What I've been reading: April edition

...and a bit of march.

Christian Merek’s In the Land of a Thousand Gods:

• “Seeks a provide a historical overview of Anatolia as a bridge and a melting pot of the changing orientations, mixtures, and transmissions, from prehistory to the heyday of the Roman Provinces. No other study has thus far done so.” (4).

Essentially a long assessment of scholarship on, and overview of, Anatolia. Slowed me down enough reading it that my usual 100 pages a day took more or less twice the usual amount of time, but you’ll come away with a thorough and some would say exhaustive account. Good for grad-school.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind

• “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second” (xiv)

• “There’s more to morality than harm and fairness” (xv)

• “Morality binds and blinds.” (xvi.)

Yeah that’s about it. Essentially a third hand but readable retelling of something the french - hell, even Kant - could have told you.

Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea

• “The sense of finality that fills today’s world is central to its volatility. To understand the implications and how we got to this point, it is worth stepping back to explore the wider story of how expectations about the future leave their mark on democracy. 5

• “The revival of democracy as an ideal in the eighteenth century coincided with changing ideas about historical time. It paired with an emerging expectation that the future would be different from the present and was potentially susceptible to influence.” 6

• “Ideas of the future have been a key terrain of conflict" 8

• “From the financial crash of 2008 to the dislocations caused by COVID-19, shocks are welcomed by some as opportunitites t re-open the future.” 9

Slow to get going for the first third or so, but then becomes an interesting overview.

Benjamin J. Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty.

• “Modern geopolitics is always based on a particular and arbitrary compositional alignment of territorial and governmental layers into a particular architecture: no topography without topology.” 24

• “Planetary-scale computation both distorts and reforms modern jurisdiction and political geography and produces new forms of these in its own image.” 5

• “For Schmitt, [air-space] is less physically defended than divided up like an algebraic equation, and it is the spacelessness of the twentieth century that the contemporary geopolitics provides, with none of the rooted limits of solid fortresses and true walls and no true distinction between friend and enemy. Without these, Schmitt warned of an era of total war of all against all.” 30

• “The stack makes space by occupying it: it does so by surveying abstraction, absorbing it, and virtualising it, which is how it is even possible to consider whether or not it expresses a nomos at all. If the space of planetary-scale computation is a new kind of ‘free soil’, then that ‘soil’ is land, sea, and air all at once, equally tangible and ephemeral.” 33

I’d been trying to find The Stack at a physical bookstore for months, ever since Sharon recommended it as a ‘must read’ considering my interest in thinking about AI in terms of communitarian political order. The Stack isn’t quite what I thought; it takes a critical-studies approach to thinking about the world via “the stack”, a term which broadly maps on to how software engineers and web developers describe the different layers in designing an application. (Front end = you work on the bit the user sees, Back end = you work on the bit the front end communicates with, databases, services, etc, Full-stack = you work on both).

The third quote above, from page 30, made me think about how the war of all against all in the globalised sphere maps to the emergence of the middling and polite classes in the eighteenth-century. In particular - and I explored this in my thesis on Burney - how rules of politeness and sociability are always thin lacquers over the threat of brute power in a britain where the Stuart threat has abated, but questions over Hanoverian legitimacy remain awkward.

The final quote obviously brings to mind James C. Scott’s point about measurement, social order, and control tends towards the totalitarian. Again, not new, but a good way to think about territory and space when it comes to virtual worlds.

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Map & Territory, the first volume of Rationality from AI to Zombies.

• “Very recently - in just the last few decades - the human species has acquired a great deal of new knowledge about human rationality. The most salient example would be the heuristics and biases program in experimental psychology. There is also the Bayesian systematisation of probability theory and statistics; evolutionary psychology; social psychology.
  […]
  These fields give us new focusing lenses through which to view the landscape of our own minds. With their aid, we may be able to see more clearly the muscles of our brains, the fingers of thought as they move. We have a shared vocabulary in whcih to describe problems and solutions. Humanity may finally be ready to synthesise the martial art of mind: to refine, share, systematise, and pass on techniques of personal rationality. Such understanding as I have of rationality, I acquired in the course of wrestling with the challenge of artificial general intelligence (and endeavour which, to actually succeed, would require sufficient mastery of rationality to build a complete working rationalist out of toothpicks and rubber bands” (6)

• “Trying to synthesise a personal art of rationality, using the science of rationality, may prove awkward: One imagines trying to invent a martial art using an abstract theory of physics, game theory, and human anatomy.
  But humans aren’t reflectively blind. We do have a native instinct for introspection. The inner eye isn’t sightless, though it sees blurily, with systematic distortions. We need, then, to apply the science to our intuitions, to use the abstract knowledge to correct our mental movements and augment our meta cognitive skills.
  We aren’t writing a computer program to make a string puppet execute martial arts forms; it is our own mental limbs that we must move. Therefore we must connect theory to practice. We must come to see what the science means, for ourselves, for our inner daily life” 7

What it says on the tin; this is the first volume of Yudkowsky’s attempt to systematise rationality; he began doing this in order to better shape and understand the problem of artificial general intelligence, and his blogs and work have had an immense influence on how we think and build AI. I read this as an attempt to understand how rationalists think about - and are attempting to build - artificial intelligence, and it isn’t bad - much better than I was expecting.

James Pethokoukis’s The Conservative Futurist: How To Create The Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.

• “Then the unexpected happened - a shock not only to Disney imagineers, but also to technologists, Washington Policymakers, CEOS, and the burgeoning futurist industry. In the early 1970s, the Space Age was suddenly grounded, the Atomic Age began powering down, and, most importantly, the postwar era of rapid technological progress and economic growth abruptly ended. It had been quite a run, and economists today call the period a “golden age” for good reason. American living standards, as measured by real per capita GDP, more than doubled as the economy overall grew at a rapid 4 per cent annually from 1948 through 1973. Most of that growth came from workers becoming more productive.

  […]
  Yet even after accounting for our workforce and machines, there’s quite a bit of productivity growth left to explain, statistically speaking. And that residual portion is considered by economists to represent innovation, both technological progress and more efficient ways of deploying machines and people” (11-12)

• “The purpose of this book is about more than promoting a future of rapid technological progress and economic growth.
  […]
  Rather than forecasting the future, my conservative futurism is about determining and then establishing the best conditions for each of us to pursue the sort of future we each desire, tackling problems as they occur.” (21-2)

• “Indeed, my conservative futurism embraces the unknowable dispersion of people’s wants and desires, choices and decisions - as well as unexpected events that the future will undoubtably deliver.” (24)

My conservative readers will note that there’s nothing that conservative about this. Indeed, he admits that the conservatism he suggests is essentially “leave people alone, but tax high profits to create excellent schools, a safety net via welfare, and strong industrial infrastructure. But hey, if GOP / american conservatives want to call liberalism conservatism and it gets us a strong and progressive American state then I’m all for it.