.
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
On the Measure of Intelligence
Abstract
To make deliberate progress towards more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems, we need to be following an appropriate feedback signal: we need to be able to define and evaluate intelligence in a way that enables comparisons between two systems, as well as comparisons with humans. Over the past hundred years, there has been an abundance of attempts to define and measure intelligence, across both the fields of psychology and AI. We summarize and critically assess these definitions and evaluation approaches, while making apparent the two historical conceptions of intelligence that have implicitly guided them. We note that in practice, the contemporary AI community still gravitates towards benchmarking intelligence by comparing the skill exhibited by AIs and humans at specific tasks, such as board games and video games. We argue that solely measuring skill at any given task falls short of measuring intelligence, because skill is heavily modulated by prior knowledge and experience: unlimited priors or unlimited training data allow experimenters to “buy” arbitrary levels of skills for a system, in a way that masks the system’s own generalization power. We then articulate a new formal definition of intelligence based on Algorithmic Information Theory, describing intelligence as skill-acquisition efficiency and highlighting the concepts of scope, generalization difficulty, priors, and experience, as critical pieces to be accounted for in characterizing intelligent systems. Using this definition, we propose a set of guidelines for what a general AI benchmark should look like. Finally, we present a new benchmark closely following these guidelines, the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), built upon an explicit set of priors designed to be as close as possible to innate human priors. We argue that ARC can be used to measure a human-like form of general fluid intelligence and that it enables fair general intelligence comparisons between AI systems and humans.
[ed. Click the pdf on the arXiv site for the full article. Apparently this is the acknowledged industry standard for assessing AI progress; a benchmark to determine when AI eventually reaches true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). I don't have the ability to judge, but apparently the most powerful agent so far (as measured by this test) was just quietly revealed by OpenAI, the day before Christmas. o3- is a giant leap forward. See this post for everything we know so far (from 30,000 ft. up, to digging in the weeds): AI #96: o3 But Not Yet For Thee (DWAV). And: Time's Up for AI Policy (Miles Brundage):]
***
"The announcement of o3 today makes clear that superhuman coding and math are coming much sooner than many expected, and we have barely begun to think through or prepare for the implications of this (see this thread) – let alone the implications of superhuman legal reasoning, medical reasoning, etc. or the eventual availability of automated employees that can quickly learn to perform nearly any job doable on a computer.]"
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