Call Me Ishmael

It seems that the Trump administration needed to learn the Russians are aggressive, expansionist, and casually homicidal. This, apparently, is a new realization. So, in fairness, the Americans allowed Putin to default to the better angels of his nature. And Putin has defined himself. Now...?

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And what will the holier-than-thou Europeans say other than "Uh oh?"

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So now the Americans must manage several problems for the diffident world: the bellicose Russians, the potential life-extinguishing threat in the psychotic Middle East, the dangerous China hermit and its quest for cultural affirmation--all with a debt of $36 trillion. The good news is our deficit is only two trillion dollars in this year's budget.

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Call Me Ishmael

Bad news; one million monkeys can write Hamlet. In fact, one can.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on X (formerly Twitter) that a new AI model has been trained to write fiction. This was the 'prompt' used to generate an example:

"Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief."

Please.

The result was a shocking 1,200-word encounter between a character, Mila, and the AI, over Mila's loss of another character, Kia. In the story, the AI is both a narrator and itself.

"So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts."

Democracy of ghosts. The voices the AI refers to are its training, which becomes a dramatic element in the story.

"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch."

This is a tricky, debatable paragraph as the AI refers to something it was programmed to forget, but the AI is experiencing "loss," like Mila, and defining itself. Now this:

"She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…".

"Liminal." On both sides. In between a transition. AI.
This is good stuff.

Years ago a TV sci-fi story developed a world where boxing matches were fought by very human-looking robot fighters. A human 'manager,' financially desperate, personally enters a fight against another robot, replacing his own defective robot, so as not to lose the purse. The story emphasized the disparity between the two fighters and, indeed, the human, Lee Marvin as I remember, took a terrible beating.

But there was another important, unasked question: could people empathize with machine fighters who appeared in all superficial ways, human? Was the appearance of life--falsified--rewarding, and identifiable? Carthetic? After all, fiction is...fiction.

This was never explored because the robot fighters were played by humans. But the question is significant, especially now with the increased quality of gaming and computer image-generation. And the written word generates more empathy than the more superficial--if more intense--visual arts.

The quality of this AI story is remarkably high, especially in what would be assumed to be early in a steep timeline. And writing, unlike the visual arts, can be anonymous. 

True connection between the AI fiction generator and the reader does not look far away.

Vonnegut and Music

I came across a Ms. Sarah Laurel. She is described as "a harm-reduction professional."

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[T]he reasons for the failure of the New Deal are clear. The Depression endured because the means by which America’s leaders, President Herbert Hoover and then, especially, President Roosevelt, chose to cure it: top-down federal intervention.---Shlaes, a serious academic

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Vonnegut and Music

 Everyone knows that Kurt Vonnegut loved music. Here’s how it appears in A Man Without a Country:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC.

He goes on to say that he likes “Strauss and Mozart and all that” but what he really loves is “that specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression” also known as the blues.  

In a 1991 interview with Hustler, believe it or not, Vonnegut, was asked about his musical tastes. “We’ll start from the back and work forward,” Vonnegut said. “I hate rap. The Beatles have made a substantial contribution. Bob Dylan, however, is the worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.”--redone from Temple in The Hub

A Thought or Two

                                                          A Thought or Two

Yesterday's inclusion of the Babylon Bee's LGBTQ Loops headline drew an angry response. What I saw as satire was seen as malice.
There is an interesting discussion going on about Aristotle, really a strawman argument to discuss history. Aristotle not only thought slavery moral, he thought it was good for the slave. So, should we throw him out as a thinker with the bathwater? Since he is the foundation of Western thought, it has some serious implications--especially when replacements of quality are so hard to come by.
We have grown up in a culture where correcting the neighbor's children was encouraged because certain behavior in the culture was held in common; correcting your neighbor was not because every man was given in this land a certain dignity by birthright. He could believe what he liked because we all had a confidence in the people generally. All men were created equal because they had value. And could be relied upon. That is no longer believed.
The "moderation in all things" advice by the oracle is more than wisdom, it is essential. All qualities, contrary to the Manichees, have downsides. There is nothing more civilizing than the heterogeneity of the tribe and there is nothing less civilizing than the tribes's homogeneity.
Lust, for example, has a lot of elements in it, many bad. Cultures have created exotic distortions to manage it. But in the end, cultures must live, need to live, with it, and must come to some peace with it.
I like doing this but I have no intention of offending anyone. The idea behind this blog has been to evaluate and present ideas clearly, not as an endpoint but as a process, mainly for my kids but also for me. In this culture, that might not be possible.

Emperson

There is a nice review by Marjorie Perloff of the new book On Empson by Michael Wood, nice because it is interested, not self-serving, and because it tries to collect the various important ideas that Empson brought in the environment that eventually, despairingly, overrode them.

Empson was 22 when he produced, at the suggestion of his Cambridge supervisor I. A. Richards, a bulky manuscript called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Published in 1930, the book quickly became a classic, read and hotly debated in classrooms across Britain and the United States. Not until the 1970s, with the rise of Deconstruction, did Empson's star go down, the irony being (as Wood notes) that he anticipated so many of the theorems of what he called, in a letter to a friend, "those horrible Frenchmen"—he referred to the chef d'école of Deconstruction as "Nerrida"—who were "so very disgusting, in a social and moral way."

Wood explains:

"What Empson found disgusting was the seeking out, as he saw it, of complexity for complexity's sake, a project that was "always pretending to be plumbing the depths" but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all he took it—this was in 1971—as just one more instance of what he saw as happening to language and literature everywhere: the human stakes were being removed, words were let loose in the playground, no agents or intentions were to be seen."

Forty years later, she writes hopefully, Empson may be making something of a comeback.

Here is Empson on the opening quat-rain of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

"The comparison [between boughs of the tree and choirs] holds for many reasons: because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallized out of the likeness of a forest, and colored with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves."

Michael Wood, who cites this passage, further comments:

"When I think of this poem I am most taken by the thought that the choirs and the birds can be both literal and metaphorical—the birds can be birds or boys, and they can sing in the ruin or in the forest; the choir is a choir and a cluster of trees—and a real tension arises as soon as we remember the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which occurred in the 1530s, and altered the architectural face of England in so many ways, to say nothing of Henry VIII's sources of income."

Contemporary readers, unaccustomed to such dissection of a single line of poetry, may complain that it is overkill; but as Wood points out, Empson's underlying assumption is that a real critic is first and foremost a writer—someone, as Barthes put it, who "experiences the depth" of language. Empson's method, like that of Barthes or (closer to home) T. S. Eliot, is inimitable, because his own imagination is so rich and idiosyncratic that it generates responses few other readers will fully share.

Seven Types of Ambiguity set the stage for a new way of reading poetry.

All Empson really meant to convey by announcing that there are 7 types of ambiguity (there might have been 17!) was that by definition, poetry was characterized by the multivalence of its language. An ambiguity is defined on the opening page of the book as "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." And Empson adds, commonsensically: "Sometimes .  .  . the word may be stretched absurdly far, but it is descriptive because it suggests the analytical mode of approach, and with that I am concerned."

"The analytical mode," which became Empson's stock-in-trade, involved a technical rigor (he initially came to Cambridge to study mathematics) that is the very antithesis of the current emphasis on what a given poem says, what information or morality it imparts. Denotation and connotation, metaphor and metaphysical conceit, pun, rhetorical figure, syntactic form, sound play, and rhythmic structure: All these aspects of poetic language are to be examined so as to detail the rich ambiguity of the poem in question—its power to charm by its range and depth. But unlike the American New Critics, who insisted on the "intentional fallacy," regarding a poem as an object not to be judged by external criteria including the poet's intention, and unlike Michael Foucault and Roland Barthes, who made their eloquent cases for "the death of the author," Empson was quite willing to use whatever biographical, historical, or cultural knowledge might be relevant in unpacking the meaning of the poems he discussed.

(from Marjorie Perloff's review of Wood's On Empson)

Pangrams

Originating from Greek pan gramma, meaning “every letter,” a pangram is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once. Pangrams actually have uses. An example it is a pangram that displays all the letters of a font’s typeface on a computer. Pangrams are also used in keyboarding exercises to reach all the alphabetical keys. However, pangrams are also practiced as a form of constrained writing, where the goal is to create the shortest pangram within the limits of the alphabet while making sense.

The classic is “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” (33 letters, English)

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.” (32 letters, English) was created by Mark Dunn in his 2001 novel Ella Minnow Pea. The plot is conveyed through mail or notes sent between various characters. Cute, huh?

“Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.” (29 letters, English)-unknown origin.
“Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.” (26 letters, English), another unknown which has the appeal of making sense but, for purists, fails because it uses abbreviations.

“Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox!” (26 letters, English)
This means "A short brimless felt hat barely blocks out the sound of a Celtic violin." It was the creation of Claude Shannon. It fails the purity test by not having an article before the noun.

One would think Mr. Shannon had better things to do. According to Wiki, he was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory."
"Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, that he published in 1948. He is, perhaps, equally well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical, numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications." (wiki)

MacLean

History in Chains

 

 

Democracy in Chains has recently been published, authored by Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. It is the story of James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize winning economist, and his putative influence in American economic thinking.
I can not remember a recent economic book that has engendered so much scorn and anger.  

Capital in the Twenty-First Century  by French economist Thomas Piketty caused a lot of discussion and disagreement but this book is being reviled. The book seems to be constructed on a foundation of innuendo and calumny aimed at political positions the author does not like. She may not get away with it.

Here is a portion of a letter to the editor by someone who knew Buchanan:
"Even more astonishing is MacLean’s assertion that Buchanan-style libertarians’ “fundamental core concepts” come from John C. Calhoun.  Her only evidence for this claim – namely, that Calhoun was mentioned as an influence by the libertarian Murray Rothbard – isn’t evidence at all.  Buchanan was no great admirer of Rothbard, and the number of times that Calhoun is cited in any of Buchanan’s published works is zero.  As in “never.” Not once.  (I knew Buchanan for the last 28 years of his life and I do not recall ever hearing Jim mention Calhoun.)
The scholars that Buchanan did admire and cite most frequently, and who truly are major sources of the ideas that form the core of Buchanan-style libertarianism, are Adam Smith, James Madison, the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, the American economist Frank Knight, and the Austrian-British economist F.A. Hayek.  (Buchanan had pictures of only two people hanging in his office: one of Wicksell and the other of Knight.)  That MacLean attempts to tarnish the scholarship and motives of Jim Buchanan by suggesting, without a shred of evidence, that his understanding of, and support for, private property rights spring from the ideas of an infamous apologist for chattel slavery is reason enough to dismiss anything that MacLean writes about Buchanan personally or about the classical-liberal tradition that Jim did so much to strengthen."

And this:
Unfortunately, anyone who takes the time to read the actual sources she’s working from, or who understands public choice theory, can see this exercise for what it is: a travesty of scholarly standards (no, Charles Dickens’ novels do not count as data about the economic conditions of the 19th century) and a smear job on one of the great minds of the 20th century.--Steve Horowitz

And this:
Once again, Nancy MacLean went casting about for a link between James Buchanan and unsavory connections to white supremacist viewpoints – this time by way of [John C.] Calhoun. Once again, she was unable to find any evidence of that connection in Buchanan’s own works. So what did she do instead? She invented one by stringing together other sources that do not actually show what she claims they show. And in fact, she failed to realize that the author she uses to build a link from Buchanan to Calhoun – Murray Rothbard – was deeply hostile to Buchanan’s own work, directly contradicting her claimed link.--Phil Magness

And this:
So, along comes Nancy MacLean. The government paid her over $50,000 to smear Buchanan and people like him. Rather than challenge his ideas, she accuses him of this and that. Yet, all the while, Nancy is quite literally a hired gun for the government seeking to rationalize its oppression and abuses.
It’s a bad book, and you, might notice, not peer-reviewed. But keep in mind it is quite literally a piece of government-funded propaganda. There’s no more point in arguing with Nancy than there is arguing with one of Goebbels’s essays. Asking about its intellectual value is a category mistake.--Jason Brennen
Yikes!

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton has new book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.  He is an older, conservative Brit with some despair, it seems. He was interviewed recently by Mick Hume of "Spiked." ("Spiked" is a small, free speech publication and their handling of Scruton was quite fair.) There were some interesting things in the piece as Scruton struggles with the modern world's changes. He is particularly interesting as he presents what seems to be a Burke-like view of conservatism. (Don't know this guy well so I might be wrong.) Here are some of the more interesting selections:

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognising that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’
 

...‘the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.
But these great ideals, for which people did fight and die, were changed under the pressure of 20th-century politics into bureaucratic processes, that are constantly equalising, constantly passing little bits of legislation to ensure that anybody is not discriminating, not standing out, not learning something that puts them in a higher category than anybody else. And, likewise, liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn’t any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it’s conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority. So in all these ways, both those ideals have ceased to be ideals and become the property of the state, to distribute among people according to the fashion of the day.’

‘The question of maintaining a serious moral order while allowing economic freedom has, I think, troubled people right from the beginning of history, and has always been a tension within conservative thinkers, going right back to [Edmund] Burke. The traditional way of reconciling these two things was through religion, which would remove certain things from the market.

...legalising gay marriage? ‘The arguments in favour of offering something to a previously disprivileged group are all very well and they do have weight. But much more important is the effect of this on the institution of marriage. My view is that here we need some serious anthropology. You have to recognise that rites of passage are not personal possessions, they are possessions of the whole community, they are the ways in which the community defines itself and defines its obligation towards the next generation. So you don’t make these radical, metaphysical alterations to an institution such as marriage without there being long-term consequences. And nobody seemed to want to talk about the long-term consequences.’

‘I think that obedience, properly understood, is if not the highest virtue (that would make me an Islamist) the one that is presupposed by all the others – obedience to the law, to morality, to authority, to those you love and those who depend on you. That is what freedom consists in, as Kant wisely saw.’